In the second post that I made on this blog back in July 2004, I provided a link to a page of html character codes in order to copy-and-paste those codes into posts and comments on phonoloblog (or on any other website, for that matter). Trochee wrote very soon thereafter to note a few other relevantly useful links, most notably this one. But I hate switching back and forth between pages, copying-and-pasting. So I ended the post with a plea for “[s]omeone to suggest and/or provide something better than having to type in (or copy-and-paste) character codes for this purpose.”

The plea has gone unanswered all this time, but we finally have something. Read on.

Relatively recently, I discovered that As originally noted by Mark Liberman here, E-MELD (Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data) has developed a great (and free) web tool called Charwrite, which allows you to make web pages in which you can relatively easily input phonetic characters in a text input field. I spent a few minutes the other day trying to get this tool to work for the post page and comments field on phonoloblog, but quickly realized it would take much more (a) time and (b) html/php/css/java knowledge than I have (much much more, since both are at virtually zero).

So I turned to David Romano, a recent UCSD linguistics alumnus (and occasional phonoloblog contributor) whom I know has more than enough of the requisite knowledge to figure this problem out in a reasonable amount of time. Within a day, David had figured out that it would be easier/better for him to write his own javascript to implement what I wanted on WordPress (the excellent blog software behind phonoloblog and also David’s blog). After less than a week of tweaking, the result is the IPA Symbol Plugin for WordPress. It’s all described on this page.

[ Update: I have no idea how this happened, but I’m glad it did. After posting this post, I noticed a few new incoming links to phonoloblog. One of them led me to a pingback on this post by Mark Liberman back when he announced Charwrite in August 2004 (something I had forgotten, now corrected in the post). The pingback is to this August 2004 post on Chris Waigl’s blog serendipity, which links directly to this clickable-chart implementation of Charwrite. A comment on that serendipity post also leads to the Phonemic Typewriter, which is more limited but still pretty good for many purposes. ]