Oxford English Trickionary

January 8, 2006 5:17 PM

The online version of the OED (subscription required) uses an ASCII version of IPA, and I can't figure it out.

I need to know how to pronounce the word "succous," which means "containing juice or sap." The OED says it is pronounced "sA.k[e]s." What does the upper-case "A" mean and why is it italicized? What is [e]?

Could someone (a) look "succous" up for me in the PRINT OED and (b) tell me where I can find a guide to the ASCII symbols used in the online OED, so when I run into this problem in the future, I don't have to post here.

Having done some online searches, it SEEMS like the OED uses a system called SAMPA to represent IPA symbols, but SAMPA guides (that I've found) don't contain [e] and they seem to give various meanings to A.

Irritatingly, the OED's own help is not helpful.

NOTE: I've referred to [e] here, but in the OED it's less-than-symbol, e, greater-than-symbol. I forget how to render less-than/greater-thans on AskMe (apersand codes don't work on preview. How does one achieve this?

posted by grumblebee to writing & language (12 comments total)

For me it looks like this:



Which looks like normal IPA.
posted by grouse at 5:39 PM on January 8, 2006

Also, <ampersand codes> work just fine. Just replace them after you use preview.
posted by grouse at 5:40 PM on January 8, 2006

OED does not use an ascii IPA, it uses the normal one. The symbol you're seeing is not an A, but more like an upside down small-caps V with serifs. This is the same vowel as in "fun".
posted by advil at 5:40 PM on January 8, 2006

Whatever the OED uses, I've seen [A] used to mean the vowel that Midwesterners tend to use where others would say [æ]. You know, sort of similar to the vowel in "air," but without the r-quality. I don't know any better way of transcribing it.

I think this may be a N. American thing though.
posted by zadermatermorts at 5:45 PM on January 8, 2006

Strange. I'm using Indiana University's portal into the OED. In Firefox, at least, it gets translated into odd ascii symbols.
posted by grumblebee at 5:46 PM on January 8, 2006

Could I be missing a special font needed to display the IPA correctly?
posted by grumblebee at 5:49 PM on January 8, 2006

For me, the special symbols are actually inline images. The alternative text for them are "{revv}" and "{schwa}" respectively.
posted by grouse at 5:54 PM on January 8, 2006

Could I be missing a special font needed to display the IPA correctly?

I'm not sure -- I was just trying to figure out how you could get a real A and e. Maybe IU has its own special portal? I'm at a UC which has an institutional subscription and I go right to dictionary.oed.com. There, the special symbols are actually images, and I checked in lynx for the alt tags, which are {revv} and {schwa} for the two non-ascii vowels respectively in that word. So in lynx I see "{sm} s {revv} k {schwa} s" (the {sm} is the stress mark on the first syllable I think).
posted by advil at 5:56 PM on January 8, 2006

man, grouse beats me every time...
posted by advil at 5:56 PM on January 8, 2006

Yeah, I went back and noticed that IU's interface looks totally different to the one in grouse's screenshot. I think IU must somehow have the OED database locally and serve it in a different way.

Thanks all.
posted by grumblebee at 6:04 PM on January 8, 2006

This may be tangentally related, but I had to specifically install some mathematical fonts in Firefox for the greek letters in Plus articles to show up correctly. Could this be the same problem?

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/
posted by patgas at 6:41 AM on January 9, 2006

I think IU must somehow have the OED database locally and serve it in a different way.

The OED is available in SGML format. When I was at The University of Texas they used this to serve the OED on a web page locally. They eventually subscribed to the official OED web site instead.

You could e-mail your library to find out how to decipher the pronunciation stuff.
posted by grouse at 6:45 AM on January 10, 2006