phonetic transcription of French (46)
Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@VM.EPAS.UTORONTO.CA)
Fri, 6 Jan 89 19:05:46 EST
Humanist Mailing List, Vol. 2, No. 483. Friday, 6 Jan 1989.
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 89 21:09:23 EST
From: Brian Whittaker <BRIANW@YORKVM2>
Subject: Re: phonetic transcription of French (40)
I have two suggestions that may not really be what you are after, but you
never know.
On the matter of fonts, screen display and printing, it is fairly easy to
create new characters or even whole fonts on the Macintosh using a commercial
program called Fontastic (from Altsys). Because both screen display and
printing are dealt with as bit-mapped graphics on the Macintosh, no extra
gadgets are required once you have created your characters or have found them.
I am certain that there is a international phonetic font available as either
shareware or freeware, but I can't offhand remember the source... I believe it
is on one of the disks from Educomp. If you're interested I could track it
down. Anyway, the question really is how committed you are to DOS at this point
and whether the Macintosh offered sufficient advantages for display, printout
and recognition to make it worth considering the expense and work of changing
systems.
(Much of my own work is with stylistic analysis of Old English poetry, and
I designed a set of Old English characters which I then inserted in one of
the standard Macintosh fonts.)
The other suggestion is probably a cold scent, but twenty years ago (when I
was last doing anything serious with phonetics) Pierre Leon had a team of
researchers at The University of Toronto doing phonetic research on nineteenth
century French poetry using a roomful of high-tech acoustic hardware. I have
lost touch so I don't know what if anything is going on there now. You're
probably more up to date than I am on that issue but, as I said at the start,
you never know.
Brian Whittaker
English Department
Atkinson College
York University
Downsview, Ontario, CANADA