It’s very convenient that so many of the phonemic symbols for English consonants are like the letters used in ordinary spelling, but there are still a number of potential pitfalls to be remembered when transcribing these consonants:
1)We don’t use the letters <c>, <q> or <x> in English phonemic transcription. We don’t need them because they are used in English spelling to represent sounds which we already have phonemic symbols for: <c> is a spelling of /k/ and /s/ (e.g. cut, city), <q> is a further alternative spelling of /k/ (e.g. queen), and <x> usually represents /ks/ (e.g. box, extra) or /ɡz/ (e.g. exam, exist).
2)We don’t use capital letters in phonemic transcription. The symbol for a sound remains the same at the beginning of sentences, names, place-names, etc. (e.g. Tim /tɪm/, London /ˈlʌndən/).
3)The phonemic symbol /s/ is only used for the /s/ sound, but in ordinary spelling the letter <s> is often used for /z/ (e.g. his, these, noise, lose) as well as /s/. You must be careful when transcribing /s/ that the word you’re transcribing really does have /s/, not /z/.
4)The digraphs (two-letter spellings) <ck> and <ph> in words like
back and
phone represent single phonemes, /k/ in
back and /f/ in
phone.
5)In English, consonant letters are often doubled even though they represent a single consonant phoneme. For example, in
happy,
hobby,
matter,
ladder,
stiff,
hammer,
dinner and
hurry, the letters <pp>, <bb>, <tt>, <dd>, <ff>, <mm>, <nn> and <rr> represent single /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /f/, /m/, /n/ and /r/. Sequences of the same phoneme, such as /mm/ in
roommate, /dd/ in
midday and /nn/ in
unnamed, are rare in English words but when they do occur, they are clearly made up of separate word elements (
room +
mate,
mid +
day,
un +
named), each contributing one of the phonemes.
6)Naturally, there are no ‘silent’ letters in phonemic transcription as there are in normal English spelling. Knit, for example, is transcribed /nɪt/, and debt is /det/.
7)We don’t use the letter shape <g> in transcriptions. The phonemic symbol for the consonant at the beginning and end of gag is /ɡ/. On the subject of symbol shapes, note also that the symbol for the /w/ phoneme has pointed bottoms and that this is also how we write it by hand in order not to confuse it with a similar IPA symbol with rounded bottoms, namely [ɯ].
The symbols for vowels are more difficult to learn than those for consonants, so first we’ll limit ourselves to these 16 familiar consonants in this and the next chapter before introducing the remaining eight unfamiliar consonants in Chapter 3. This way we’ll be able to concentrate on transcribing each of the new vowel symbols without the distraction of any unfamiliar consonant symbols.
