On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 6:58 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
What's the point of using a phonetic alphabet that 95% of our readership can't interpret? If the idea is to help readers understand how a word is pronounced in English, it should actually be useful to the majority of readers and not largely useless but academically perfect.
We ought to have a speech synthesizer that extension that provides clickable audio playback for marked up IPA.
IPA is sufficient for a machine pronounceation. I looked into creating one of these but none of the FOSS synthesizers I could find could take IPA for their phonetic input. Festival supports a standard input format which has IPA as a supported mode, but festival lacked support for the IPA part.
In any case, this seems to be clearly possible it's just a question of development resources. I think the prospect of a nice machine synthesizer in the future (with the ability to provide real recordings, of course) is probably sufficient justification for continuing to use IPA all by itself.