Using phonemic notation

Why phonemic notation?

Not everyone is familiar with the international phonetic alphabet (IPA), so there are quite a few home-grown notation systems to represent phonemes.  On DailyCues we have created three notation systems: IPA, dictionary and phonetic.  You can set your preferred system in your profile and all phonemic transcriptions will be converted to your preferred notation on-the-fly.

When discussing Cued Speech, there may be times when listing phonemes could be helpful to the reader.  You could simply type out an approximation of the phoneme.  However, the reader may not be familiar with your system.  Even if you gave examples of words, it's possible that the reader's dialect may be different.

With just a bit of code you can insert phonemes that are automatically converted to the reader's preferred notation with a little pop-up that lists mneumonics to help the reader.  For example, we could talk about the phonemes for the side-forward placement, /ɑäahɑäahɑäah, ōohōohōoh/, or the phonemes for handshape 8, /ʧchchʧchchʧchch, jyyjyyjyy, ŋngngŋngngŋngng/.  When the mouse hovers over each phoneme, a pop-up with the mneumonic for that phoneme appears.

How to insert phonemic notation

Here is the code you'll need to link a word to it's dictionary entry:

  1. Type two opening foreslashes: //
  2. Enter a list of IPA symbols representing the phonemes (e.g., ɑ, oʊ, ʧ, j, ŋ).  You may also use commas, spaces and underscores to format your example.
  3. Type two closing foreslashes: //

To see formatted examples, click "Edit page" and look at the examples on this page.  They will look like //ðɪˈs//.  You may also use commas, spaces and underscores to format your example, such as //ðɪ, s_// (it will be converted to /ðt͟htHðt͟htHðt͟htHɪĭiɪĭiɪĭi, sssssssss_/).

If you look at the examples in the above line that have double-slashes, we added an exclamation mark, !, just before the opening slashes.  This prints out the example as-is for demo purposes (stripping out the ! in the process).