
Show HN: Add a play button next to IPA on Wikipedia - rusbus
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikipedia-ipa-speaker/jkgihpigffcfeebgedpklldebdibbnne
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wamatt
Kudos on a useful concept. Some feedback: Alternate pronunciations seems to go
a bit wonky. For example it pronounces Ribosome [1] (/ˈraɪbəˌsoʊm, -boʊ-/) as
ri-bo-some-bo :). Overall quite a nifty tool as many wikipedia pages do not
have native pronunciation recordings. Could also see it helping casual
learners of IPA.

_[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome)
_

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lambdadmitry
You confused me quite a lot! Why did you "transliterate" /soʊm/ as "some"? Is
there a dialect of English where "some" is pronounced as /soʊm/ and not as
/sʌm/ or /səm/?

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suchire
Likely "some" as in "home", not as the real English word "some"

~~~
wamatt
Yes, that's exactly right. Sorry for the confusion lambdadmitry!

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Null-Set
This would make a good addition to mediawiki itself. Have you considered
trying to contribute it to the project?

~~~
JoshTriplett
Agreed completely; this should be natively available in Wikipedia itself.

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sborra
Ha! I Tried it with a couple names from my own language and it clearly is
using an english TTS sound library. The pronounciation is better than you
would get from a computer reading the name like an english word, but it's
funny that even a language-neutral script such as IPA gets read with an
english accent.

~~~
restalis
Accents can be (and many times are) specified in IPA scripts, so if the
speaker carries an accent that isn't in the content he/she is reading or
ignores any of the explicitly specified accents, then the pronunciation is
wrong.

~~~
katamaritaco
FWIW as well, linguists use different styles of IPA too, depending on the
language families they most often work with.

Because of how it is used, IPA isn't really the 'one true standard' many would
think it is.

~~~
jdmichal
That's the difference between a phonemic and phonetic transcription [0]. The
former is bracketed with slashes (//), and the latter with square brackets
([]). To use Wikipedia's example:

Phonemic transcription of English "pot" is /pɔt/, and "spot" is /spɔt/.
However, a phonetic transcription is closer to [pʰɔt̚] and [spɔt̚]. Note the
addition of aspiration on the initial /p/ in "pot", and marking the /t/ as
unreleased in both. But you don't need to differentiate stop aspiration in
English, because they are conditioned allophones. And all final stops in
English are unreleased, so you don't need to mark those phonemically either.

Basically, your first sentence is entirely correct, but your second sentence
is a bit inappropriate. It serves it's purpose of a standard, but you must
keep in mind that most transcriptions are not phonetic but phonemic. And a
phonemic reading is not meant to be independent of the language -- there are
plenty of languages for which [p] and [pʰ] are not allophones and must be
distinguished in even a phonemic reading. You should be familiar with the
phonemic conventions of a language in order to actually render a phonetic
reading.

And even then, a phonetic reading will be dependent on things that boil down
to individual speaker differences. That is, there is not any standardized,
singular mapping of a phonemic transcription to a phonetic one, in _either_
direction.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme)

~~~
amyjess
Something interesting I noticed here:

> Phonemic transcription of English "pot" is /pɔt/, and "spot" is /spɔt/.

Your use if this particular IPA indicates that you speak a dialect that has
undergone the cot-caught merger, which probably means your accent is from
Scotland, the western half of the US, or the Boston area. If you didn't, then
you'd transcribe those words as /pɑt/ and /spɑt/ if you spoke a dialect with
the father-bother merger (most American accents) or /pɒt/ and /spɒt/ if you
spoke a dialect without it (many English accents, including RP).

I'm leaning towards you being Scottish, since Scottish English tends to merge
them to [ɔ], while American dialects with the merger tend to merge them to
[ɑ].

This goes to show that IPA transcriptions are heavily dependent on dialect.

~~~
jdmichal
I did transcribe it wrong; it's phonetically [ɒ] for me -- cot-caught is in
effect.

Though this does give opportunity to point out that even phonemic
transcriptions can have dialectal differences. There is no one phonemic
transcription for English, as the different vowel mergers mean that minimal
pairs differ between groups. This kind of variation tends not to happen as
much with consonants as vowels, which make them much harder to transcribe even
phonemically. But, for example, here's a list of mergers for non-rhotic
dialects:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English#Mergers_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English#Mergers_characteristic_of_non-
rhotic_accents)

~~~
lambdadmitry
There is also a liiiiitle difference between RP's and SA's [i] and [ɪ] (IPA
sounds are "areas", not "points"), as well as a difference in tenseness
(British is generally more tense).

So yeah, IPA doesn't completely specify how things sound.

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lauretas
How does this work? Where does the audio come from? Does it use some database
of recorded IPA sounds, or does it convert from text to speech on the fly?

~~~
josephfrazier
Judging from the source (viewable with Chrome extension source viewer [1]),
it's POSTing the IPA text to
[https://www.ipaaudio.click/audio](https://www.ipaaudio.click/audio) as the
`ipa` key of a JSON object, the server does the heavy lifting and sends back
an audio buffer, which the extension sends to a WebAudio context.

It'd be neat to know what exactly the server is doing, though.

[1]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-
extension-s...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-extension-
source-v/jifpbeccnghkjeaalbbjmodiffmgedin)

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apearson
It seems like once I push the play button I can no longer push the button
again.

Console Error: ipa.js:38 Uncaught (in promise) DOMException: Cannot decode
detached ArrayBuffer

Chrome 59.0.3071.115 (Official Build) (64-bit) Mac OS X

~~~
rusbus
Fixed. Thanks for your bug report!

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similaro
Another great tool to anyone that likes Wikipedia, but hate to go back & forth
between pages, or having multiple tabs all from Wikipedia.. I've developed
this with a friend, and never got the time to distribute.. Free, made with
love to UX and usability :) Enjoy _WikiLinks_
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikilinks/cdlabbcf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikilinks/cdlabbcfbmmimjpcekcmoglnejgppncc)

~~~
cooper12
Wikipedia is actually developing that natively currently as well:
[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_Features/Hovercards](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_Features/Hovercards).

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lauretas
Is this add-on also available for Firefox?

~~~
gattilorenz
+1

The idea is great but some more love for ffox users would be nice :)

~~~
lauretas
I think the idea behind the new "WebExtensions" is precisely "write once - run
everywhere". But I don't know if this add-on is one of them.

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j_s
IPA (international phonetic alphabet)

~~~
phillc73
Thank you. My immediate trained response was India Pale Ale.

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ddrum001
This is a great feature that has been missing for so long. Can't help but feel
that IPA will go the way of cursive once tools like this propagate.

~~~
lambdadmitry
Adding to what Xophmeister said, IPA isn't just a notation, it's also a tool
of thought. First, to efficiently quantize the stream of sound you need mental
"buckets" to put the sounds to, and IPA provides your those buckets. Second,
it may seem as if we hear "objectively", but in fact what you hear is very
much affected by your language upbringing; for example, a ton of Americans
can't really differentiate "pin" and "pen" even if the words are pronounced as
in Standard American — they don't have a concept of the sound needed. IPA
gives you those concepts.

~~~
schoen
That's a terrific way of putting it! Maybe we can say that IPA reminds of the
challenges that are still out there for us in terms of distinctions that we
overlook and sounds that we can't produce.

For example, I haven't learned to distinguish /pʰ/ and /p/ or /bʰ/ and /b/, as
Hindi does, but thanks to IPA, I know that that issue exists and maybe I can
learn it some day. Also, I haven't learned to say the consonant at the
beginning of a Chinese friend's name (I think it's [ʈ͡ʂʰ]), and IPA helps
remind me that [ts] and [tʃ] are just approximations to it.

~~~
lambdadmitry
Exactly! Moreover, even if I didn't learn the exact sound you are talking
about, I can sort-of approximate it in my head. To be able to "transmit" sound
in text is a proper super-power I would say, not too far from what Arrival
pictured :)

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bmn__
more IPA speech synthesis

[https://eu-west-1.console.aws.amazon.com/polly/home/Synthesi...](https://eu-
west-1.console.aws.amazon.com/polly/home/SynthesizeSpeech)

[http://speak-ipa.bearbin.net/](http://speak-ipa.bearbin.net/)

[http://developer.ivona.com/en/ttsresources/phonesets/phonese...](http://developer.ivona.com/en/ttsresources/phonesets/phoneset-
en_us.html)

Also indirectly: [http://espeak.sf.net/](http://espeak.sf.net/)

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joekrill
This is awesome! I can't tell you how many times I've clicked that link
expecting it to take me to something more specific about pronouncing the word
rather than just a generic page about IPA.

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captainmuon
Nice idea! I would also like a transliteration of IPA into pseudo-english
(like francais = frahn-say). Most people don't know IPA well enough, and
sometimes I don't want to or can't listen to audio. Also I find sometimes,
having it written out helps with comprehension.

(While we are at it, can people please start "transliterating" names from
languages that use the latin alphabet in very different ways, like "Saoirse
(seersha)"? And liberally using hyphens to break up longer foreign words? I
know everybody is proud and feels well educated when they can pronounce
foreign names, but I think there is no shame in using pronunciation aids.)

~~~
omaranto
Does "français" really sound like "frahn-say" to monolingual English speakers?
It has always sounded more like "frahn-seh" to me, but that may be because I
also speak Spanish. There's a recording of the word here:
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Français](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Français)

It's not an isolated example. For instance, "chez" is pronounced "shay" in
English but in French it sounds more like "sheh" to me.

~~~
OJFord
Are you making 'seh' rhyme with 'meh', or mostly with 'say', but saying it's
subtly different? (If only there were some sort of phonetic alphabet eh...)

I would say it's most like the long 'a' in 'fate' or 'mate'.

~~~
omaranto
I did mean rhyming with "meh", not a long "a" at all! In IPA, I'd say it's ɛ,
like the vowel in the English word "bed".

So it really sounds like "a" to you? Huh.

~~~
OJFord
Oh, interesting.

It does, yes, but as I alluded to that differs from 'ay' in which I'd linger
slightly more on the end 'y' note if you see what I mean.

Less extreme than the way Americans linger on a syllable-ending 'r', but the
same sort of thing.

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marzell
I see the button and it has mouseover text, but it's not actually clickable.
Chrome Version 59.0.3071.115 (Official Build) (64-bit) on Windows 7.

~~~
rusbus
Ah! Nice find. I need css to make it a pointer. Will push a fix for that. You
should be able to click the button anyway to hear the audio.

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jf
This is amazing, I have wanted something like this for over a decade. I check
for something like this every few years. Thanks for making this!

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lodestone6
somewhat related: is there an extension that, upon mousing over hypertext
linked to a wikipage, gives you a preview or summary of that wikipage? I feel
like this would be incredibly useful.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Would this work for Firefox, or does it rely on a Chrome-only TTS API?

~~~
rusbus
Should work fine in FF

