Hello! I'm new at this forum, and I'm from Ohio, in the US. The reason I joined this forum was to learn how to pronounce the symboles in fontok, a conscript I found on omniglot. However, I hope I'll be able to contribute to discuscions.

The Consonants all sound exactly like their English counterparts except for the following:
(Symbol in Chart - Common Orthographic Representation (how we write it in English) - sample word)

/ʃ/ - <sh> - shack
/ð/ - <th> - that
/tʃ/ - <ch> - chair
/θ/ - <th> - thing
/ʒ/ - <zh> sort of* - vision
/j/ - <y> - yam
/dʒ/ - <j> - jam
/ŋ/ - <ng> - running

The vowels are more difficult, since they vary by dialect. I'm a little confused by their classification, and lack of /ɛ/ met. I can define some of the more universal ones for you though. Also, vowels can be written many different ways so I might leave out the orthographic representation. Some of these might be different for you; since I am from California, /ɑ/, /a/ and /ɔ/ all sound the same to me.

/ə/ - <uh> - about
I'm pretty sure for "short i" they meant /ɪ/ - <i> - it
/ʊ/ - put, hook
/ɑ/ - <a> - spa
/æ/ - <a> - cat
/i/ - <i, ee, ea> - bee, meat
/u/ - <oo, u> moo, dude
/ai/ - eye
/oi/ - <oi, oy> - boy

You can go to Wikipedia's IPA page, it has charts with all the symbols. You can click the symbol you want to know about and it will take you to a page that describes how to pronounce it, give you a lexicon in English, and, if you're lucky, a properly pronounced recording.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA#Consonants


*You can write it <zh> since it's the voiced counterpart of <sh> (z is voiced version of s). It doesn't have a specific orthography, it could be si like in vision, su like in treasure, j like in Taj.

Thank you! While incomplete, it's still a long way towards achieving my goal. Also, I have checked out wikipedia, but when you factor in how in America how complexe the charts are, the fact you might not find what you're looking for, etc. it just becomes a mess of contradicting information and I just gave up.

Sorry that it couldn't be of more help. The hard thing about making conscripts for English is that the dialects differ so much from each other in terms of vowels that it is difficult to make a script that reconciles all of them and has reasonably similar spellings. My guess is that fontok is for a British accent.