Phonetic Alphabets
In this course, we will be using learning to use the phonetic alphabet developed
by the International Phonetic Association. In this section, we look at some of
the reasons why a special phonetic alphabet is necessary and then some
of the background of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
- Writing things the way they sound
- How not to do it
- Problems with using English spelling conventions
- Ways to overcome the problem
- The IPA
- The International Phonetic Association
- The International Phonetic Alphabet
The standard system used to write a language is called its
orthography (from Greek stems: ortho- 'correct',
graphy 'writing'). Even for languages whose writing systems are
based on alphabets, the standard "correct" spellings often have little to
do with how the words are pronounced.
Phonetic alphabets are designed (and necessary) for writing down utterances
in a way that records how they sounded. Ideally, someone who never heard
the original utterance should be able to recreate it simply by reading the
written transcription out loud.
Fiction writers will often try to give the impression that a speaker is using
a different accent by deliberately misspelling some randomly chosen words.
Pets thim animals may be, an' domestic they be, but pigs I'm blame sure they
do be, an' me rules says plain as the nose on yer face, 'Pigs Franklin to
Westcote, thirty cints each.' An' Misther Morehouse, by me arithmetical
knowledge two time thurty comes to sixty cints.
Ellis Parker Butler, "Pigs is pigs"
'Pears lak she should pay some 'tention to her fifth husban', or leastwise her
fo'th, but she don'. I don' understan' wimmin. Seem lak ev'body settin' fire
to somethin' ev'time I turn my back. Wonder any buildin's standin' in the
whole gahdam United States.
James Thurber, "Bateman comes home"
There are several problems with trying to use ordinary English spelling
conventions to suggest how a word is pronounced.
Firstly, doing so usually has offensive connotations. Writers seldom use
misspelling for the speech of characters they are trying to get you to respect.
While the misspellings may help suggest that a character speaks "differently"
(from whom?), it usually also implies that the character is stupid or illiterate.
(This is especially obvious with misspellings like "sez" that suggest a
pronunciation which is almost certainly identical to pronunciation used by
the writer.)
More importantly, English spelling conventions are not consistent enough
to be used in a systematic phonetic transcription.
- The same letter or letter combination can refer to different sounds.
- low vs. cow vs. bow, row, sow
- The same sound can be written with different letters or letter combinations.
- Different dialects pronounce the same word differently.
- Good only for English (at best)
The writer of a phonetic transcription facing a particular sound would have
to choose between a number of different possible symbols. The reader
of a phonetic transcription facing a given symbol could never be sure of
what sound it was intended to represent. There would be problems even if
there were some consistency in how a symbol was used. The transcriber
might say "the combination 'ay' always means the sound in the word 'day'",
but would this be the word "day" as pronounced by a western Canadian,
by an Australian, by a Londoner? Even if these problems could be solved,
English spelling conventions would (for understandable reasons) only be
useful in writing the sounds which occur in English -- they would be no
help in writing sounds found in other languages (or in language-disordered
childred) which are not found in standard English.
Several writing systems have been developed which are more concerned
with how a word sounds than with how it has traditionally been spelled.
- Shorthand systems
(e.g., Pitman shorthand)
- Traditional dictionary keys
- Informal transcription conventions
- Specialized alphabets, e.g.,
Many of the shorthand systems developed for English in the last couple of
centuries (such as Pitman shorthand pictured here)
use the idea of writing down words
the way they sound, rather than the way they are spelt -- a large
motivation being the time saved in not writing silent letters.
English dictionaries usually give the pronunciation of a word as part of
its entry. In Webster's dictionary, for example, you will find that
the pronunciation of knight is
"n
t" and
cat is
"k
t". In
order to understand these pronunciation entries, you have to learn what
sounds are meant by symbols like
"" and
"".
As consistent as they can be made for a single dialect of English, both
shorthand systems and the traditional dictionary pronunciation keys will
suffer from the same problems as ordinary orthography when it comes to
discussing the differences between dialects.
Professional linguists, particularly those in the North American
tradition, have over the past century developed a collection of symbols
for use in phonetic transcriptions. Many of these are identical to the
symbols used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), but there are
also several differences. For example, the "sh" sound of English is
written [
] in the
International Phonetic Alphabet, but was usually written [![&shacek;](../alpha/14pt/132c.gif")
] by North American
linguists. Many of these differences made it easier to type the symbols
on a typewriter -- instead of leaving a space where an [] should have been
and writing it in by hand later, you could type an ordinary [s] and only
have to put the check mark on later.
Unfortunately, this set of transcription conventions was never
standardized. While some of the symbols were used the same way by
almost everybody (e.g.,
[
]), most were not.
If you read a particular
symbol in a linguistics article, you could never be certain what sound it
was supposed to represent.
A more radical solution is to create an entirely new alphabet. Several
proposals for new alphabets have been made over the centuries. One
example is George Bernard Shaw's proposed alphabet for
English.
The only proposed alphabet which has achieved widespread use is the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), used by phoneticians, linguists,
speech/language pathologists, and increasingly by dictionary makers and
second language teachers.
Next: The IPA
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