OT Font Question

[Mark Swindell]

Devin,

Thanks for the link.  I'm actually after something that I think may  
not exist.  It would be similar in function to an IPA font, but with  
regular English character pairs whose kerning would be reduced so that  
they would represent a single visual unit, mirroring how they  
represent sound.  "Good" would be "G oo d" and "shallow" would be "sh  
a ll ow."  It would require tweaking the kerning between digraph  
letter pairs and dipthongs to tighten them up, while keeping regular  
spacing between these double letters, single letters, and words.

I'm not sure it's worth the trouble to create, but in teaching I find  
that some children have a difficult time seeing that "sh" for example,  
is not "s h" but rather its own phonetic unit.  (A parallel: until  
fairly recently, "ch" was the fourth letter of the Spanish alphabet,  
though it was never represented with tighter kerning... I think the  
Real Academia might have done away with that one, as well as the "ll",  
at least for purposes of alphabetizing.  (Wikpedia: In 1994, it ruled  
that the Spanish consonants CH (ché) and LL (elle) would hence be  
alphabetized under C and under L, respectively, and not as separate,  
discrete letters, as in the past.)

The idea was to be able to present text to kids written with these  
combinations emphasized while retaining a somewhat natural look.

Mark,

On Sep 29, 2008, at 12:28 PM, Devin Asay wrote:

>
> On Sep 29, 2008, at 12:34 PM, Mark Swindell wrote:
>
>> Does anyone here know if there exists a font that combines the  
>> letters
>> that make phonemes, be they digraphs, dipthongs, or just multiple
>> letters (oo, ee, ea)?
>>
>> For example, the word "cough" would have three phonemic chunks: c -  
>> ou
>> - gh.
>>
>> But the phonetic representations of the short o phoneme (ou) and  
>> the /
>> f/ (gh) would be squished up against each other so they would be
>> recognized as a chunk, not as separate letters?  Does this make  
>> sense?
>
> Not exactly sure what you are after. Would an IPA font do what you  
> wanted? You can get some very good ones from sil.org:
>
> http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_software_catalog.asp?by=cat&name=Font
>
> HTH
>
> Devin
>
> Devin Asay
> Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
> Brigham Young University
>
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