[WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] IPA issues

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 6:58 PM, Nathan <nawrich at 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.