The Phonicon 1.0: A Multimedia Digital Encyclopedia of the Sounds of the World's Languages

The Phonicon is an electronic encyclopedia of the speech sounds or phones of the world’s languages, and ways those sounds are described and analyzed. Developed jointly by Dr. M. Stanley Whitley & Bakhit Kourman, and produced & published by SIL International.

This product runs on Microsoft Windows 7 and Vista 32-bit, XP, 2000. It has not been tested on 64-bit computers. Requires administrator privileges to install IPA fonts.

• Introduction—navigation, organization, frequently asked questions, and acknowledgments
• Readings—phonetics and phonology articles
• Phone directory—symbol and terminological indexes with articles on specific sounds and concepts
• References—glossary, consonant and vowel charts, phonological features, and the Electronic IPA
• Sources—bibliographic references

It is useful for all who work with languages:

• Linguists and linguistics students
• Foreign language and ESL students
• Future and current language teachers
• Speech pathologists
• Linguistic anthropologists
• Anyone interested in speech sounds of languages

The Readings section provides extended articles reviewing basic notions of phonetics and phonology.

1. The description of phones
   • Articulatory phonetics: Consonants and glides
   • Articulatory phonetics: Vowels and suprasegmentals
   • Instrumental and acoustic phonetics
   • Disordered speech and “ExtIPA”
   
   
2. Representing sound: a brief history
   • Phonetic symbols
   • Phonological representation
   • Some current approaches
   
   
   
   
3. Systems, Patterns, and Universals
   • Phonological inventory (phonemes) charts of ten major languages
   • English (American)
   • French
   • German
   • Spanish (Castilian)
   • Portuguese
   • Italian
   • Arabic
   • Japanese
   • Chinese (Mandarin)
   • Russian
   
   
4. English phonology
   
   
5. Sound vs. orthography: English phoneme-spelling correspondences