At the moment, I am thinking about the IPA transcription of the word "verlassen".  The dictionary acquisition project proposes the following transcription: "f????lasn?".  But in my opinion, this is in conflict with the Wiktionary transcription guideline.  The transcription should be either "f????lasn?", or "f???lasn?". I am trying to understand the concept.  Or did I misunderstand something?

Addition: The same problem applies to the words  "daher", and "verlassen."

Hm... "ver-" is a prefix, so it should be unstressed. Thus "er" becomes [?]: [f?lasn?]. Then again, the "er" is slightly prolonged compared to e.g. "verraten". If it's prolonged, then it should in fact be transcribed as [f????lasn?], which I think we should use. 

The funny thing is, that systematically (at least as far as it is explained in the guidelines) you are right: Phonemically, the vowel in the prefix "ver-" is Schwa followed by an /r/ (whichever, you know my opinion :o) So, [f???lasn?] would be good. But, that's not what it sounds like (kinda difficult to explain the difference in a written-only forum, but listen to yourself, you'll hear it): There is definitely no [r] in verlassen (notice the brackets, I'm talking about the phonetic layer, not about the phonemic layer). So, if there's no [r], then it must be gone (we said it was there phonemically, didn't we?) due to contraction, and [f????lasn?] must be right, right? Not quite. If there has been a contraction, the Schwa must be gone now and we arrive at my first proposal. 

Now the rescue: If "ver-" is not unstressed (at least not completely unstressed, but a little longer than usual), than the Schwa doesn't have to stay a Schwa. Instead it becomes some other kind of "e". If we listen carefully, we notice, it's actually an [?], that it's becoming and that the following /r/ is becoming [?]!

It's slightly different for "daher": it usually sounds different than "da, Herr", thus we should transcribe it as [da:he:?]. 

Just as a side notice: Phonetic transcription is very hard work, especially if you're not (yet) a studied linguist/phonetician and I think you're doing really really well at it. Keep up the good work!

Hi,

I found a very good phonem translator: http://familientagebuch.de/rainer/2007/38.html#4

The other thing is, you guys used SAMPA for phonem transcriptions, which is good I would say. But I noticed that there occure problems with htk and julius for phonem transcriptions which include digits like "2:", "9" and "6" and for the "?" phonem (which you already changed to "Q"). So I would recommend to build up a dictionary which is similar to SAMPA except for the mentioned phonems!

So when I use htk and julius I changed the SAMPA transcription like this: "2:" -> "OE"; "9" -> "oe"; "6" -> "er"; "?" -> "Q" (but I think the glottal stop is not really necessary)!

Regards!