Re: My new IPA resource

Roger Mills wrote:

> Very nicely done, and I'm sure it will be useful. Some observations, meant
> as _constructive_ criticism--
Of course.

> 1. It is, as you say, incomplete. I note the lack of the front rounded
> vowels, epsilon (E), reversed epsilon and its retroflex (3, 3^), print a
[...]
> (gamma), uvular stop q, glottal stop, etc. etc. Do you plan to include
> these at a later date?
At the moment I'm including symbols that I can foresee a use for
somewhere in my own pages, give or take. It's really meant for my own
use and its potential usefulness to others is really a bonus. The
quickest way to get more symbols on the site would be to draw them
yourself and email them to me.

I'm certain to add a few more in time (probably epsilon, for example)
but in the foreseeable future I won't have time to add much (updating
the rest of my site is a higher priority, as is Life).

> 2. There seems to be a problem with "eng", "p" and "g"; is there some way to
> make them sit on the line?
The only way to align them (SFAIK) is to make part of the black region
below each image part of the image itself. Unfortunately, this makes
the symbols look as though they're floating above the line, which is
very ugly in pages that combine text with IPA. I decided that a few
characters improperly aligned was a little less ugly than all
characters floating in mid-air.

Muke Tever wrote:

> Also... the rhotic diacritic shouldn't sit to the upper-right of the
> letter like the palatalization or the labialization... it goes to
> the right, like the lengthening (and attached to the letter, if your
> font can do it).
Finding the correct symbols in the fonts is one of the fiddly bits
(they're not always the same as the x-sampa representation and the
resolution of Windows character map is terribly small). Sometimes the
symbol I want isn't there at all, for example I had to draw [3\] by
hand (by modifying a [3]). I'm pretty sure I scanned the whole
character map for a rhoticity symbol and that there was no better one
('twould have been unfortunate if I'd accidentally used the
nasalisation symbol instead, don't you think?).

Incidentally I wouldn't mind discussing rhoticity, palatisation and
labialisation, because such qualities are usually neglected when
discussing vowel quality and there's a lot I don't know. I understand
that whereas the primary dimensions of a vowel are front/back and
closed/open, there are several secondary dimensions as well, involving
configurations of the tongue (rhot., pal. & lab.), lips (roundness)
and throat. I don't necessarily understand the technicalities nor
precisely how all the qualities fit together, even though I routinely
pronounce several of the contrasts.

Adrian.