phonetic transcription of French (40)

Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@VM.EPAS.UTORONTO.CA)
Wed, 4 Jan 89 20:29:25 EST


Humanist Mailing List, Vol. 2, No. 478. Wednesday, 4 Jan 1989.

Date: Wed, 4 Jan 89 09:45 EST
From: <PONTERIO@MIDD>
Subject: phonetic transcription of French text

I am looking into automatic phonetic transcription of nineteenth century
French poetry for a literary project. My starting point is the work
done by Pratt and Silva, "PHONTRNS", CHum 1969; and more recently
Nina Catach, La phonetisation automatique du francais, CNRS 1984.
Can anyone help me out with suggestions or information about...
- Similar projects on progress
- Other programs in use or under development
- Transcription programs modified to transcribe French poetry
- An E-Mail address for Nina Catach
- Sources for French poetry in machine readable form and
- making our machine readable texts available to others

I strongly believe that the mind functions best when it works in
symbol systems which it is udes to. To this end I have insisted on
CRT display of the International Phonetic Alphabet in my own programs.
Does anyone work with commercial software which permits such a modified
character set on PC-DOS machines using Herc+, EGA or VGA cards? I am
thinking of a kind of TSR program which would allow any other software
to have two keybords, display an altered character set, and print this
changed character set. A program called "Turbofonts" does the basic job
but the version I have used is very awkward.

Thank you.
Robert Ponterio
Dept. of French
Middlebury College
PONTERIO@MIDD