2. The need for phonetic transcription

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2. The need for phonetic transcription
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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.

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• 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.

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

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Vowel mergers in East Anglian English
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• 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.

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• 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.

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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.

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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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.