IPA Zounds 3.1 review

IPA Zounds models language sound changes by applying a given set of sound change rules to a given lexicon. IPA Zounds has a built-in

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 408K Developer: Jamie Norrish

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IPA Zounds models language sound changes by applying a given set of sound change rules to a given lexicon.

IPA Zounds has a built-in model of the International Phonetic Alphabet, allowing users to write input words in IPA characters and rules using those characters or the distinctive features of the model.

IPA Zounds is a set of Python scripts. The GUI uses the PyGTK toolkit. The code and documentation is released under the GNU GPL, and is free to download, use and modify.

There are three parts to IPA Zounds:

Zounds, the sound change engine which applies the rules to the lexicon. This can be used by itself from the command line or by another script. It is very similar to Mark Rosenfelder's Sound Change Applier and the Lingua::SoundChange Perl module.
An IPA extension, which adds support for using IPA characters and binary features in the lexicon and rules. It can be used from the command line or by another script.
A GUI to the IPA extension. This allows for nice display of the lexicon, rules and output, provided a Unicode font with the appropriate glyphs is installed.
The application uses Unicode to represent all IPA characters. However, the program can automatically convert between Unicode and X-SAMPA, and user-defined script mappings can be made so that all input and output are in a different orthography.

What's New in This Release:
The reverse applier was added to the GUI.
Dialects, rule groups, persistent rules, and dates were added to the rules file syntax, allowing restricted transformations.
The ability to cancel transformations was added.
Error handling of certain problems was improved.
The documentation was revised to be more like a tutorial.