This page contains links to resources on the web which may be useful to you for Ling 300 (and hopefully in other linguistics classes as well). The fonts and alignment macros will come in handy for writing your language reports, or any work where you need to cite glossed examples from other languages. The web resources about languages and linguistics section is self-explanatory; it is also under construction, so please feel free to E-mail Dr. E. at reng {at} rice.edu about additional relevant material you think would be useful to include on this page.

* Please note that all of the following links will take you away from the Ling 300 course page and are not affiliated with Rice University.

Phonetic Fonts and Keyboard Input

In this class, you are required to download and use the Doulos SIL Font for doing your assignments and language reports. This is a Unicode font which works on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. This is generally the best font to use for IPA characters. It is fully Unicode compliant, works on all platforms, and costs nothing to download and use. This font provides a full IPA Unicode character set, something which other Unicode fonts do not generally have. Please download and install this font. Other IPA fonts may not work well for purposes of your assignments, and your TA and professor may not be able to read your work! If you are having trouble downloading or installing the fonts from the above link, please contact your college Computer Associate, a tech-savvy friend, or e-mail Dr. E or the TA for help. The Linguistics department has requested that these fonts also be available on Owlnet Lab computers for student use.

Once you have installed the Doulos SIL Font on your computer, the next step is to learn how to insert IPA symbols into your documents. There are three good ways of doing this, discussed below (from easiest to most complicated). Whichever method you choose, you must keep the following points in mind:

• Your word processor must be Unicode compatible. For Microsoft office,, anything after Microsoft Office 2000 (including Office Xp, 2003, and 2007) will work, or anything after Microsoft Office X for the Macintosh. For other word processors, you will need to check to make sure they can handle a full Unicode character set.
• Be sure to set the Doulos SIL font as the active font for your document. To do this in Word, open a new document and change to 'Doulos SIL' in the font selection box on the toolbar. If you are working in a pre-existing file, select the entire contents of the file (ctrl-a), and then change to 'Doulos SIL' in the font selection box on the toolbar. A more sophisticated way to do this is to define a 'phonetic' character style, and activate this style for the specified text. See Susanna Cumming's Word for Linguists tutorial for more information on using styles.

One way to quickly get IPA characters is to use a web-based IPA character picker. This is especially handy for people who don't want to learn new keyboard layouts, or who simply want a quick and easy way of pasting Unicode IPA characters into a document. Go to http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/pickers/ipa. Clicking on an IPA symbol in the chart will insert it into the text box at the bottom of the page, from which you may select it, copy it, and paste it directly into your document.

If you are using Microsoft Word, another easy way to get IPA symbols into your document is to use Uniqoder written by Östen Dahl, and recently updated by Hans-Jörg Bibiko. This is a template for Microsoft Word, for either Windows or Macintosh. The template provides extra menus, toolbars, and macros for inputting phonetic symbols--no need to search through screenfuls of characters trying to find the one you want. Documentation is provided, which also explains how to attach the template to your documents so you can use the menus and toolbars. Come talk with me during office hours if you need more information or help with this.

If you will be typing a large amount of IPA data, you may wish to consider a keyboard mapping utility which allows you to access IPA characters by using special combinations or sequences of keys. An excellent one for Windows is IPA Unicode 1.0.4 Keyman Keyboard. Documentation is included in the download. To use this keyboard layout, you will also need to download and install Tavultesoft Keyman from Tavultesoft. Note that you will need to register Keyman, for which there is a small fee. If you use a Macintosh, IPAkeys provides an IPA Unicode keyboard layout for Mac OS X for use with the Doulos SIL Unicode font. And an   IPA Palette can be used on OS 10.2 and later. For additional input methods for Windows, Mac, and Linux, visit the SIL Character Input page.

Tools for Aligning Glosses

The simplest, safest, and quickest way of making word-for-word glosses align with language data is to format the data as a table. Susanna Cumming at UC Santa Barbara has developed "LingWord", a document template for Microsoft Word for Windows. This template adds a number of useful toolbar buttons and macros to Word, one of which will automatically align language examples and glosses as a table. The template contains instructions for its use, which you can access by opening the template directly instead of attaching it to the Word document. For instructions on how to attach the template to your documents, as well as a number of other tips and tricks to make Word more productive for linguists, see Susanna's Word for Linguists tutorial, or come talk with me during office hours.

Web Resources about Languages and Linguistics

The electronic version of Ethnologue: Languages of the World provides basic ethnographic and geographic information about most of the known languages of the world. It is a good place to look if you want to know where a particular language is spoken, how many speakers there are, what its linguistic affiliation is, and other such details.

This section is still under construction. Please E-mail me at reng {at} rice.edu if you know of material relevant to Ling 300 which you think should be included here.