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Linguistics

Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology

International Phonetic Alphabet

Principal Investigator Prof. Pramod Pandey Centre for Linguistics, SLL&CS, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi-110067

Paper Coordinator Prof. Pramod Pandey

Module ID & Name Lings_P2_M3; International Phonetic Alphabet

Content Writer Pramod Pandey

Email id pkspandey@yahoo.com

Phone 011-26741258, -9810979446

Phonetic Transcription Contents: 3.1 Introduction

3.2 The IPA chart 3.3 Features of the IPA Chart 3.3.1 General features Consonants 3.3.2 Consonants 3.3.3 Vowels 3.3.4 Suprasegmentals 3.4 Two main types of phonetic transcription 3.5 Summary

Objectives:

The main objective of this module is to introduce students to the International Phonetic Alphabet chart and its characteristic features

3.1 Introduction

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The present module is an introduction to phonetic transcription. We take a detailed look at the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) chart in terms of its main features, features of consonants, vowels and suprasegmentals. In the end, we discuss the two main types of phonetic transcription. 3.2 The IPA Chart In Module1 of the present course, we saw how conventional orthography fails to meet the

need of one-to-one correspondence between a written symbol and a sound. This need has

been fulfilled by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

The abbreviation IPA stands for both the International Phonetic Alphabet and the

International Phonetic Association. The alphabet is a product of the efforts of the

association. The International Phonetic Association was formed with the intention of

developing a script for representing speech sounds that did not depend on the

orthographic representation, since the same orthographic form may be pronounced

differently in languages that share the orthographic form, as for example, words such as

experiment and Paris in English and French. Besides, there are languages that lack a script

for writing. The phonetic transcription could then be a useful and the only way of

representing the languages. It is because of the IPA that it has been possible to carry out

studies on world languages on a massive scale. A detailed introduction to the IPA can be

had in the IPA Handbook, which can be freely downloaded at the following URL:

https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-handbook-downloads

For a brief story of how the IPA has come to be evolved, visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

A point that needs to be noted is that the IPA chart is continually revised by the Association

at its meetings held at regular intervals. Thus, each new version has features that are added

to the chart and that make it different from the earlier versions. The changes are for the

most part minor. The version we are looking at below is the 2005 version.

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The IPA chart is produced below in Table 3-1.

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Table 3-1: The IPA chart (2005) 3.2 Features of the IPA Chart The IPA chart (2005) has some important features that must be kept in mind in reading it.

These features are discussed below under four heads:

• General features

• Consonants

• Vowels

• Suprasegmentals

3.2.1General Features of the IPA Chart The goal of the IPA is to represent those features of speech that are linguistically relevant

by using letters (e.g. p t k a e, etc.) and diacritic marks. The diacritic marks may be placed

abovealetter,called‘superscript’,(e.g.a and á), below a letter, called ‘subscript’, (e.g.t,

‘voiceless dental plosive’,anda, ‘voiceless low central vowel’) or in the middle of a letter,

called ‘inscript’ (e.g. ɨ, ‘unrounded high central vowel’ and ɫ (‘voiced velarized alveolar

lateral consonant’). An important task for a student aiming to be proficient in the use of the

IPA is to know the significance of the letters and diacritic symbols. For this, it is necessary

both to produce the sounds of the symbols and as well as the symbols for the sounds heard.

Notice that the symbols are used precisely and although the differences between them may

be minor they are crucial. For example, both ‘a’ and ‘ɑ’ are variants of the letter ‘a’, one is

used in printed texts with conventional spelling, while the other is close to the one used

more commonly in handwritten texts. Yet the two symbols signify different sounds: [a] is

an ‘unrounded low central vowel’, while [ɑ] is an ‘unrounded low back vowel’. As you go

through the list of the symbols in the IPA chart for vowels, you will discover some other

letter symbols related to the letter ‘a’, e.g. [ɒ] and [ɐ]. This practice has been guided mainly

by the goal to confine the symbols to the Roman symbols. Occasionally Greek symbols are

also used (e.g. [β], a ‘voiced bilabial fricative’ and [θ], a ‘voiceless dental fricative’), and for

features of speech sounds such as strong articulation/ weak articulation, silent articulation

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or ‘mouthing’, etc. observed in areas such as language acquisition and speech pathology,

there is Extended IPA.

In addition to the letters and the diacritic marks, there are marks for the prosodic features

Length, Stress, Tone and Intonation.

A note of caution for handwritten symbols: unless you are careful, you might not notice the

difference in the shape and size of the symbols, as we saw for the vowel symbols ‘a’ and ‘ɑ’. The

letter ‘g’ is not an IPA symbol; instead there is ‘ɡ’. Similarly, sometimes students have the

tendency to write letters such as [l] as , ‘f’ as , etc. Some of the letters have similar shapes but

different sizes, e.g. [ɤ], a vowel and [ɣ], a consonant. Care should be taken to keep them distinct.

It is interesting to take a look at the movements that the articulators make in the

production of sounds at a stretch, such as a sentence. Take a look at the real-time MRI of

the production of a sentence in English

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTOhDqhCKQs

Now, let us turn to look at the charts from the point of view of the convention of presenting

them.

3.3 Consonants

There are three charts for consonants- for Pulmonic, Non-pulmonic and Co-articulated

consonants. The difference between pulmonic and non-pulmonic consonants, as the terms

suggest, lies in the source of the air-stream in producing them. Pulmonic sounds are

produced with the air coming out (‘egressive’) from the lungs. Non-pulmonic sounds are

produced with the air manipulated in the oral tract, either in the larynx or in the area of the

velum. The rows in the pulmonic consonant charts are for Manners of articulation from the

closest in contact (Plosives) to an opener position (Approximants). Affricates are not

included here, but listed separately as instances of co-articulation. The columns in the

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pulmonic chart are for the Places of Articulation, determined by the contact between the

articulators between the lips and the vocal cords. Three of the Places are not separated by

solid lines, on the assumption that in a majority of languages consonants in only one of the

places occur- Dental, Alveolar and Palato-alveolar. This is not true for all languages. For

example,Malayalamhasbothdentalandalveolarplosives[t]and[t]. In slots in which

there are pairs of consonants, the ones on the left are voiceless and the ones on the right

are voiced consonants. Unfilled white areas are for possible but rare consonants. Shaded

areas are for impossible consonants.

Co-articulated consonants are those consonants in the production of which there are two

places of articulation, e.g. [kp], a labio-velar consonant in Igbo, an African language, or two

manners of articulation, e.g. [ts], a dental affricate in Marathi, which is produced first as a

plosive and then quickly as a fricative.

3.4 Vowels

There is one vowel chart. The chart deals with mainly monophthong vowels as in bit, cat,

ball, etc.. These are produced by keeping the tongue and the jaw constant. Diphthongs or

vowels of changing quality, as in try, how, main, etc. are assumed to be combinations of the

two monophthongal positions.

The chart has two main axes- vertical and horizontal. The vertical axis is mapped by vowel

height, while the horizontal axis is mapped by vowel backness. Four degrees of vowel

height are represented in the abstract- Close, Close-mid, Open-mid and Open. As the terms

suggest, in the production of the Close vowels, the tongue is closest to the roof of the mouth

in the vocal tract, as for [i] in bin. Try producing the vowel alone, and go as close to the roof

of the mouth as possible. You will find that beyond a point, you don’t get the vowel [i], but a

buzzing sound [z], which is consonant. The lowest vowel, called Open vowel, is produced by

lowering the jaw as far as possible, for [a].

The lowering and raising of the tongue/ jaw gives you the vowels that differ in height. It is

accompanied by a difference in backness. For each degree of height, speakers can use either

the Front or the Centre or the Back of the tongue, represented on the horizontal dimension.

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This way you get pairs such as [i]/ [u], [e]/ [o] etc. for Front and Back vowels or triples

such as [i]/ [ɨ]/ [u] for Front, Central and Back vowels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cardinal_vowel_tongue_position-front.svg Besides, Height and Backness, vowels also differ in some languages on the basis of the

roundness of lips, as for example, in French and German. Most of you will be familiar with

the name Goethe, a great German poet of the 18th Century. The middle vowel in his name is

an [e] produced with rounded lips, symbolized as [œ]. In order to present the main vowels

found along the roundedness parameter, the convention followed is: the vowel on the left

of a bullet representing a vowel position is Unrounded, and the vowel on the right is

Rounded.

Exercise 1

Take a look at the IPA vowel chart and write three term labels for the symbols [e], [o]

and [ɯ].

Go to the end of the module for the answer to the question. The vowels on the vowel chart are known as Cardinal Vowels, that is, the main vowels

produced by the human vocal organ. These are ideal vowels that the human vocal organ

produces. The may or may not occur in a specific language. When the idealized vowels are

found not to occur in a language, it is a vowel that appears close to one of the Cardinal

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vowels. It requires some practice to produce the Cardinal vowels. You can practice them

too. Click on the following URL to go to the sounds represented in the IPA chart:

http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/contents.html.

Go to the relevant part of the IPA chart and click on the symbol to hear the sound. Try to

reproduce the sounds as many times as possible. (Take care to find a safe place for

practicing the sounds in order to avoid being seen as behaving abnormally.)

The Cardinal vowels are abstract vowels in relation to which actual vowels in languages

can be described. Thus, in Hindi, the vowel [e:] is pronounced lower [ɛ:] in the western

varieties such as Meerut and Delhi. None of these are exactly like the Cardinal vowels of the

IPA. They are described as being close to them by using terms such as ‘just below’, ‘just

above’ or ‘ between’ for differences in vowel height. For further details, see Module# 8. For

all the variations, as you will remember, there are various diacritics. These too will be dealt

with in greater detail in Module# 8.

Exercise 2

Take a close look at the consonant and vowel charts. Make a list of six pairs of

phonetic symbols into two groups. One of the groups contains three pairs of letters

that represent variant sizes of a letter, e.g. [x] and [X]; the other group contains

three pairs of letters that represent variant shapes of a letter, e.g. [ɒ] and [ɑ]

You can turn to the answer given at the end of the module as examples.

3.5 Suprasegmentals

Finally, there are symbols for representing the prosodic features at the word and the

sentence levels. At the word level, the relevant features are syllable break or division (.),

length (four degrees- short, extra-short, long, and half-long), word-stress (two degrees-

primary and secondary) and tone (two types- level tone, with a consistent pitch level and

contour tone, with changing pitch levels). The level tone has in turn five degrees, and the

contour tone has multiple degrees and contours. In addition tonal phenomena of Upstep,

Downstep, Peaking and Dipping are symbolized.

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At the sentence level, there is a brief classification of intonational breaks and processes.

Detailed discussions of the prosodic features along with their use in transcription will be

taken up in later modules (Modules 23-25).

3.6 Two main types of phonetic transcription

Phonetic transcription is of two main types- ‘Narrow Transcription’ and ‘Broad

Transcription’. Broad transcription is aimed at representing the pronunciations of words in

terms of the main speech sounds that play a role in distinguishing words. For example, in

Indian English we find that speakers tend to pronounce the first consonant in the word cap

either as voiceless unaspirated [k] or as voiceless aspirated [kʰ], but never as voiced [ɡ].

(Note that we use the square brackets [ ] to enclose sounds in the narrow transcription.)

Every speaker of English knows that no matter which of the two variant sounds [k] or [kʰ]

is used, the word cap> has the same meaning. One of the sounds, in this case [k] is treated

as the ‘main sound’ and the other, [kʰ], as its variant. In the pronouncing dictionary, it is the

main sounds of the word cap that are chosen to represent all its variants. Thus the word

cap is represented in broad phonetic transcription as /kæp/. (Notice that broad phonetic

transcription containing the main contrastive sounds of the language is enclosed in slanted

lines, / /). A pronouncing dictionary represents the pronunciations of words in their broad

transcriptions. Broad transcription is thus idealized transcription. A well-known

pronouncing dictionary of English that uses IPA symbols is the English Pronouncing

Dictionary. Once you are familiar with the IPA, you will be able to use this dictionary to find

out the pronunciations of most English words as pronounced in Standard British English.

Narrow transcription aims at representing the pronunciations of words and sentences as

closely as possible to the way in which they are articulated. This way of transcription is

especially suited to focus on the details of idiolectal or dialectal peculiarities. Thus narrow

transcriptions of the word <cap> by different speakers in India may give us the following

pronunciations: [kæp], [kʰæp, [kæ:p], [kɛ:p], etc. Note that [ɛ] stands for the vowel that is

between [e] and [æ] and [:] stands for length. All these variant pronunciations do not find

entry in a pronouncing dictionary of English. Besides, the extent of variation is unlimited. A

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pronouncing dictionary, whose main objective is to represent the idealized pronunciations

of a given variety, cannot include all of them.

Can narrow transcription faithfully represent a specific pronunciation of a word or a

phrase or a sentence in its entirety? Well, in a strict sense, no. Any transcription is in some

way an idealized representation of a spoken utterance. No two utterances are exactly alike

in all their features- vowel quality, consonantal articulation, duration, pitch, loudness, etc.

Variations in all these features are not always amenable to observation by the senses. What

a narrow transcription aims to achieve is linguistically significant and noticeable variations

in spoken utterances. For an introduction to narrow transcription, and practice in narrow

transcription, take a look at Kelly & Local (1989).

3.5 Summary

In this module, we have looked in detail at the IPA chart. You should have been able to

familiarize yourselves with a brief history and objectives of the IPA. The IPA chart was

described in four parts- general features, consonants, vowels and suprasegmental sounds. In the

end, we were introduced to a distinction between narrow transcription and broad transcription.

By the end of this course, you will be familiar with the use of the IPA symbols for both broad

and narrow transcription.