THEME NOTES The International Phonetic Alphabet Summary There is a special system of symbols called IPA for transcribing human speech. Many of the symbols look like the familiar letters of the Roman alphabet which we use. Some symbols like q and J may be unfamiliar. Here are some examples of IPA transcription/ spelling ➔ / xspelIN / these ➔ / Diz / judge ➔ / juj / such ➔ / sutS / ➔ C explanation / xeksplCxnEIS n / This theme will teach: • that representing the speech sounds of English is much more difficult than simply spelling the words to represent their meaning; • that linguists use a special system of symbols called IPA when they are representing the pronunciation of words; • that there is a difference between phonetics and phonology; • that phonetics is for pronunciation and does not use alphabetic letters; spelling, however, is for meaning which it represents using combinations of letters of the alphabet. Kit 6 G Teaching Notes: page 1 Preparing for this theme NOTES It is essential that, before beginning to teach this theme, you should have read Chapters F and G of The User’s self-Training Manual. The subject of real phonetics is difficult and demanding. Given, however, the great deal of misinformation circulating in educational circles both about the phonetic structure of English and the (tenuous) relationship between English spelling and phonetics, any teacher of spelling at any stage just has to have at least a basic grasp of real phonetics, and its essential distinction from phonology. The best way to give yourself a good grounding in phonetics, phonology and the crucial distinction between the two is to attend a Residential Real Spelling Hexameron. • Spelling and pronunciation Even with reasonably confident spellers you cannot emphasise often enough that the English spelling system neither does take great note of pronunciation, nor can it do so with any consistency. It is no accident of history that the system has evolved in this way. The very nature of English makes it practically impossible to represent in letters the pronunciation of words with any consistency that makes sense. ➪ We produce more phones in spoken words than are needed to fix what words mean. Spelling often does not need to represent pronunciation The English spelling system deals with elements of pronunciation only when all other priorities of meaning, relationship and structure have been satisfied. ➪ Only discrete segments of speech which are capable of affecting meaning are given any attention in the spelling system. Kit 6 G Teaching Notes: page 2 When spelling does take note of some elements of pronunciation it is not operating phonetics. Spelling does, however, take note of phonology. NOTES • Defining phonetics Phonetics is the academic study of the physical acoustics of any speech act, and is concerned exclusively with the physiological nature of their articulation. Phonetics is not concerned with what speech sounds might mean. The units of phonetics are ‘phones’, isolated and invariable units of human speech activity irrespective of any representation or distinction of meaning. ➪ Alphabetic letters are no part of phonetics. Phones can only be represented by IPA symbols, not letters. It is a strict phonetic convention that a single phone is represented by a single IPA symbol: one symbol — one phone. • Defining phonology Distinct from phonetics, phonology is the study of how elements of pronunciation relate to meaning and how those minimal contrastive sounds-for-meaning, called ‘phonemes’, are represented in writing by ‘graphemes’. ➪ Phonetics represents phones by IPA symbols only. Spelling represents phonemes by letter-based graphemes. These are the modalities of phonology in spelling. • Starting with a phoneme, we can build a repertoire of different graphemes which are available to represent it. — A single phoneme may contain more than one phone, and may have more than one pronunciation. — Not all the phones in a word’s pronunciation are necessarily part of a phoneme. • Starting with a grapheme, we can build a repertoire of the phonemes which it can represent. — The graphemes are a limited set of one, two- or three-letter strings. Kit 6 G Teaching Notes: page 3 • There are ‘circumstances’ governing the choice of grapheme which help us to choose between different spelling possibilities. NOTES The mature speller knows that English spelling takes account of phonology: it is not interested in phonetics. • The use of square, slash and angle brackets Linguistics uses established signs to indicate whether it is referring to phones, phonemes or the written spelling of words. 6G (i) OHP TRANSPARENCY for photocopying �������������������������������� phonetic information ������� � ��� � ��� � ��� � ��� � ��� � ������ graphemic information ��������� � � �� � � �� � � � � ����������� phonological information ������� � ���� � ���� � ��� � �������� To show that what is being referred to is a spelling, not necessarily concerned with any aspect of pronunciation, the letters are enclosed in angle brackets — < >. So < chain > is just the written word. It has three graphemes: 1 the consonant digraph < ch >; 2 the vowel digraph < ai >; 3 the single-letter consonant grapheme < n >. To represent the constituent phones of a word’s pronunciation with no reference to anything to do with meaning, then the symbols are enclosed in square brackets. So [tSeIn] represents just the pronunciation of the word. There are five IPA symbols, so the pronunciation of < chain > has five phones. Kit 6 G Teaching Notes: page 4 To represent the phonemes that construct the meaning of < age >, the symbols are enclosed in slash brackets — / tSeIn /. Beware, though; < age > has only NOTES three phonemes: 1 the two-phone consonant cluster phoneme / tS /; 2 the two-phone vowel glide ‘long < a >’ phoneme / eI /; 3 the single-phone consonant phoneme / n /. Ω Asking students to count ‘sounds’ is highly ambiguous: do you mean phones, or do you mean phonemes? The answer will frequently be different! • Base words can change pronunciation with affixes The word < no > usually rhymes with < low >, but in the compound word < nothing > its pronunciation is different, like the first two letters in < nut >. The base < know > rhymes with < slow >, but the rhyme is lost when it combines with the suffix <-ledge > to form < knowledge >. Here are more simple examples from British English of the way in which the same base can have different pronunciations in different spoken contexts. • The base < do > rhymes with < coo >, but with the suffixes <-es > or <-ne > (as in < does > and < done >) the results rhyme with < fuzz > and < bun >. • In the word < house > the final [ s ] becomes [ z ] when you add the plural suffix, giving the pronunciation [ haOzIz]. • The base < clean > changes its pronunciation when you add the suffixes <-ly > and <-ness > to form < cleanliness >. Ω If English spelling chased pronunciation around in all its variations rather than represented meaning we would have an inconsistent writing system. Spelling would become more complicated, not less. We would have the absurd situation of a single word needing to be spelled in different ways depending on the context in which it was being spoken, who was speaking and when it was being spoken. Kit 6 G Teaching Notes: page 5 Ω The greatest failing of a supposedly ‘phonetic’ spelling NOTES system for everyday English writing would be that it could have little consistency as far as meaning is concerned. Your students might like to revisit examples of the phonetic elasticity of English that they will have already met. Here are two of them: the suffix <-ed > (Kit K Theme H, Kit 4 Theme G); the grapheme < ea > (Kit 3 Theme D). The main theme Here’s one way you could introduce the theme: “The way we spell English words is not that much to do with what we think they sound like when we pronounce them. The scientific study of language called ‘linguistics’ has a way of representing just the elements of pronunciation. There is a special set of signs that is used in linguistics to represent just pronunciation. It is called ‘The IPA (the initials of the International Phonetic Association), and we are going to learn a little about it and how to understand it. Ω Transcribing speech is extremely difficult. Don’t expect to be able to do it easily! You are going to find out that real spelling is actually much easier than relying first on so-called sound!” Kit 6 G Teaching Notes: page 6 • IPA—a way of representing all the segments of speech NOTES Phoneticians are not interested in spelling, so letters are not appropriate for recording elements of speech. Phoneticians need a different symbol system. They need hundreds of distinct symbols to accommodate the wide variety of sounds made by the human voice. • Spelling is one thing—pronunciation is another Remind your students of the good news about English spelling. ¥ The fact that English spelling is mainly concerned with the meaning and sense of words makes spelling much easier than trying to represent all the voice ‘sounds’ that we make when speaking. Remind your students of some of the main points of the spelling system. • Words or parts of words that mean the same are spelled the same, even if they are pronounced differently. Put another way, if the meaning stays the same, the spelling stays the same, even if the pronunciation (as often happens in English) changes. examples: please ➔ pleasant act ➔ action • Spelling indicates speech sounds that are present in a word’s family, even if that speech sound isn’t present in all the individual words of that family. examples: sign ➔ signal soften ➔ softer • Because of the homophone principle the spelling system needs different ways of representing the same pronunciation. example: mist & missed side & sighed ruff & rough If we only represented pronunciation: • there would be no way of distinguishing meaning; • different speakers would represent words in writing in different ways, depending on their accent; • the same word would have different spellings depending on the spoken context in which it occurred.