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2. The need for phonetic transcription

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2. The need for phonetic transcription Reasons for the divergence In Old English, the relation between sound and symbol was much more regular. – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: 2. The need for phonetic transcription


1
2. The need for phonetic transcription
2
Reasons for the divergence
  • In Old English, the relation between sound and
    symbol was much more regular.
  • Some of the sounds, especially the vowels, have
    undergone changes in the history of English.

3
  • For example, in 1400 the words put, bush, pull,
    cup, luck and mud all had the vowel ?, a high
    front vowel, for the Londoners. By about 1550,
    however, the vowel in cup, luck and mud had
    lowered to ?, a mid-high back vowel, whereas
    ? was retained in put, bush and pull. Later,
    the lowered vowel in cup, luck and mud moved
    through a number of stages to the front to become
    a, a low front vowel, in contemporary speech.

4
A vowel split in London
5
  • In some cases such change involves vowel merger,
    where two or three vowels have gradually become a
    single vowel in contemporary speech.

6
Vowel mergers in East Anglian English
7
  • Additionally, many English words have been
    borrowed from other languages throughout history
    and the irregularity of its spelling is made
    worse because of such borrowings.
  • This divergence becomes greater when we consider
    the many accents of English used by people from
    different regions.

8
  • Because of these reasons, it is necessary to
    devise sets of symbols that can be used for
    transcribing sounds in language.
  • Several such systems are in use but the
    International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is the most
    widely accepted and used set of symbols for
    phonetic transcription.

9
3. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
  • In 1886, the International Phonetic Association
    (also shortened as IPA) was inaugurated by a
    small group of language teachers in France who
    had found the practice of phonetics useful in
    their teaching and wished to popularize their
    methods. It was first known as the Phonetic
    Teachers Association and was changed to its
    present title in 1897.

10
One of the first activities of the Association
was to produce a journal in which the contents
were printed entirely in phonetic transcription.
  • The idea of establishing a phonetic alphabet was
    first proposed by the Danish grammarian and
    phonetician Otto Jespersen (1860-1943) in 1886,
    and the first version of the IPA was published in
    August 1888.

11
  • Its main principles were that
  • there should be a separate letter for each
    distinctive sound, and that
  • the same symbol should be used for that sound in
    any language in which it appears.
  • The alphabet was to consist of as many Roman
    alphabet letters as possible, using new letters
    and diacritics only when absolutely necessary.
  • These principles continue to be followed today.

12
  • The IPA has been revised and corrected several
    times and is now widely used in dictionaries and
    textbooks throughout the world. The present
    system of the IPA derives mainly from one
    developed in the 1920s by the British
    phonetician, Daniel Jones (1881-1967), and his
    colleagues at the University of London. Some of
    its special letters have even been accepted as
    part of the new orthographies devised for
    previously unwritten languages.

13
  • The Handbook of the International Phonetic
    Association (The IPA Handbook), published by
    Cambridge University Press in 1999, is an
    up-to-date comprehensive guide to the use of the
    IPA. Produced collaboratively by leading
    phoneticians who have been on the Executive of
    the Association, it incorporates materials
    provided by numerous members of the Association
    worldwide.
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