utf8 and utf8_general_ci

I run a linguistics-based blog that would use the International Phonetics Alphabet fairly frequently. The problem is that I’ve never been able to make this show up – whenever I put it into a post, it comes out as question marks.

I went into my wp-config file and edited the DB_COLLATE to utf8_general_ci; that didn’t change anything. So, I edited the DB_CHARSET to see what would happen, and when it was set at utf8_general_ci, my IPA symbols showed up fine. However, a lot of the normal utf8 characters didn’t – in particular, every apostrophe in all of the posts.

Is there any way to have both of them work? So that I can have both IPA and my apostrophes without rebuilding the SQL or anything of that sort (which I don’t know how to do.)

Cheers.