The phonetic representations that appear in most of the Name Inspector’s posts present four kinds of information.
First, syllables are separated by spaces.
Second, the relative stress of the syllables is represented by size, with more stressed syllables being larger and less stressed syllables being smaller.
Third, the individual consonant and vowel sounds of the names are represented using symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
Fourth, different degrees of sonority are represented by the darkness of the symbols. The least sonorous sounds, voiceless stops, are the darkest, and the most sonorous sounds, vowels, are the lightest. This is a graphic way to represent one aspect of sound symbolism: less sonorous sounds are often considered harder, heavier, and harsher, and more sonorous sounds are often considered softer, lighter, and more musical.
January 9th, 2007 by The Name Inspector
A fellow Seattleite, Weston Ruter, developed the following excellent IPA chart and keyboard:
http://linguiste.org/phonetics/ipa/chart/
http://linguiste.org/phonetics/ipa/chart/keyboard/
I feel it’s a bit more accessible than IPA page referenced here.
Look forward to reading more of your naming analysis!
Joshua,
Thanks for the pointers. I recently discovered that IPA keyboard and think it’s really cool, but I didn’t notice there was a chart to go with it.
Hello, I was asked to figure out this sort of riddle for someone and I could not figure it out so I was hoping you could help. I am looking for the name of a person, the first names sounds like boasted dinosaur? Dont ask, that is just what they told me, and yes this is a real person. Also, they said he goes by this nickname with these scrambled letters: C O X O M E. If you could help I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks