Why Linked Examples?

When writing about a linguistic rule or cueing mechanics, there may be times when examples could be helpful to your reader. You can simply list your examples. However, with just a bit of code, you can bring your examples to life by linking them to the Cued Speech dictionary. 

For example, imagine if you were writing about diphthongs. You could list words that contain diphthongs (e.g., cowboy, flies, race) and those would be helpful to the reader. However, with a little extra effort, you could create interactive examples (e.g., take, mouse, weigh).

How to Link Your Examples to the CS Dictionary

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

1. Type two opening curly brackets: {{
2. Enter the spelling for the word as it appears in the CS dictionary (e.g., weigh)
3. Type a pipe which is a stright line on your keyboard: |
4. Enter the pronunciation in IPA (it's easiest to cut and paste this directly from the dictionary, but you need to set your preferred notation to IPA in your profile to see the IPA representation).
5. Enter another pipe: |
6. Type the display text. This is exactly what the example will look like on the page. Often it is just the word typed out (e.g., weigh, Weigh). 
7. Type two closing curly brackets: }}

To see a formatted example, click "Edit page" and look at the examples on this page like {{this|ðɪˈs|this}}. 

If you look at the dictionary link example in the above line, we added an exclamation mark, !, just before the opening curly brackets.  This prevents the content from being linked to the CS dictionary and prints out the example as-is for demo purposes (stripping out the ! in the process).

Why do we need to provide both spelling and IPA?

A word can have multiple pronunciations (especially when accents and dialects are involved).  Often examples in Cued Speech depend on the pronunciation of the word, so it's important that we link to the entry in the dictionary that has the proper pronunciation of the word.  Providing the IPA differentiates between homographs such as lead and lead.

Likewise, a particular pronunciation may have multiple spellings.  Two words can sound the same, but be spelled differently and have different meanings.  Providing the spelling differentiates between homophones such as pray and prey.

So many examples in Cued Speech depend on the spelling and pronunciation of the word involved, especially since the spelling of the word tends to trip up beginning cuers.  It's essential to ensure that you've linked to the appropriate entry in the dictionary.