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Upodn's Phonetically Obscure Domain Name.
IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet. APA is the American Phonetic Alphabet. The IPA is officially sanctioned by the International Phonetics Association. The APA is a less formal de facto standard that developed in the 20th century out of work with Native American languages. As far as English is concerned, the IPA and APA differ in the symbols for the palatals: IPA [ʃ] = APA [š]; IPA [ʒ] = APA [ž]; IPA [tʃ] = APA [č]; IPA [dʒ] = APA [ǰ]; IPA [j] = APA [y]. Notice also that the APA unambiguously treats the affricates ([č] and [ǰ]) as unit sounds rather than sequences.
SAMPA is the Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet. It is a rendering of the IPA in 7-bit ASCII characters. It was useful before Unicode phonetic fonts became widely available.
Shavian is a phonetic alphabet invented by Ronald Kingsley Read and named in honor of George Bernard Shaw. The upodn rendering of Shavian follows Shaw's criterion of one symbol per sound (phoneme) and does not use the shorthand or ligature symbols that are officially part of the system. If anyone knows of a use for Shavian, please let us know; we cannot think of any. It was there.
The IPA, APA, SAMPA and Shavian are more than enough.
The program looks up words from a database.
Perhaps that dictionary represents a different dialect. Perhaps that dictionary does not use IPA or APA transcriptions. Perhaps that dictionary is wrong.
A vowel symbol indicates a syllabic segment. The [i] in [ai] renderings of English diphthongs usually represents a glide, not a syllabic segment. Upodn, therefore transcribes a diphthong as a vowel followed by a glide, not a vowel followed by another vowel.
This site provides broad (phonemic) transcriptions. It does not present phonetically predictable details. For example, all English dialects pronounce /p/ as [pʰ]. The aspiration is predictable, so it is not marked in the broad transcription. In (almost) all English dialects, certainly all American English dialects, the tense vowels break into diphthongs. It is predictable, so the details do not appear in the transcriptions.
They are correct for the dialect transcribed, which is basically a northern/north midland American dialect. The English dialects differ mainly in the pronunciation of the vowels.
We could, but there are many dialects of English and life is short. Use upodn as a tool to learn to transcribe your own dialect.
Only American English.
No. If you find any, please let us know.
Yes. Please do. Cite us.
No, thanks.
Do your own homework.
Is it a compound? If so, try doing the parts separately. Otherwise, if it really is an English word, it may be added in the future.
Chaos lurks everywhere!
The transcriptions come from native speakers of American English. A large part of the database was imported and modified from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
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