Chapter 2 Phonology and Phonetic Transcription

BAB 2

Phonology and Phonetic Transcription

Phonetic transcription is no more than a useful tool that phoneticians use in the description of speech. It is,however, a very important tool. It mean Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds (or phones) which is used by phoneticians.

         Citation style is the style of speech you use to show someone how to pronounce a word.Transcriptions of citation style are particularly useful in language documentation and lexicography, and also serve as the basic phonetic observations described in phonology.

When phoneticians transcribe a citation speech utterance, we are usually concerned with how the sounds convey differences in meaning.In this case we describe only the significant articulations rather than the details of the sounds. For example, when saying the English word “try”, some people pronounce the consonant with the blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, others with the tip of the tongue. sound. 

However, phonetic variations that cannot be used to distinguish words, such as the differences between the consonants at the beginning and end of the word. We cannot rely on the spelling to tell us whether two sounds are members of different phonemes. For example, the words phone and foam begin with the same sounds, although they have different spellings. we can regard as the same sound, But in this case, the two sounds are not exactly the same. This example shows that there may be very subtle differences between members of a phoneme. The sounds at the beginning of phone and foam are slightly different, but it is not a difference that changes the meaning of a word in English. The variations between sounds that cause a difference in meaning are called phonemic transcriptions.

1. THE TRANSCRIPTION OF CONSONANTS

 A set of words in which each differs from all the others by only one sound is called a minimal set. There are obviously many other words that rhyme with pie, such as spy, try, spry, but these words begin with sequences of two or more of the sounds already in the minimal set.

The difference between spelling and phonetic usage occurs with the letter c, which is sometimes used to represent (k) sound, as in calm, and sometimes to represent an (s) sound, as in cellular. Two c’s may even represent a sequence of (k) and (s) sounds in the same word, as in accent, access.

2. THE TRANSCRIPTION OF VOWELS

In looking for contrasting vowels we might try to find a minimal set of words that differ only in the vowel sounds. Look for monosyllables that begin with (h) and end with (d) and supplement this minimal set with other lists of monosyllables that contrast only in their vowel sounds. For example one form of British and one form of American English. The major difference between the two is that speakers of American English pronounce (r) sounds after vowels, as well as before them, whereas in most forms of British English, (r) can occur only before a vowel. American English speakers distinguish between words such as heart and hot not by making a difference in vowel quality, but rather by pronouncing heart with an (r) and hot with the same vowel but without an (r) following it.

3. CONSONANT AND VOWEL CHARTS

Using the consonant and vowel symbols mainly as ways of representing the contrasts that occur among words in English. For example (p) is an abbreviation for voiceless bilabial stop and ( l ) is equivalent to voiced alveolar lateral approximant.

The symbols which is using for the contrasting vowels may also be regarded as shorthand descriptions for different vowel qualities. For example Thus, (i) is used for a high front vowel, (u) for a high back one, (I) for a mid high front vowel, (e) for a raised mid-front vowel, (Ꜫ) for a mid-low, and so on. There are problems in this respect in that we have been using these symbols somewhat loosely allowing them to have different values for different accents.

The consonant and vowel charts enable us to understand the remark made and the sounds of English involve about twenty five different gestures of the tongue and lips. The consonant chart has twenty three different symbols, but only eleven basic gestures of the tongue and lips are needed to make these different sounds. The sounds ( p,b,m ) are all made with the same lip gesture, and ( t,d,n ) and ( k, g, ŋ ) with the same tongue gestures.

The vowel chart has fourteen symbols, each of which may be considered to require a separate gesture. But, as we have seen, accents of English vary in the number of vowels that they distinguish, which is why we said that English requires about twenty-five different gestures of the tongue and lips.

4. PHONOLOGY

As we know that some of the phoneme symbols may represent different sounds when they occur in different contexts. For example, the symbol / t / may represent a wide variety of sounds. In tap / toep /, it represents a voiceless alveolar stop. But the / t / in eighth / EitT / may be made on the teeth, because of the influence of the following voiceless dental fricative / T /. This / t / is more accurately called a voiceless dental stop, and we will later use a special symbol for transcribing it.

Note :

• Small marks that can be added to a symbol to modify  value are known as diacritics.
• The phonology of a language is the set of rules or constraints that describe the relation between the underlying sounds, the abstract units called phonemes. They provide a useful way of increasing the phonetic precision of a transcription.
• The variants of the phonemes that occur in detailed phonetic transcriptions are known as allophones. They can be described as a result of applying the phonological rules to the underlying phonemes.
• The term broad transcription is often used to designate a transcription that uses the simplest possible set of symbols. the other way, a narrow transcriptions is one that shows more phonetic detail, either by using more specific symbols or by representing some allophonic differences. For example the broad transcription of please and trip would be / pliz / and / trIp /.
• A transcription that shows the allophones in this way called a completely systematic phonetic transcription.
• Impressionistic transcription is  writing down an unknown language or when transcribing the speech of a child or a patient not seen previously, one does not know what rules will apply. In these circumstances, the symbols indicate only the phonetic value of the sounds.