phonoloblog | all things phonology | camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog

I just discovered this amazing online script for LaTeX users that converts your hand-drawn symbol into the appropriate LaTeX command (it also tells you which package you need to load to have access to the command, which for many people, may be the more useful function). The character recognition is very accurate in most cases, especially for math symbols, but of course, the more training it receives, the better the results will be.

It’s clear that the IPA symbols haven’t been trained very much yet. I’ve already noticed improvement just from my own limited training on ɒ, which wasn’t on the short list at all the first time I tried it, and now frequently appears as the number one choice after a few trainings. So pick your favorite IPA symbols and get to work!

I’m pleased to announce Charpal, the new-and-very-much-improved version of the IPA symbol plugin for WordPress! Now users of this blog (authors and commenters) can enter phonetic symbols as well as symbols from other character sets easily — and other WordPress bloggers can install the plugin on their own blogs so that their users can do the same. For more details, follow this link.

Big thanks (and mad props) to David Romano for developing the original IPA symbol plugin and for upgrading it to Charpal. Thanks also to Bill Poser for recently discussing character input on Language Log (follow the links here), which is what made me think to ask David if he would upgrade the plugin.

Finally, Jessica Barlow recently pointed out this IPA Unicode keyboard, which has apparently also inspired David to see if he can fashion a similar interface for Charpal…

Joe Pater, Chris Potts and I are happy to deliver version 1.2 of OT-Help, which we hope will be especially appreciated by users of Mac OS X.

OT-Help can now be launched by a simple double-click from either a Windows or a Mac machine. If you aren’t familiar with OT-Help, please read more here.

With technical issues of any kind, please contact Michael Becker.

OT-Help 1.2

Joe Pater, Chris Potts and I just released version 1.1 of OT-Help, and we figured we’d use this occasion to announce it on Phonoloblog.

If you’re already using OTHelp 1.0, upgrading will give you a somewhat smoother interface and the ability to export Praat files from every screen.

If you aren’t familiar with OT-Help, read more here.

We’re happy to get your comments and feedback, including ideas and requests for future versions, stories of how you used OT-Help in research or teaching, etc.

With technical issues of any kind, please contact Michael Becker.

OT-Help 1.1

Speaking of the LSA, readers of phonoloblog will no doubt be interested in the subject of a talk presented by members of the Chicago Language Modeling Lab (CLML) (lab director Jason Riggle and grad researchers Max Bane, James Kirby, and Jeremy O’Brien). The talk was titled “Efficiently Computing OT Typologies” (here’s the abstract) and it served several purposes: to announce Erculator (”a web-based application that lets you create OT candidate tableaux, check their consistency, make inferences and other analyses, and format them for direct inclusion in your Word or LaTeX documents”), to report on its progress (e.g., the gui is not yet fully functional, but the cli is), and to show what it can do and how it does it (drawing heavily from Alan Prince’s work on Entailed Ranking Conditions (ERCs), which you can read about here, here, here, here, and here). Go on and check it out.

I’ve just finished writing the first version of OTtablx, a sorely-needed LaTeX package that draws nicer OT tableau than is possible with the standard tabular environment.

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OT tableaux seem to be designed with WYSIWYG editors, such as Word or WordPerfect or OpenOffice in mind. They do not come as natural to those linguists using e.g. LaTeX; it is too easy make a lot of mistakes in where one should put asterisks, etc.

Julien Eychenne, a phonology student who is finishing his PhD thesis in Toulouse right now, has written a small programme which works as a small WYSIWYG editor, just for tableaux: OTableau. Next to generating LaTeX output, the programme also calculates ‘fatal’ violations, and places exclamation marks and shading (if desired) accordingly. It’s a nice little programme.

In the second post that I made on this blog back in July 2004, I provided a link to a page of html character codes in order to copy-and-paste those codes into posts and comments on phonoloblog (or on any other website, for that matter). Trochee wrote very soon thereafter to note a few other relevantly useful links, most notably this one. But I hate switching back and forth between pages, copying-and-pasting. So I ended the post with a plea for “[s]omeone to suggest and/or provide something better than having to type in (or copy-and-paste) character codes for this purpose.”

The plea has gone unanswered all this time, but we finally have something. Read on.

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While listening to NPR’s Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me! a few weeks ago, I heard the coolest speech error: circumnavimgate for circumnavigate.

(In Adam Felber’s defense, he committed the error during the “Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank” portion of the show; it’s amazing to me that the panelists don’t commit more speech errors than they do during that time. Besides, Adam won the game that particular week, speech error notwithstanding.)

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