Think time

Every now and then, posts will be published for the purpose of making you think about issues connected with English pronunciation in particular and linguistic and cultural things in general. I hope you enjoy this section.
One of the tools we can make use of when learning a foreign language is a pronouncing dictionary. In the latest edition of the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (LPD), authored by J. C. Wells, we can find a number of relevant facts about the (changing) pronunciation of English. Below is a link to a video where Prof. Wells explains how a number of words are pronounced. After watching the video, comment on what you've found most interesting. Do you think it is worth learning about these things?
Dr. Wells about preference polls in LPD

Phonetic fonts

In the first part of the Phonetics and Phonology course, you'll have to use the special phonetic fonts which represent the phonemes used in broad (= phonemic) transcription. These fonts do not normally come with word processors. Below is a link to the UCL page you can visit to download them into your own hard disk so that you can make and visualize your transcriptions on your Word documents. On the page you will see the headings DOULOS, SOPHIA or MANUSCRIPT and the phonetic fonts offered. You can download one, some or all of them. You have to save the files on your C or D disks (depending on how your computer has been configured) in a folder called FONTS within the WINDOWS folder. After this easy step, open a Word document and select the fonts you want from the font box. As is stated on the page following the link below, most sounds are mapped onto the qwerty keyboard symbol configuration. Under each set of fonts, you will see the symbols you can get if you press SHIFT and the regular keys. For example, to obtain the ɒ symbol , you need to press SHIFT + Q.
IPA fonts