Phonetic notations

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 467.

Anyone who wants to represent speech sounds in writing has to use the system of phonetic notations, which is generally termed as “transcription”. There are two general types of transcription - broad and narrow.

The first one, broad or phonemic transcription, provides special symbols for all the phonemes of a language. There are various systems of phonetic transcription in use for English, among which the best-known one is that of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The difference among present-day sets of broad transcription of British English is mainly due to the varying significance which is attached to vowel quality and quantity. The transcription introduced by D. Jones aims at reducing the number of symbols to a minimum, so this type does not reflect the difference in vowel quality, but states only the difference in vowel quantity and gives the same symbols for the following pairs of vowels: [i: - i], [u: - u], [ɔ: - ɔ], [ə: - ə]. This type of notation ignores the qualitative difference between these vowels, though most phoneticians nowadays agree that the vowel length is not a distinctive feature of the vowel. The other type of broad transcription is most frequently used in English publishing. It provides special symbols for all the English vowel phonemes: [i: - ɪ], [u: - ʊ], [ɔ: - ɒ], [ɜ: - ə]. Besides this type of notation is a good visual aid and is especially useful in teaching the pronunciation of English.

Narrow (or phonetic) transcription is mainly applied in research work. It provides special symbols for all the allophones of the same phoneme, so it is much more accurate in phonetic detail and contains much more information than a phonemic transcription. For example: [ł] indicates the hard variant of [l]; [k^h] shows that [k] is aspirated; [d^r] means post-alveolar [d], etc.