How to enter phonetic transcriptions?

Question

I was impressed of some answers (as well as comments) which used phonetic transcriptions.

My Question is how can I enter them in the text editor?

Maybe it's not possible with an ipad, how do you do this on a PC?

Answer 1

I usually copy and paste the characters I don't have on my keyboard from Wikipedia:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA#Consonants
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA#Vowels
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA#Diacritics
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA#Suprasegmentals

Or, specifically for English:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_chart_for_English_dialects#Chart

Answer 2

Macchiato's character picker:

http://macchiato.com/picker/MyApplication.html

Go to "Latin" and then "Phonetics (IPA)".

Richard Ishida's character picker (fancy pants):

http://rishida.net/scripts/pickers/ipa/

Answer 3

If you're on a Mac, I can't recommend IPA Palette enough. I do think the site would benefit from something built-in though.

Answer 4

The nice people at SIL have a great resource for this.

Answer 5

Some IPA symbols have HTML entity codes with more or less logical names/abbrevations, so you can type them in plain ASCII:

• æ becomes æ
• ð becomes ð
• ñ becomes ñ

But most of them, like the schwa, only have numbers, which will be hard to remember:

• ə becomes ə

A full list is available here.

_{Copied from my answer here.}

Answer 6

On Android, I use the IPA keyboard, but when I'm on PC, I write them using 'Type IPA symbols' website and copy-paste them.

You might want to read Alfred's IPA Made Easy: A Guidebook for the International Phonetic Alphabet, Author(s): Anna Wentlent (PDF), it has all the IPA symbols with examples in English, French, German, Italian, Latin and Spanish.

Also Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, (Author(s): International Phonetic Association, Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Year: 1999)

Answer 7

If you're on a Macintosh, then Unicode characters are built in and easy to use, including the entire International Phonetic Alphabet, and plenty of nonce characters for phonetic and phonemic entities. You can find them all under the title Emoji & Symbols, at the bottom of the Edit menu, to the right of the File menu, in all Mac applications.

Except for Microsoft products -- Word, Powerpoint, Outlook, etc.
They don't conform to Mac application standards, because Microsoft.

That menu choice brings up a Characters window containing separate lists of all the alphabets available, special characters like math symbols, enclosed characters, bullets and stars, box drawing, etc, and lists of Favorites and Frequently Used characters that can be customized. The box includes search, unicode symbol, symbol names, accentuation, and font.

Any character available can be inserted into any document this way, and most Macs come with all world alphabets, abugidas, and abjads installed.