| UNIT 412-3: PHONETICS |
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| 412.3.7: PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION |
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| Phonetic transcription is a method of writing down or transcribing utterances in a manner that indicates the articulatory properties of each segment or phone in the utterance. For example the Hindi word for "day" may be transcribed as [din]. There are several things to be noted about this transcription: |
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It is conventional for phonetic transcriptions to be enclosed in square brackets "[]". (you will have noticed by now that we have used [] for speech sounds [s], [f], [l] or [r] earlier.) This distinguishes them from phonemic transcriptions (about which you will read in the chapter on phonology). |
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There is a one-to-one mapping between the phones in the utterance being transcribed and the letters or symbols in the transcription. More often than not, these are either letters from the Roman or Greek alphabets or slight modifications thereof. |
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The phones in an utterance are transcribed in the order in which they occur in the utterance. |
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| Now consider the above transcription. The utterance transcribed is made up of three phonetic segments or phones. The first segment is a voiced unaspirated dental stop. The second segment is a high front unrounded vowel; and the third and final segment is a dental nasal. In our transcription these three segments are represented by the symbols d, i, and n. |
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| There are several systems of transcription. The notable among them are the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) proposed and standardized in 1949, and periodically updated by the International Phonetic Association, and the system proposed by Bloch and Trager (1942). The IPA probably has the greater following. The symbols of the IPA are presented here in tabular form. |
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| THE INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET (revised to 1993) |
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