L10A- Phonetic Alphabets (28 January, 2005)
In this course, we will be learning to use the phonetic alphabetdeveloped by the International Phonetic Association. In this section, welook at some of the reasons why a special phonetic alphabet is necessaryand then some of the background of the International Phonetic Alphabet(IPA).
We need the following as our guide:
1. Writing things the way they sound
1. How not to do it
2. Problems with using English spelling conventions
3. Ways to overcome the problem
2. The IPA
1. The International Phonetic Association
2. The International Phonetic Alphabet
Writing things the way they sound
The standard system used to write a language is called its *orthography*(from Greek stems: /ortho-/ 'correct', /graphy/ 'writing'). Even forlanguages whose writing systems are based on alphabets, the standard"correct" spellings often have little to do with how the words arepronounced.
- Phonetic alphabets are designed (and necessary) for writing downutterances in a way that records how they sounded. Ideally, someone whonever heard the original utterance should be able to recreate it simplyby reading the written transcription out loud.
How not to do it
Fiction writers will often try to give the impression that a speaker isusing a different accent by deliberately misspelling some randomlychosen words. For example:
- Pets thim animals may be, an' domestic they be, but pigs I'm blamesure they do be, an' me rules says plain as the nose on yer face,'Pigs Franklin to Westcote, thirty cints each.' An' MistherMorehouse, by me arithmetical knowledge two time thurty comes tosixty cints.
(Ellis Parker Butler, "Pigs is pigs")
- 'Pears lak she should pay some 'tention to her fifth husban', orleastwise her fo'th, but she don'. I don' understan' wimmin. Seemlak ev'body settin' fire to somethin' ev'time I turn my back. Wonderany buildin's standin' in the whole gahdam United States.
(James Thurber, "Bateman comes home")
Why not
There are several problems with trying to use ordinary English spellingconventions to suggest how a word is pronounced.
Firstly, doing so usually has offensive connotations. Writers seldom usemisspelling for the speech of characters they are trying to get you torespect. 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 misspellingslike "sez" that suggest a pronunciation which is almost certainlyidentical to pronunciation used by the writer.)
More importantly, English spelling conventions are not consistent enoughto be used in a systematic phonetic transcription.
- The same letter or letter combination can refer to different sounds.o /low/ vs. /cow/ vs. /bow, row, sow/
The same sound can be written with different letters or lettercombinations.o s/ou/nd, c/ow/, b/ough/- Different dialects pronounce the same word differently.Good only for English (at best)
The writer of a phonetic transcription facing a particular sound wouldhave to choose between a number of different possible symbols. Thereader of a phonetic transcription facing a given symbol could never besure of what sound it was intended to represent. There would be problemseven if there were some consistency in how a symbol was used. Thetranscriber might say "the combination 'ay' always means the sound inthe word 'day'", but would this be the word "day" as pronounced by awestern Canadian, by an Australian, by a Londoner? Even if theseproblems could be solved, English spelling conventions would (forunderstandable reasons) only be useful in writing the sounds which occurin English -- they would be no help in writing sounds found in otherlanguages (or in language-disordered children) which are not found instandard English.
Overcoming the problems
Several writing systems have been developed which are more concernedwith how a word sounds than with how it has traditionally been spelled.
1. Shorthand systems (e.g., Pitman shorthand
2. Traditional dictionary keys
3. Informal transcription conventions
4. Specialized alphabets, e.g.
- George Bernard Shaw's 'Proposed English Alphabet'
- the International Phonetic Alphabet
Shorthand systems
Many of the shorthand systems developed for English in the last coupleof centuries (such as Pitman shorthand pictured here usethe idea of writing down words the way they sound, rather than the waythey are spelt -- a large motivation being the time saved in not writingsilent letters.
Traditional dictionary keys
English dictionaries usually give the pronunciation of a word as part ofits entry. In Webster's dictionary, for example, you will find that thepronunciation of /knight/ is "n&imacron;t" and /cat/ is "kăt". Inorder to understand these pronunciation entries, you have to learn whatsounds are meant by symbols like "&imacron;" and "ă".
As consistent as they can be made for a single dialect of English, bothshorthand systems and the traditional dictionary pronunciation keys willsuffer from the same problems as ordinary orthography when it comes todiscussing the differences between dialects.
Informal transcription conventions
Professional linguists, particularly those in the North Americantradition, have over the past century developed a collection of symbolsfor use in phonetic transcriptions. Many of these are identical to thesymbols used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), but there arealso several differences. For example, the "sh" sound of English iswritten [esh] in the International Phonetic Alphabet, but was usuallywritten &shacek; [&shacek;] by North American linguists. Many of thesedifferences made it easier to type the symbols on a typewriter --instead of leaving a space where an [esh] should have been and writingit in by hand later, you could type an ordinary [s] and only have to putthe check mark on later.
Unfortunately, this set of transcription conventions was neverstandardized. While some of the symbols were used the same way by almosteverybody (e.g., &scheck;), most were not. If you read a particularsymbol in a linguistics article, you could never be certain what soundit was supposed to represent.
Specialized alphabets
A more radical solution is to create an entirely new alphabet. Severalproposals for new alphabets have been made over the centuries. Oneexample is George Bernard Shaw's proposed alphabet for English.
The only proposed alphabet which has achieved widespread use is theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), used by phoneticians, linguists,speech/language pathologists, and increasingly by dictionary makers andsecond language teachers.
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