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| Fedra Serif Phonetic | | | version 1.0 | | | © Peter Biľak, 2004 | | |  |
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The International Phonetic Alphabet
Although most western languages are alphabetic, they do not have a one-to-one correspondence between the letters of their alphabets and the sounds used in their speech. (In English, for example, one letter can represent more than one sound, like c in the words acre and acid. English also has sounds that can be represented by more than one letter, as in cuff, cough, glyph. English even has sounds that have no symbols of their own and must be represented by combinations of other letters as in pushing, passion, potion.) Slavic languages, with their abundance of diacritics, have very regular spelling systems closer to a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds, so it is easier to predict the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, and vice-versa. Still, the correspondence between the written and spoken forms of the languages are not precisely one-to-one. IPA, or the International Phonetic Alphabet, is an alphabet intended to serve as a universal notation system for the phonetic representation of all languages, avoiding the confusion of inconsistent spellings and pronunciation.
Fedra IPA
Harper Collins Publishers have adopted the Fedra family (both sans and serif) to redesign their dictionaries. The fonts are now being applied across a range which amounts to 150 titles published every year in a very wide range of formats and languages. I have worked closely with Mark Thomson, Collins art director to make necessary adjustment to the existing fonts. He also commissioned the designing of Fedra Serif Phonetic, and it was used for the first time in the Desktop Edition of the Collins English Dictionary in September 2004. The fonts consist of more than 330 linguistic symbols, letters, and diacritical marks for use in dictionaries, language guides, linguistics texts, or wherever else spoken sounds need to be typographically represented. Fedra Serif A IPA conforms to the IPA glyph complement finalized at the 1989 Kiel conference (with the exception of contour tones).
Fedra Serif A Phonetic is the first full IPA font to treat the glyphs as individual letterforms and is drawn according to the same principles as Fedra Serif rather than just mirroring existing glyphs, which results in incorrect weight distribution.
