Phonetic transcription

The practice of using written letters to represent the sounds of speech is called phonetic transcription. Transcriptions represent an analysis of the sounds we can hear, so transcriptions often have a linguistic status. (‘Often’ and not ‘always’ because some transcriptions are more impressionistic and try to capture what we hear rather than make claims about the significance of what we hear for making meaning.) It is useful for phoneticians to write down what we can hear, and we need to do this in a way that is systematic, easy to use, easily understood by others, and portable – a notepad and a pencil predate modern recording equipment by many years, and remain the cheapest tools of the phonetician’s trade.

How we transcribe is not a simple matter. Using just the letters of the Roman alphabet is problematic for a number of reasons.

First, the phonetic values of letters are variable. For instance, the letteris regularly used in most European languages with the value of a voiced velar plosive, [g]. In Dutchis pronounced like thein Scottish ‘loch’; in French and Portuguese before anorit has the same value asin ‘invasion’,; in Swedish in the same context is pronounced like Englishin ‘yes’; in English (sporadically) and Italian (regularly), as in ‘gem’.

Within English, letters can have very different values, as inin ‘get’ and ‘gem’, or in ‘sofa’, ‘hat’ and ‘hate’. These differences are due to different spelling conventions being used at different times in the history of the language, or spelling conventions reflecting the etymology of words, and through the conservative approach to spelling reform adopted in the English-speaking world.

Secondly, the Roman alphabet has no symbol for some sounds of English, so that we use digraphs (combinations of two letters) likefor the different sounds of ‘thick’ ([θ]) and ‘this’ ([ð]) orfor the [ʃ] sound in ‘ship’; but ‘facial’, ‘admission’, ‘station’ and ‘louche’ also contain this sound, where it is represented differently. So the alphabetic principle in English writing is weak.

A number of writing systems built on phonetic principles have been invented over the centuries, but the one that is most widely used is the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association.