| From: Karen Mercedes <dalila@R...> Karen Mercedes <dalila@R...> Date: Thu Aug 30, 2001 3:26 pm Subject: Phonetic transcription (was Re: GORGEOUS CID!!!!) (fwd)
| Thought this was an interesting enough post to share with Vocalist.
Karen ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 10:26:27 GMT From: "Mark D. Lew" <markdlew@e...> From: "Mark D. Lew" <markdlew@e...> Newsgroups: rec.music.opera Subject: Phonetic transcription (was Re: GORGEOUS CID!!!!)
In article <20010828234748.01577.00001729@m...>, In article <20010828234748.01577.00001729@m...>, (Opaffic) wrote:
> Helen, I believe you have understood Karen correctly. The IPA symbols (intl > phonetic alphabet) are often delineated by brackets, as I am sure you and many > others are aware. [i] = long ee sound for example, [u] = oo, [y] = the french > vowel being discussed. A nifty universal shorthand of pronuciation.
The brackets have a specific meaning in phonetic transcription. They indicate that the included sound is a phone, as opposed to a phoneme (which would be enclosed in slashes).
A phoneme is the smallest unit of spoken sound which is perceived as distinctive within a given language. A phone is a unit of speech sound which can be distinguished, regardless of whether the distinction is meaningful in a particular language.
IPA typically deals in phones. The pronunciation guides in a typical dictionary will deal in phonemes. Each language has its own collection of phonemes (though there is plenty of overlap), while the collection of phones is universal (though phoneticists don't entirely agree about some of the details).
A single phoneme may be represented by more than one phone depending on context. For example, in showing the pronunciation for "knife" and "knives", your dictionary will use the same vowel symbol for both -- the long /i/, with a macron (horizontal bar) over the "i" -- in spite of the fact that it is a different sound in the two different words. In English, the long /i/ phoneme is pronounced like an "ah-ee" diphthong [ai] before an unvoiced consonant, but pronounced as an "uh-ee" diphthong [^i] before voiced consonant.
Similarly, the vowels in "loon" and "loot" would each be phonemically represented by the same symbol, /u/, but phonetically one is long [lu:n] and one is short [lut]. In English, a vowel is always lengthened in a one-syllable word which ends in a voice consonant, but it short if the word ends in an unvoiced consonant. [*]
Many consonants phonemes also have multiple allophones. (Allophones are different phones represented by a single phoneme.) For example, /p/ is sometimes aspirated and sometimes not, depending on the surrounding sounds.
Phonemes also transcend some differences in regional pronunciation. For example, in American speech the long /a/ phoneme corresponds with [Ei] an "eh-ee" diphthong, but in Australian speech it corresponds to [^i] an "uh-ee" diphthong. Same phoneme, different phone.
mdl
[*] This fact is more easily seen when pronouncing nonsense words. For example, compare the lengths of the words when you say "the zog is blat" versus "the zock is blad."
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