Re: phonetic markup

Hi,

Thanks for the comment.

     > Use of IPA is a possibility in phonetic data; SGML attributes
     > cannot be user-typed to indicate LANG or encoding on the fly.  So
     > we may need another, richer mechanism for binding phonetic
     > equivalents to standard text.

Actually, I thought about using IPA.  I think there are several points 
to consider:

1. Is IPA good enough to present pronunciation of any language?

2. How should the supplied IPA be treated?

Since most of the voice synthesizer (as far as I know all of them) can 
just handle phonetic codes of certain language, ie, English aplphabet, 
Japanese kana, etc., there should be some pre-processing to the
supplied IPA string before passing it to the voice synthesizer.  This
can, of course, be soved if the voice sythesizer vendors start
supporting IPA in their hardware.

3. Will people use IPA to provide phonetic information?

I think people don't bother to use this mechanism unless it is
relatively easy for them to write the phonetic representation.  So in
the case with Japanese, kana is widely used and well-known, while IPA
is rarely seen by people except when they look up English-Japanese
dictionaries, so that there would be more probability that the
Japanese use this mechanism if kana could be used.


     > There are at least three ways to go to connect the phonetic script
     > and the text web-content:

     > one:  HTML attribute as you suggested

I guess this is the simplest one and easiest one to understand, thus
my suggestion.

     > two:  CSS attribute targetted to audio medium (applied via inline style)

At this point, I need to put much more effort to read the CSS2 spec to 
fully understand this.

     > three:  Dictionary entry with proper noun marked as "must see
     > dictionary for pronunciation."  Dictionary linking via LINK attribute
     > and/or RDF.

Yes.  Maybe this will solve most of the cases.  But would this
approach solve problems like in examples [2a and [2b] in my memo?
(Sorry, I haven't had time to read and understand what RDF can do, so
I may be wrong.)

     Cheers,
Max

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          Masafumi NAKANE, Keio Univ., Dept. of Environmental Information
E-Mail : max@wide.ad.jp / max@FreeBSD.ORG
[URL] :  http://www.sfc.wide.ad.jp/~max/

Received on Friday, 7 November 1997 13:54:15 UTC