Description of the International Phonetic Alphabet
Linguistics is the study of language, and in 1886 French linguist Paul Passy and his peers created what would be known as the International Phonetic Association. As members of the organization, they developed and formulated the description of the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) to further the science and create practical applications. The association and the alphabet aim to provide a notational standard for the phonetic expression of languages worldwide.
What is Phonetics?
The Greek word phone means’ voice’ or ‘sound,’ and phonetics is the science of the sounds of human speech. Phonetics is the classification and study of how humans perceive and produce speech. Phoneticians are linguists who study, analyze, classify and transcribe speech sounds.
The nature of sounds in speech is called phones, and phonemes are the units of sound. Phones are definitive and not distinct to any language, but phonemes are examined only with specific languages.
Differences Between Phone and Phonemes
A phoneme is the smallest unit of speech sound that can change one word into another. Only someone who speaks a specific language can determine whether removing a sound and substituting another will generate a distinctly different word. In contrast, an entire phone has to be substituted to create a different word.
The general purpose of the IPA chart is to provide one letter for each speech sound, and each sound is represented by one letter. The alphabet is primarily used to transcribe sounds (phones, not phonemes)
Description of Letter Forms
The association selected the letters for the IPA to conform with Roman characters or adapted from other scripts such as Greek. Consonants and vowels are represented by 107 letters with 31 diacritics to modify them.
Diacritical marks demonstrate sound differences and indicate nasal resonation qualities, including stress, length, and tone. These symbols are organized into the official chart of the International Phonetic Association.
Typography and Iconicity
Typography includes the appearance, structure, and style of a font. Iconicity is the similarity between the shape of a sign or icon and its meaning. The IPA characters are based on Latin script, but there are not enough to cover every sound. More symbols can be created by adding cursive forms, diacritics, small capitals, and rotation. Stress and intonation are conveyed through special symbols, and tone symbols are derived from a musical scale.
Brackets and Transcription Delimiters
It’s nearly impossible for linguists to use traditional writing to demonstrate how to pronounce a word because no one language does it perfectly. Some letters are from the Roman alphabet, and some are taken from the runic and Greek alphabets or redesigned from parts of other symbols.
Transcription is the conversion of speech into written characters. When the transcription comes from English, spelling is enclosed with single quotes and is called a graphemic transcription. Square brackets are used when the conversion is from IPA characters (phones).
Description of IPA Cursive Forms
When the International Phonetic Alphabet was first created, and transcription was done by hand, cursive was used to form some letters in manuscripts and field notes. New versions of the alphabet did not because it is preferable to use a script that closely resembles the printed form of the symbols and is easier than cursive to read.
Braille Representation
In 1934 Merrick and Potthoff published a braille version of the IPA in London. Later updates were inadequate and cumbersome until Robert Englebretson revised it in 2011. It does include diacritics that are more systemic, but there is no procedure for marking tone, and some of them cannot be written.