International Phonetic Alphabet

12 Key excerpts on "International Phonetic Alphabet"

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  eBook - PDF

  The Unicode cookbook for linguists : Managing writing systems using orthography profiles

  • Steven Moran, Michael Cysouw(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Language Science Press

    (Publisher)

  Today, the IPA is designed to meet practical linguistic needs and is used to transcribe the phonetic or phonological structure of languages. It is also used increasingly as a foreign language learning tool, as a standard pronunciation guide and as a tool for creating practical orthographies of previously unwri ten languages. Te IPA suits many linguists’ needs because: • it is intended to be a set of symbols for representing all possible sounds in the world’s (spoken) languages; • its chart has a linguistic basis (and specifcally a phonological bias) rather than just being a general phonetic notation scheme; • its symbols can be used to represent distinctive feature combinations; 2 • its chart provides a summary of linguists’ agreed-upon phonetic knowl-edge. Several styles of transcription with the IPA are possible, as illustrated in the Handbook , and they are all valid. 3 Terefore, there are di ferent but equivalent transcriptions, or as noted by Ladefoged (1990: 64), “perhaps now that the Asso-ciation has been explicit in its eclectic approach, outsiders to the Association will no longer speak of the IPA transcription of a given phenomenon, as if there were only one approved style.” Clearly not all phoneticians agree, nor are they likely 1 For a detailed history, we refer the reader to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_ International_Phonetic_Alphabet. 2 Although the chart uses traditional manner and place of articulation labels, the symbols can be used as a representation of any de fned bundle o f features, binary or otherwise, to de fne phonetic dimensions. 3 For an illustration of the di ferences, see the 29 languages and their transcriptions in the Illus-trations of the IPA (Te International Phonetic Association 1999: 41–154). 38 4.2 Premises and principles to ever completely agree, on all aspects of the IPA or on transcription approaches and practices in general.

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  Discovering Phonetics and Phonology

  • Lynne Cahill(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The aim of the IPA is to give a standard representation for the sounds of every language in the world. This means that it’s possible to compare the exact pronunciation of different languages and document the ways in which different speech sounds are used in different languages. The IPA gives us different symbols for the different sounds, like the example of [ θ ] for th . But it also gives ways of indicating very precise and quite subtle differences between very similar sounds. The IPA is based on the Roman alphabet, which makes it convenient for those of us whose language already uses this alphabet, but that does mean that it is sometimes easy to slip into using the character you’d use for spell-ing, by mistake, when the correct IPA character is different. For example, going back to one of our examples of why spelling and pronunciation don’t always match up, remember the example of cat ? In the IPA the sound at the 16 DISCOVERING PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY beginning is written as k , not c . The use of the Roman alphabet therefore means that if that’s the alphabet your language is written in, you’ll have to concentrate to avoid making careless mistakes, and will have to learn the more complex aspects of phonetic transcription. Although quite a lot of the symbols in the IPA are Roman alphabet char-acters, there are also many that are variants on these, such as ŋ ; some that are Greek letters, such as β ; and some that are from punctuation or mathemati-cal symbols, such as ! and ⊙ . The IPA also makes use of diacritics – marks that are added like accents, usually either above or below the symbol – and sub- and superscript letters or symbols. I explain how and why these are used as I go along. For quite a lot of phonetic transcription, you won’t really need to use many of these, but they can be very important. When you want to transcribe speech, the IPA symbols can be used to represent each of the sounds in a word.

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  Phonetics

  Transcription, Production, Acoustics, and Perception

  • Henning Reetz, Allard Jongman(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  3 Phonetics: Transcription, Production, Acoustics, and Perception , Second Edition. Henning Reetz and Allard Jongman. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Companion website: www.wiley.com/go/reetz/phonetics While a detailed articulatory description of sounds can provide a reasonably good idea of what a spoken utterance sounds like, it is quite cumbersome to label each sound in terms of its articulation. For example, the word “speech” would consist of a voiceless alveolar fricative, followed by a voiceless bilabial plosive, which is in turn followed by a high front unrounded vowel, followed by a voiceless post-alveolar affricate. In order to provide a more efficient means of describing speech, phoneticians have devised a set of symbols, known as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). IPA symbols are by convention enclosed in square brackets ([ ]). Founded in 1886, the International Phonetic Association, which is also abbrevi-ated IPA, continues to modify the alphabet in order to accommodate newly docu-mented sounds. Ideally, anyone properly trained in the use of this alphabet should be able to use it to transcribe the sounds of any language. Proper training should help in listening as objectively as possible in order to minimize any influence of the native language or dialect. The final transcription should enable anyone with proper training to reconstruct the sounds of the original message. The extent to which the original sounds can be reconstructed is of course a function of the level of detail and precision of the transcription. Transcription in a nutshell The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) provides letter‐like symbols for nearly every sound in the world’s languages. The underlying idea is to be able to write down how a word sounds in a particular language.

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  eBook - ePub

  Linguistics for Singers

  An Introduction

  • Gregory Camp(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Most singers today are taught how to use the IPA early in their training. This invaluable tool provides a shortcut to get beyond the complexities of spelling across various languages and go straight to the sounds themselves. It serves as an international way to describe sounds separated from individual languages or dialects. I will make extensive use of IPA in these chapters, but with a caveat that IPA should be used not as a crutch but rather as a secondary tool to support language learning. The downside of IPA is that it erases the grammatical and etymological information available in individual languages’ spelling systems; we will see evidence of this in the grammatical chapters that follow. Another issue, especially if you are performing little-known or new repertoire, is that IPA transcriptions might not be readily available. Unfortunately, some singers limit themselves to performing the material on IPA Source or in Nico Castel’s opera text volumes because they are afraid to lay down the crutch of IPA; these are excellent resources, but discomfort with foreign languages should not disallow the widening of the repertoire. 3 FIGURE 3.1 IPA Chart Phonemes and Allophones Languages’ sound systems are divided up into individual sounds called phonemes. A phoneme is a single sound that, if replaced with another sound, might change the meaning of a word. In English, [p] and [b] are phonemes because the words PIT and BIT, identical in every way other than their initial consonant, mean two different things. We call these minimal pairs. The words PET and PAT are different only because of their vowel phonemes, [ε] and [æ]. Languages also have allophones, different versions of phonemes that change depending on where they are in a word but that do not alternate with other sounds to change words’ meanings. The sounds of the letter p in PIT and SPIT are subtly different: the first p is aspirated, with a little puff of air after it, but the second is not: [p h ɪt] vs [spɪt]

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  Everyday Linguistics

  An Introduction to the Study of Language

  • Joanne Cavallaro(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 4 Phonetics

  The sounds of English

  DOI: 10.4324/9780429269059-4

  First glance

  International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA):

  • Voice
  • Consonants: place and manner of articulation
  • Vowels
  • Natural classes V
  • Accents
  • Prosody
  • What’s in a name?
  • Local acts of identity
  • Sign language phonetics
  • Phonetics in other languages
  • Acquiring language sounds

  INTRODUCTION

  Part of knowing any spoken language is knowing its sounds and how they are put together. We will begin here with the sound units of language, examining the meaningfully distinct sounds of English. In the next chapter on phonology, we will use that knowledge to examine how the sound system in English is structured.

  To do so, we will need something besides letters to indicate sounds, since letters in English are poor at representing sounds. For one thing, one letter can represent more than one sound. How do you pronounce the letter a, for example? It depends; in the word pat it is pronounced differently than in father or late. The letter t can also be pronounced in several different ways—as in pretty, late, or nation. To make the whole thing even worse, one sound can be spelled in a variety of ways; the ee sound can be spelled ee (seed) or ea (lead) or ey (key), among other ways. And some letter combinations hide sound differences. Although we spell them the same, there are really two th sounds in English, the one in think and the one in then.

  International Phonetic Alphabet

  Because there is simply too much inconsistency in our alphabet, we will use a slightly modified version of the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA, an alphabet designed by linguists to designate a unique symbol for every sound in every language. (You can find and download the full IPA at internationalphoneticalphabet.org.) Here we will be concentrating on English, learning to use those symbols to represent the minimally distinct sounds of English. Other symbols are necessary to represent sounds in other languages, for many of the sounds in other languages differ from similar sounds in English or do not exist in English. We will learn what aspects of the vocal tract are involved in producing those sounds; that is, we’ll be doing phonetics, the study of sounds in human speech. Phonetics includes both acoustic phonetics, the study of the physical properties of speech as sound waves, and articulatory phonetics

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  Linguistic Perspectives on Language and Education

  • Anita K. Barry(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  The most widely used system of phonetic notation is called the Alphabet of the International Phonetics Association (also called the "IPA"). Symbols of the IPA are placed within brackets to distinguish them from ordinary spelling: [b], [m]. Below are the IPA symbols associated with the consonant sounds of English: Stops [p]: oral, stop, voiceless, bilabial [b]: oral, stop, voiced, bilabial [t]: oral, stop, voiceless, alveolar [d]: oral, stop, voiced, alveolar [k]: oral, stop, voiceless, velar [g]: oral, stop, voiced, velar Affricates [c]: oral, affricate, voiceless, palatal Q]: oral, affricate, voiced, palatal Fricatives [f]: oral, fricative, voiceless, labiodental [v]: oral, fricative, voiced, labiodental [6]: oral, fricative, voiceless, interdental [5]: oral, fricative, voiced, interdental [s]: oral, fricative, voiceless, alveolar [z]: oral, fricative, voiced, alveolar [§]: oral, fricative, voiceless, palatal [z]: oral, fricative, voiced, palatal Nasals [m]: nasal, stop, voiced, bilabial [n]: nasal, stop, voiced, alveolar [rj]: nasal, stop, voiced, velar 20 Linguistic Perspectives on Language and Education Table 2.1 IPA Symbols for English Consonant Sounds Bilabial Labiodental Interdental Alveolar Palatal Velar Stop P b Fricative Affricate Nasal m f V e ? t d s z n i t U k g 1 You might find it easier to learn these symbols if they are arranged on a grid. In Table 2.1, the first of each pair is voiceless and the second is voiced. You will notice that there are certain symmetries in this consonant system: For every voiceless consonant there is a matching voiced one, and for every oral voiced stop there is a matching nasal. (Hold your nose for the nasal sound and the oral one comes out!) Another sound, [h], is sometimes classified as a fricative, although it involves very little obstruction of air.

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  eBook - ePub

  Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics

  • Hadumod Bussmann, Kerstin Kazzazi, Gregory Trauth, Kerstin Kazzazi, Gregory Trauth(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The principles of the International Phonetic Association.

  Jones, D. 1914. Outline of English phonetics. London.

  Kuglerkruse, M. 1985. Computer phonetic alphabet. Bochum.

  Ladefoged, P. 1990. The revised International Phonetic Alphabet. Language 66. 550–2.

  Passy, P. and D.Jones. 1921. L’Écriture phonétique internationale, 3rd edn. Cambridge.

  Pullum, G.K. and W.A.Ladusaw. 1986. Phonetic symbol guide. Chicago, IL.

  Bibliography

  Wellisch, H. 1975. Transcription and transliteration: an annotated bibliography on conversion of scripts. Silver Spring, MD.

  ⇒ phonetics

  phonetics

  Linguistic subdiscipline that studies the phonetic aspect of speech with regard to the following processes: (a) articulatory-genetic sound production (⇒ articulatory phonetics); (b) structure of the acoustic flow (⇒ acoustic phonetics); and (c) neurological-psychological processes involved in perception (⇒ auditory phonetics). An understanding of anatomy, physiology, neurology, and physics is fundamental to these studies. In contrast to phonology, phonetics studies the concrete articulatory, acoustic, and auditory characteristics of all the possible sounds of all languages. Instrumental phonetics makes use of electronic equipment, whereas experimental phonetics involves empirical and experimental processes.

  References

  Abercrombie, D. 1966. Elements of general phonetics. Edinburgh.

  Asher, R.E. and E.J.A.Henderson (eds) 1981. Towards a history of phonetics. Edinburgh.

  Catford, J.C. 1988. A practical introduction to phonetics. Oxford.

  Clark, J. and C.Yallop. 1995. An introduction to phonetics and phonology. 2nd edn. Oxford.

  Jespersen, O. 1904. Lehrbuch der Phonetik. Leipzig.

  Jones, D. 1922. An outline of English phonetics, 2nd edn. Berlin.

  Knowles, G. 1987. Patterns of spoken English: an introduction to English phonetics. London.

  Ladefoged, P. 1971. Preliminaries to linguistic phonetics. Chicago, IL.

  ——1975. A course in phonetics. 3rd edn 1993. Fort Worth, TX and Philadelphia, PA.

  Laver, J. 1994. Principles of phonetics

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  The English Language and Linguistics Companion

  • Keith Allan, Julie Bradshaw, Geoffrey Finch(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  They are also available on an interactive CD-ROM The Sounds of the International Phonetic Alphabet available from the University College London Department of Phonetics and Linguistics: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/shop/soundsipa.php. Phones and the organs of speech Phonetics is the study of speech sounds ( phones ). Most language is spoken and heard, not written and read. Phonetics offers tools to identify, discriminate, interpret, describe and analyse the speech sounds that (if you are a hearing person) constantly surround you. Phonetics has application to language learning and teaching, audiology and speech pathology, sociology, psychology, computer speech recognition, and forensic science. Articulatory phonetics investigates the production of phones and consequently the anatomy and physiology of speech, the process of articulation using vocal organs, and the description and classification of phones based on properties of the speech mechanism. The focus of acoustic phonetics is the variations in air pressure that are transmitted as a result of vocal organ activity. Instrumental phonetics uses instruments to examine the sound wave charac-teristics that have been converted to electrical energy, such as frequency (pitch) and intensity (amplitude). Auditory phonet-ics deals with the hearing process. Figure 2.1 A visual analysis of Sit down will you ? 2

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  Understanding Language

  A Basic Course in Linguistics

  • Elizabeth Grace Winkler, Elizabeth Winkler(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Because my goal was Phonetics 99 to represent how Kpelle sounds to other linguists, I used phonetic char-acters to describe each word rather than create an alphabet for the lan-guage and all the rules to explain how all the letters related to individual sounds. Finally, phonetic transcriptions tell us how to pronounce new words in our own language or a language we may be studying. Most hard-copy monolin-gual English dictionaries use some kind of archaic system they have created to represent pronunciations of words, often using a couple of letters to repre-sent a single sound. However, online versions have been increasingly switch-ing to phonetic systems. The online version of the Oxford English Dictionary transcribes cute as [kju:t]. 8 Many of the non English-speaking international students in my linguistics classes have very sophisticated hand-held dic-tionaries that also use a phonetic alphabet. Many of the ones created in Asia reflect British pronunciations whereas the ones from Latin America reflect US pronunciations. 6. Phonology This chapter has focused on the study of articulatory phonetics, which is concerned with describing the production of sounds of languages. A related area of study, called phonology, looks at how these sounds are distributed throughout a particular language and the patterned variations of it in dia-lects for instance. In the introduction of this text, I explained that part of what a native speaker knows, consciously or unconsciously, is what sounds or combination of sounds can occur together and where they can occur in a syl-lable. For example, in the varieties of English spoken in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Australia, no word begins with the sound [ŋ], but many syllables and words end in this sound: [fiŋgr] finger or [riŋ] ring. However, this sound is found in the speech of South African English speak-ers who have borrowed words from Bantu languages spoken by many of its bilingual speakers.

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  Handbook of Interpersonal Communication

  • Gerd Antos, Eija Ventola, Gerd Antos, Eija Ventola(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  192 Arnulf Deppermann and Wilfried Schütte of sound fidelity. Consequently, there is no predictable relation between characters and sounds. An orthographic layer of transliteration thus is most recommendable for retrieval purposes in a spoken language data-base, but it is insufficient as the only mode of representation for the analysis of speech and talk-in-interaction. b) The phonetic transcription represents sound sequences most faithfully by using an extensive and precisely defined sign inventory which captures all physiological features of articulation and phonation. Most common is the IPA system of the International Phonetic Association. This minute translitera-tion allows you to represent most precisely variants of pronunciation. It makes available those features of speech which are important for the study of dialectal and ethnolectal variation and for second-language learning, speech impairments, and other issues which crucially involve phonological variants. Phonetic transcription, however, is very hard to write and read. It requires a lot of training from transcribers and readers, and it is very time-consuming. Often an IPA transcription is not feasible because the special characters of the phonetic alphabet are not applicable in a technical sense. A thorough pho-netic transliteration is only needed for phonetic research interests. It is not needed for conversation analytic purposes and should be used only locally in order to represent phonetic variants which are interactionally relevant. c) The literary transcription uses the standard alphabet, but it departs from or-thography in using the alphabet to represent the sounds as faithfully as pos-sible. That is, the transcriber tries to capture properties of the articulation of spoken language (like elision of vowels or contraction) and dialectal (and other) variants of pronunciation by representing them in the standard alpha-bet in a most evident manner.

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  An Introduction to Language (w/ MLA9E Updates)

  • Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams, , Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Summary The science of speech sounds is called phonetics. It aims to provide the set of properties necessary to describe and distinguish all the sounds in human languages throughout the world. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Summary 209 When we speak we produce continuous stretches of sound, which are the physical manifestations of strings of discrete linguistic segments. Knowledge of a language permits one to separate continuous speech into individual sounds and words. The discrepancy between spelling and sounds motivated the development of phonetic alphabets in which one letter corresponds to one sound. The major phonetic alphabet in use is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), by means of which the sounds of all human languages can be repre- sented. To distinguish between orthography (spelling) and phonetic tran- scriptions, we write the latter between square brackets, as in [fǝnɛɾɪk] for phonetic. All English speech sounds come from the movement of lung air through the vocal tract. The air moves through the glottis (i.e., between the vocal cords), up the pharynx, through the oral (and possibly the nasal) cavity, and out the mouth or nose. Human speech sounds fall into classes according to their phonetic proper- ties. All speech sounds are either consonants or vowels, and all consonants are either obstruents or sonorants.

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  Understanding Phonetics

  • Patricia Ashby(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Starting phonetics This chapter will look at what we already know about phonetics, exploring writing and spelling, texting and talking. It looks at the relationship between speaking and spelling and between speech sounds, letters of the alphabet and symbols. The IPA chart and transcription are introduced and the different types of phonetics (articulatory, acoustic, auditory), accents, our attitudes to what people sound like, and the phonetics/phonology interface. 1.1 WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW 1.1.1 Writing Before we look more deeply into phonetics, it is worth finding out what we already know about this subject. Far from being a strange and different discipline, phonetics touches our everyday lives in a huge number of ways and has done so since the moment we were born (and maybe even earlier, while we were still in the womb). Phonetics, of course, is the study of speech sounds, but before we can really get to grips with these, we need to dispel a few myths about writing and spelling, and explore the relationship between the spoken and written forms of languages. Most of us learn to speak very early in our lives but at school we all grapple with the intricacies of writing. Around the world, the first writing system many of us use is based on applications of the Extended Latin Alphabet (ELA). (If you are not sure what this means, check it out by looking at the fonts and symbols available on your computer.) Our familiarity with this alphabet, and with other alphabets such as the Greek alphabet, depends very much on where we live in the world. In the Faroe Islands, for example, shapes such as , ø and ð are part of everyday orthography (see Figure 1.1). In Greece, ε, β and φ are taken for granted in the same way. It is shapes like these from the ELA plus a few extras from the Greek alphabet that we use to ‘write phonetics’. We give the name transcription to this writing and instead of referring to letters, we call the shapes that we use symbols.

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