PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY
Segmental Aspects
TRANSCRIPTION
Transcription (also called notation or script) could be defined as the procedure using a set of written symbols called the phonetic alphabet to represent speech sounds. They “create a one-to-one correspondence between the spoken form of language and the written one” (Pavlík, 2000, p. 31). Transcription is very useful for English learners, mainly because of the fact there is NOT a one-to-one correspondence between a letter and a phoneme. Of course, each language is manifested by sounds in speech, but in English, the relationship of spelling to pronunciation is neither phonetic, nor phonological, but conventional, i.e. a highly non-predictable coexistence of several spelling conventions (Böhmerová, 2001). Simply explained, the written and the spoken form of words do not correspond. A typical example which can be found in many English textbooks is the pronunciation of the English letter-combination oo. Following the occurrence of this vowel cluster in English words, its different pronunciation can be really confusing for learners. Although the written form is identical, the spoken equivalents of the written form vary, e.g. blood /blɅd/, book /bʊk/, door /dͻ:/, cool /ku:l/, etc. Concerning Slovak, “the spelling is phonological, i.e. there is a relatively regular and predictable relationship…between letters and sounds”, says Böhmerová in her publication Slovak for you in which she presents many contrastive aspects of English and Slovak (Böhmerová, 2001, p. 8). The author further explains that “in English, the relationship of spelling to pronunciation is historical, and hence synchronically rather unpredictable, the same letters being read differently in different words, e.g. some and home, pronounced /sɅm/, /həʋm/” (ibid.).
The symbols used in this publication are the ones of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Slant brackets / / are used to represent the way of pronunciation within phonemic transcription, while square ones [ ] are found in a very detailed allophonic transcription which picks the exact peculiarities of each individual sound.
Two fundamental types of transcription are recognised – phonemic and allophonic. Phonemic transcription is manifested as either simple or comparative, while allophonic transcription is presented as either narrow or broad.
Simple phonemic transcription does not reflect the differences in vowel quality in short vowels and their long counterparts. The only difference between short and long counterpart vowels is using a double-dot after the vowel symbol which represents a length mark, e.g. /u/ versus /u:/. This is “a simplified version of the transcription of Daniel Jones” (Pavlík, 2000, p. 34).
Comparative phonemic transcription takes into consideration both the differences in vowel quantity and vowel quality (to be discussed later, in Chapter 6), so for short and long vowel-pairs, different letters of the phonetic alphabet are used. Phonemic transcription appears in most dictionaries and represents a very useful study tool as it provides a lot of information about the pronunciation of the word (Phonemic & Phonetic Transcriptions Compared (pronunciationstudio.com).
The following IPA symbols are used for vowels and consonants within comparative phonemic transcription:
1) British English vowel phonemes:
MONOPHTHONGS: short pure vowels: Ʌ e ɪ ɒ ʊ ə æ, long pure vowels: ɑ: i: ͻ: u: ɜ: DIPHTHONGS (gliding vowels): eɪ aɪ ͻɪ əʊ aʊ ɪə eə ʊə
TRIPHTHONGS (gliding vowels): eɪə aɪə ͻɪə əʊə aʊə
In the following list, note the peculiarities in using the appropriate transcription symbols for some of the English vowels, as the specific features in their quality are recognised by using different symbols:
Ʌ – this symbol is used for the short vowel placed in any word-position, as in son /sɅn/
ɑ: – used for a long vowel in any word-position, as in ask /ɑ:sk/
a – used in diphthongs and triphthongs, as in drive /draɪv/ or higher /haɪə/
ɪ – short vowel pronounced initially and medially in English words, this symbol is also used in diphthongs and triphthongs, as in inn /ɪn/, fit /fɪt/, day /deɪ/, or layer /leɪə/
i – used for the short vowel pronounced finally, as in merry /meri/
i: – long vowel in any word-position, as in eat /i:t/, peace /pi:s/
ɒ – short vowel pronounced in any position, as in on /ɒn/, pot /pɒt/
ͻ – symbol used in diphthongs and triphthongs, as in boy /bͻɪ/ or royal /rͻɪəl/
ͻ: – long vowel in any word-position, as in daughter /dͻ:tə/
ʊ – this symbol represents the short vowel pronounced in any word-position, it is also used in diphthongs and triphthongs, as in good /gɒd/, brown /braʋn/, or hour /aʊə/
u: – long vowel, pronounced in any word-position in a stressed syllable, as in cool /ku:l/
British English consonant phonemes: p t k b d g f v θ δ s z ʃ ʒ h ʧ ʤ l m n η r j w
2) American English vowel phonemes:
MONOPHTHONGS: lax vowels: Ʌ ɛ ɪ ʊ ə æ, tense vowels: ɑ i ͻ u ɜ
DIPHTHONGS (gliding vowels): eɪ aɪ ͻɪ oʊ aʊ jʊ
American English consonant phonemes: p t k b d g f v θ δ s z ʃ ʒ h ʧ ʤ l m n η ɹ j w
3) Slovak vowel phonemes:
MONOPHTHONGS: short vowels: a e i o u æ, long vowels: a: e: i: o: u:
DIPHTHONGS (gliding vowels): ĭa ĭe ĭu ŭo
Slovak consonant phonemes: p t ť k b d ď g f v s z ʃ ʒ c dz ʧ ʤ h l ľ m n ň r j ĺ ŕ ch = IPA symbol /x/
In this textbook, the symbols of phonetic alphabet presented in the publication Príručný slovník slovenskej výslovnosti are used for Slovak phonemes. This dictionary was issued for the first time in 1982 by the distinguished Slovak phonetician Ábel Kráľ. The symbols are also taken from IPA to make it obvious which Slovak speech sounds are approximately similarly pronounced (are similar in quality) as the English ones. It is really very difficult to meet the demands of using the symbols of IPA for transcribing Slovak words because not all of them are suitable and comparable with the way how the Slovak speech sounds are pronounced.
Allophonic transcription is rather accurate and uses many specific symbols with diacritics to grasp the details in pronunciation. It reflects the specific allophones of phonemes and marks issues like nasality, syllabicity of consonants, voicing, rhoticity or aspiration of the sounds (as could be seen in Figure 2):
The key difference between phonemic and allophonic transcription lies in the way how they reflect the pronounced sounds. While phonemic transcription manifests phonemes as functional speech units, allophonic transcription reflects allophones as their variants. Phonemic transcription is found in dictionaries, allophonic transcription is used predominantly by experts dealing with pronunciation and reflects the individual peculiarities of every speaker.
Jones explicitly outlines the difference between phonemic and allophonic transcription when he states that “it is usual to put slant brackets before and after symbols representing phonemes. When non-phonemic symbols are used, the convention is to use square brackets (e.g. the glottal stop will be represented as [ʔ]“ (Jones, 2003, p. viii). While allophonic transcription uses diacritics to mark special features of the oral performance (e.g. nasality, aspiration), phonemic transcription is more general and presents the institutionalised norm in pronunciation.
When transcribing spoken utterances, it is essential to follow the basic settings: in any type of transcription, only lower-case letters are used, a pause in speech is marked by one vertical bar, i.e. |, thus no commas, dashes or colons occur in a notated text to express pauses. At the end of a sentence, a double vertical bar, i.e. ‖, is used. This represents full stops, question marks or exclamation marks used in written texts. The dot-symbol marks syllable boundaries. The symbol /:/ is used in transcription for marking length in pronunciation.
The word stress is marked only in the case that not the first, but some other syllable is stressed. English syllables are pronounced as stressed or unstressed. If they are pronounced as stressed, the word stress is manifested in two degrees of intensity (according to the degree of prominence placed on a syllable): as either primary (i.e. main) or secondary (i.e. subsidiary). Primary stress uses the symbol of an apostrophe and it occurs before a stressed syllable. Secondary stress makes use of the symbol reminding of a comma. It is placed before a syllable pronounced with a lower intensity and occurs only in polysyllabic words, e.g. /prəˌnʌnsɪ’eɪʃən/.
The following links could be helpful for transcribing single words or spoken utterances:
https://ipa.typeit.org/
https://ipa.typeit.org/full/
For the transcription of connected speech also other symbols are needed (for example, the symbols marking linking or intonation patterns).
Numerous scholars – phoneticians and phonologists – have influenced pronunciation awareness throughout history. They have devised various sets of symbols representing especially vowel phonemes. It is inevitable to mention at least some of the names of the distinguished experts, as well as the titles of the specialised publications dealing with the sound level: Alexander Melville Bell – 1867 – Visible Speech – according to various codes he recognized certain positions of articulators, Henry Sweet – made use of Latin and Greek alphabet – system called Romic (broad and narrow Romic), Alan Cruttenden, J. D. O´Connor, Gordon Arnold, John Wells, but especially the British phonetician Daniel Jones with his An English Pronouncing Dictionary, first published in 1917, who contributed to building up the Department of Phonetics at University College in London in 1907. In 1917, he also issued An Outline of English Phonetics and is considered the founder of experimental phonetics. His student A. C. Gimson, Professor of Phonetics, University College, London is the author of An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English, the first edition of which was published in 1962. Nikolay S. Trubetzkoy contributed to introducing phonology as a separate discipline, and set up the phoneme theory focusing on distinctive features of phonemes which function as the smallest units of phonology. From among contemporary scholars, it is above all David Crystal with an unusually large number of publications on linguistics, e.g. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995), re-edited many times since then, or Peter Roach (https://pronunciationstudio.com/peter-roach/) with English Phonetics and Phonology (first published in 1983) also deal with the pronunciation matters of British English.
As for American English, mention should be made at least of Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman with their An Introduction to Language, first published in 1974, and A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English (1953) prepared by John S. Kenyon and Thomas A. Knott.
There are also several scholars in Slovakia who deal with English phonetics and phonology. They include Radoslav Pavlík with his Phonetics and Phonology of English (first published in 2000, re-edited since then), Miroslav Bázlik and Jolana Miškovičová with their publication Pravidlá výslovnosti britskej a americkej angličtiny (i.e. Rules of the Pronunciation of British and American English), written in Slovak, but presenting a contrastive view on selected aspects of the British and American varieties of English (1st edition from 2012), and Beata Borošová with Segmental and Suprasegmental Phonetics and Phonology. British English, published in 2017. From among prominent Slovak linguists dealing with Slovak phonetics and phonology, these are above all Ábel Kráľ and Ján Sabol.
Presented the names of the Czech linguists dealing with a contrastive view of selected features of Czech and English phonetics and phonology, we have to mention Bohumil Trnka with Rozbor nynější spisovné angličtiny (2014), Libuše Dušková with Mluvnice současné angličtiny na pozadí češtiny (2012) or Pavel Kolář with Slovak Speakers of English: Typicality in Pronunciation (2010).