Welcome back to school with more IPA

The stats haven’t jumped yet, and they usually double at the start of a college semester, but I expect most students will be back to school over the next two weeks. Classes have already commenced at JMU.

For those of you who look for new posts, there hasn’t been much to see lately, but there has been a fair amount of work being done in less visible ways.

Most importantly, I’ve developed a workflow to get IPA transcriptions up for all of the material over the next few months. Around January, I purchased an old Windows XP laptop for the sole purpose of running IPANow transcription software. (I live in a Mac/Linux household, but the IPANow software is only available for Windows.) The author had graciously provided a few files for some of the more popular songs, but if I wanted more, I was going to need to do it myself.

I’ve created transcriptions for all of the songs in French, and will be uploading them over the next several weeks. Italian will probably be next, and then German.

Please note that I am posting these as they come out of the transcription software, which means there will probably be occasional mistakes. It’s the only way I can face the daunting task of creating these files for the entire collection. However, I am counting on you as a community to point out any flaws in the comment section. (Please, though, don’t have flame wars over nitpicky stuff… IPA can’t express the nuances of any language, and we shouldn’t expect it to. These are primarily intended as broad guides for students unfamiliar with the language.)