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Phonetic transcription (also known as phonetic script or phonetic notation) is the visual representation of speech sounds (or ''
phones A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...
'') by means of
symbols A symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different co ...
. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the
International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
.


Versus orthography

The pronunciation of words in all languages changes over time. However, their written forms ( orthography) are often not modified to take account of such changes, and do not accurately represent the pronunciation. Words borrowed from other languages may retain the spelling from the original language, which may have a different system of correspondences between written symbols and speech sounds. Pronunciation can also vary greatly among dialects of a language. Standard orthography in some languages, such as
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
and
Tibetan Tibetan may mean: * of, from, or related to Tibet * Tibetan people, an ethnic group * Tibetan language: ** Classical Tibetan, the classical language used also as a contemporary written standard ** Standard Tibetan, the most widely used spoken diale ...
, is often irregular and makes it difficult to predict pronunciation from spelling. For example, the words ''bough'', ''chough'', ''cough'', ''though'' and ''through'' do not rhyme in English even though their spellings might suggest otherwise. Other languages, such as Spanish and Italian have a more consistent (but still imperfect) relationship between orthography and pronunciation, while a few languages may claim to have a fully phonemic spelling system (a phonemic orthography). For most languages, phonetic transcription makes it possible to show pronunciation with something much nearer to a one-to-one relationship between sound and symbol than is possible with the language's orthography. Phonetic transcription allows one to step outside orthography, examine differences in pronunciation between dialects within a given language and identify changes in pronunciation that may take place over time. A basic principle of phonetic transcription is that it should be applicable to all languages, and its symbols should denote the same phonetic properties whatever the language being transcribed. It follows that a transcription devised for one individual language or group of languages is not a phonetic transcription but an orthography.


Narrow versus broad transcription

Phonetic transcription may be used to transcribe the phones of a language. In all systems of transcription there is a distinction between broad transcription and narrow transcription. Broad transcription indicates only the most noticeable phonetic features of an utterance, whereas narrow transcription encodes more information about the phonetic characteristics of the
allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
s in the utterance. The difference between broad and narrow is a continuum, but the difference between phonemic and phonetic transcription is usually treated as a binary distinction. Phonemic transcription is a particular form of broad transcription which disregards all allophonic difference; as the name implies, it is not really a phonetic transcription at all (though at times it may coincide with one), but a representation of phonemic structure. A transcription which includes some allophonic detail but is closely linked to the phonemic structure of an utterance is called an allophonic transcription. The advantage of the narrow transcription is that it can help learners to produce exactly the right sound and allows linguists to make detailed analyses of language variation. The disadvantage is that a narrow transcription is rarely representative of all speakers of a language. While most Americans, Canadians, and Australians would pronounce the of ''little'' as a tap , many speakers in southern England would pronounce /t/ as (a glottal stop; t-glottalization) and/or the second as a vowel resembling ( L-vocalization), possibly yielding . A further disadvantage of narrow transcription is that it involves a larger number of symbols and diacritics that may be unfamiliar to non-specialists. The advantage of broad transcription is that it usually allows statements to be made which apply across a more diverse language community. It is thus more appropriate for the pronunciation data in foreign language dictionaries, which may discuss phonetic details in the preface but rarely give them for each entry. A rule of thumb in many linguistics contexts is therefore to use a narrow transcription when it is necessary for the point being made, but a broad transcription whenever possible.


Types of notational systems

Most phonetic transcription is based on the assumption that linguistic sounds are segmentable into discrete units that can be represented by symbols. Many different types of transcription, or "notation", have been tried out: these may be divided into ''Alphabetic'' (which are based on the same principle as that which governs ordinary alphabetic writing, namely that of using one single simple symbol to represent each sound) and ''Analphabetic'' (notations which are ''not'' alphabetic) which represent each sound by a composite symbol made up of a number of signs put together.


Alphabetic

The
International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
(IPA) is the most widely used and well-known of present-day phonetic alphabets and has a long
history History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well ...
. It was created in the nineteenth century by European language teachers and linguists. It soon developed beyond its original purpose as a tool of foreign language pedagogy and is now also used extensively as a practical alphabet of phoneticians and linguists. It is found in many dictionaries, where it is used to indicate the pronunciation of words, but most American dictionaries for native English-speakers, e.g., '' American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,
Random House Dictionary of the English Language ''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary'' is a large American dictionary, first published in 1966 as ''The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition''. Edited by Editor-in-chief Jess Stein, it contained 315,0 ...
, Webster's Third New International Dictionary'', avoid phonetic transcription and instead employ '' respelling'' systems based on the English alphabet, with diacritical marks over the vowels and stress marks. (See Pronunciation respelling for English for a generic version.) Another commonly encountered alphabetic tradition was originally created by American linguists for the transcription of Native American and European languages and is still commonly used by linguists of Slavic, Indic, Semitic,
Uralic The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian lan ...
(here known as the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet) and Caucasian languages. This is often labeled the Americanist phonetic alphabet despite having been widely used for languages outside the Americas. The principal difference between these alphabets and the IPA is that the specially created characters of the IPA are abandoned in favour of already existing typewriter characters with diacritics (e.g. many characters are borrowed from Eastern European orthographies) or digraphs. Examples of this transcription may be seen in Pike's ''Phonemics'' and in many of the papers reprinted in Joos's ''Readings in Linguistics 1''. In the days before it was possible to create phonetic fonts for computer printers and computerized typesetting, this system allowed material to be typed on existing typewriters to create printable material. There are also extended versions of the IPA, for example: Ext-IPA, VoQS, and Luciano Canepari'
''canIPA''


Aspects of alphabetic transcription

The
International Phonetic Association The International Phonetic Association (IPA; French: ', ''API'') is an organization that promotes the scientific study of phonetics and the various practical applications of that science. The IPA's major contribution to phonetics is the Inter ...
recommends that a phonetic transcription should be enclosed in
square brackets A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...
" nbsp;. A transcription that specifically denotes only phonemic contrasts may be enclosed in
slash Slash may refer to: * Slash (punctuation), the "/" character Arts and entertainment Fictional characters * Slash (Marvel Comics) * Slash (''Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles'') Music * Harry Slash & The Slashtones, an American rock band * Nash ...
es "/ /" instead. If one is unsure, it is best to use brackets since by setting off a transcription with slashes, one makes a theoretical claim that every symbol phonemically contrasts for the language being transcribed. For phonetic transcriptions, there is flexibility in how closely sounds may be transcribed. A transcription that gives only a basic idea of the sounds of a language in the broadest terms is called a ''broad transcription''; in some cases, it may be equivalent to a phonemic transcription (only without any theoretical claims). A close transcription, indicating precise details of the sounds, is called a ''narrow transcription''. They are not binary choices but the ends of a continuum, with many possibilities in between. All are enclosed in brackets. For example, in some dialects the English word ''pretzel'' in a narrow transcription would be , which notes several phonetic features that may not be evident even to a native speaker. An example of a broad transcription is , which indicates only some of the features that are easier to hear. A yet broader transcription would be in which every symbol represents an unambiguous speech sound but without going into any unnecessary detail. None of those transcriptions makes any claims about the phonemic status of the sounds. Instead, they represent certain ways in which it is possible to produce the sounds that make up the word. There are also several possibilities in how to transcribe the word phonemically, but here, the differences are generally of not precision but analysis. For example, ''pretzel'' could be or . The latter transcription suggests that there are two vowels in the word even if they cannot both be heard, but the former suggests that there is only one. Strictly speaking, it is not possible to have a distinction between "broad" and "narrow" within phonemic transcription, since the symbols chosen represent only sounds that have been shown to be distinctive. However, the symbols themselves may be more or less explicit about their phonetic realization. A frequently cited example is the symbol chosen for the English consonant at the beginning of the words 'rue', 'rye', 'red': this is frequently transcribed as /r/, despite the symbol suggesting an association with the IPA symbol which is used for a tongue-tip trill. It is equally possible within a phonemic transcription to use the symbol , which in IPA usage refers to an alveolar approximant; this is the more common realization for English pronunciation in America and England. Phonemic symbols will frequently be chosen to avoid diacritics as much as possible, under a 'one sound one symbol' policy, or may even be restricted to the
ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...
symbols of a typical keyboard, as in the SAMPA alphabet. For example, the English word ''church'' may be transcribed as , a close approximation of its actual pronunciation, or more abstractly as , which is easier to type. Phonemic symbols should always be backed up by an explanation of their use and meaning, especially when they are as divergent from actual pronunciation as . Occasionally a transcription will be enclosed in pipes (", , "). This goes beyond phonology into morphological analysis. For example, the words ''pets'' and ''beds'' could be transcribed phonetically as and (in a fairly narrow transcription), and phonemically as and . Because and are separate
phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
s in English, they receive separate symbols in the phonemic analysis. However, a native English speaker would recognize that underneath this, they represent the same plural ending. This can be indicated with the pipe notation. If the plural ending is thought to be essentially an ''s'', as English spelling would suggest, the words can be transcribed and . If it is essentially a ''z'', these would be and . To avoid confusion with IPA symbols, it may be desirable to specify when native orthography is being used, so that, for example, the English word ''jet'' is not read as "yet". This is done with
angle brackets A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...
or ''chevrons'': . It is also common to italicize such words, but the chevrons indicate specifically that they are in the original language's orthography, and not in English transliteration.


Iconic

In ''iconic'' phonetic notation, the shapes of the phonetic characters are designed so that they visually represent the position of articulators in the vocal tract. This is unlike alphabetic notation, where the correspondence between character shape and articulator position is arbitrary. This notation is potentially more flexible than alphabetic notation in showing more shades of pronunciation (MacMahon 1996:838–841). An example of iconic phonetic notation is the Visible Speech system, created by Scottish phonetician Alexander Melville Bell (Ellis 1869:15).


Analphabetic

Another type of phonetic notation that is more precise than alphabetic notation is ''analphabetic'' phonetic notation. Instead of both the alphabetic and iconic notational types' general principle of using one symbol per sound, analphabetic notation uses long sequences of symbols to precisely describe the component features of an articulatory gesture (MacMahon 1996:842–844). This type of notation is reminiscent of the notation used in
chemical formula In chemistry, a chemical formula is a way of presenting information about the chemical proportions of atoms that constitute a particular chemical compound or molecule, using chemical element symbols, numbers, and sometimes also other symbols, ...
s to denote the composition of chemical compounds. Although more descriptive than alphabetic notation, analphabetic notation is less practical for many purposes (e.g. for descriptive linguists doing fieldwork or for speech pathologists impressionistically transcribing speech disorders). As a result, this type of notation is uncommon. Two examples of this type were developed by the Danish Otto Jespersen (1889) and American Kenneth Pike (1943). Pike's system, which is part of a larger goal of scientific description of phonetics, is particularly interesting in its challenge against the descriptive method of the phoneticians who created alphabetic systems like the IPA. An example of Pike's system can be demonstrated by the following. A syllabic voiced
alveolar nasal The voiced alveolar nasal is a type of consonantal sound used in numerous spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar nasals is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol ...
consonant ( in IPA) is notated as : ''M''aIlDe''C''VoeIpvnnAP''p''a''a''t''d''tl''t''n''r''ansnsfS''p''v''a''v''d''tlv''t''n''r''anss''s''fT''p''g''a''g''d''tlwv''t''itv''r''ansn''s''f''S''rp''F''Ss In Pike's notation there are 5 main components (which are indicated using the example above): # ''M'' – manner of production (i.e., ''M''aIlDe) # ''C'' – manner of controlling (i.e., ''C''VoeIpvnn) # description of stricture (i.e., AP''p''a''a''t''d''tl''t''n''r''ansnsfS''p''v''a''v''d''tlv''t''n''r''anss''s''fT''p''g''a''g''d''tlwv''t''itv''r''ansn''s''f) # ''S'' – segment type (i.e., ''S''rp) # ''F'' – phonetic function (i.e., ''F''Ss) The components of the notational hierarchy of this consonant are explained below:


See also

* English Phonetic Alphabet * Eye dialect * Orthographic transcription * Phonetic spelling *
Phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
* Pronunciation respelling for English * Pronunciation spelling *
Romanization Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, a ...
* Transliteration


Notational systems

*
Americanist phonetic notation Americanist phonetic notation, also known as the North American Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA), the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet or the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA), is a system of phonetic notation originally developed by European and American ...
*
ARPABET ARPABET (also spelled ARPAbet) is a set of phonetic transcription codes developed by Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a part of their Speech Understanding Research project in the 1970s. It represents phonemes and allophones of General ...
* Cyrillic phonetic alphabet *
International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
** Comparison of ASCII encodings of the International Phonetic Alphabet ** SAMPA ** X-SAMPA ** IPA chart for English * RFE Phonetic Alphabet, (Revista de Filología Española) * Stokoe notation to represent sign languages * Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) * Visible Speech * Teuthonista


Bibliography

* Albright, Robert W. (1958). ''The International Phonetic Alphabet: Its Background and Development''. International Journal of American Linguistics (Vol. 24, No. 1, Part 3); Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, publ. 7. Baltimore. (Doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 1953). * Canepari, Luciano. (2005). ''A Handbook of Phonetics: Phonetics.'' München: Lincom Europa, pp. 518. (hb). * Ellis, Alexander J. (1869–1889). ''On Early English Pronunciation'' (Parts 1 & 5). London: Philological Society by Asher & Co.; London: Trübner & Co. * International Phonetic Association. (1949). ''The Principles of the International Phonetic Association, Being a Description of the International Phonetic Alphabet and the Manner of Using It, Illustrated by Texts in 51 Languages''. London: University College, Department of Phonetics. * International Phonetic Association. (1999). ''Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hb); (pb). * Jespersen, Otto. (1889). ''The Articulations of Speech Sounds Represented by Means of Analphabetic Symbols''. Marburg: Elwert. * Kelly, John. (1981). The 1847 Alphabet: An Episode of Phonotypy. In R. E. Asher & E. J. A. Henderson (Eds.), ''Towards a History of Phonetics''. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. * Kemp, J. Alan. (1994). Phonetic Transcription: History. In R. E. Asher & J. M. Y. Simpson (Eds.), ''The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics'' (Vol. 6, pp. 3040–3051). Oxford: Pergamon. * MacMahon, Michael K. C. (1996). Phonetic Notation. In P. T. Daniels & W. Bright (Ed.), ''The World's Writing Systems'' (pp. 821–846). New York: Oxford University Press. . * Pike, Kenneth L. (1943). ''Phonetics: A Critical Analysis of Phonetic Theory and a Technique for the Practical Description of Sounds''. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. * Pullum, Geoffrey K.; & Ladusaw, William A. (1986). '' Phonetic Symbol Guide''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . * Sweet, Henry. (1880–1881). Sound Notation. ''Transactions of the Philological Society'', 177-235. * Sweet, Henry. (1971). ''The Indispensable Foundation: A Selection from the Writings of Henry Sweet''. Henderson, Eugénie J. A. (Ed.). Language and Language Learning 28. London: Oxford University Press.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Phonetic Transcription de:Lautschrift