International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language; the IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, speech-language pathologists, actors, constructed language creators and translators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of oral language: phones, phonemes and the separation of words and syllables. To represent additional qualities of speech, such as tooth gnashing and sounds made with a cleft lip and cleft palate, an extended set of symbols, the extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet, may be used. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two basic types and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a single letter, or with a letter plus diacritics, depending on how precise one wishes to be.
Slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription. Letters or diacritics are added, removed or modified by the International Phonetic Association; as of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters, 52 diacritics and four prosodic marks in the IPA. These are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, formed what would come to be known from 1897 onwards as the International Phonetic Association, their original alphabet was based on a spelling reform for English known as the Romic alphabet, but in order to make it usable for other languages, the values of the symbols were allowed to vary from language to language. For example, the sound was represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, thus providing the base for all future revisions.
The idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, Passy. Since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After revisions and expansions from the 1890s to the 1940s, the IPA remained unchanged until the Kiel Convention in 1989. A minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives; the alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap. Apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted of renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990 and adopted by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association in 1994; the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex.
This means that: It does not use combinations of letters to represent single sounds, the way English does with ⟨sh⟩, ⟨th⟩ and ⟨ng⟩, or single letters to represent multiple sounds the way ⟨x⟩ represents /ks/ or /ɡz/ in English. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do "hard" and "soft" ⟨c⟩ or ⟨g⟩ in several European languages; the IPA does not have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as "selectiveness". Among the symbols of the IPA, 107 letters represent consonants and vowels, 31 diacritics are used to modify these, 19 additional signs indicate suprasegmental qualities such as length, tone and intonation; these are organized into a chart. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet. For this reason, most letters modifications thereof; some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a dotless question mark, derives from an apostrophe.
A few letters, such as that of the voiced pharyngeal fricative, ⟨ʕ⟩, were inspired by other writing systems. Despite its preference for harmonizing with the Latin script, the International Phonetic Association has admitted other letters. For example, before 1989, the IPA letters for click consonants were ⟨ʘ⟩, ⟨ʇ⟩, ⟨ʗ⟩, ⟨ʖ⟩, all of which were derived either from existing IPA letters, or from Latin and Greek letters. However, except for ⟨ʘ⟩, none of these letters were used among Khoisanists or Bantuists, as a result they were replaced by the more widespread symbols ⟨ʘ⟩, ⟨ǀ⟩, ⟨ǃ⟩, ⟨ǂ⟩, ⟨ǁ⟩ at the IPA Kiel Convention in 1989. Although the IPA diacritics are featural, there is little systemicity in the letter forms. A retroflex articulation is indicated with a right-swinging tail, as in ⟨ɖ ʂ ɳ⟩, implosion by a top hook, ⟨ɓ ɗ ɠ⟩, but other pseudo-featural elements are due to haphazard derivation and coincidence. For example, all nasal consonants but uvular ⟨ɴ⟩ are based on the form ⟨n⟩: ⟨m ɱ n ɳ ɲ ŋ⟩.
However, the similarity between ⟨m⟩ and ⟨n⟩ is a historical accident. Some of the new letters were ordinary Latin letters tu
Daniel Jones (phonetician)
Daniel Jones was a London-born British phonetician who studied under Paul Passy, professor of phonetics at the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne. He was head of the Department of Phonetics at London. In 1900, Jones studied at William Tilly's Marburg Language Institute in Germany, where he was first introduced to phonetics. In 1903, he received his BA degree in mathematics at Cambridge, converted by payment to MA in 1907. From 1905 to 1906, he studied in Paris under Paul Passy, one of the founders of the International Phonetic Association, in 1911, he married Passy's niece Cyrille Motte, he took private lessons from the British phonetician Henry Sweet. In 1907, he became a part-time lecturer at University College London and was afterwards appointed to a full-time position. In 1912, he became the head of the Department of Phonetics and was appointed to a chair in 1921, a post he held until his retirement in 1949. From 1906 onwards, Jones was an active member of the International Phonetic Association, was Assistant Secretary from 1907 to 1927, Secretary from 1927 to 1949, President from 1950 to 1967.
In 1909, Jones wrote the short Pronunciation of English, a book he radically revised. The resulting work, An Outline of English Phonetics, followed in 1918 and is the first comprehensive description of British Received Pronunciation, the first such description of the standard pronunciation of any language; the year 1917 was a landmark for Jones in many ways. He became the first linguist in the western world to use the term phoneme in its current sense, employing the word in his article "The phonetic structure of the Sechuana Language". Jones had made an earlier notable attempt at a pronunciation dictionary but it was now that he produced the first edition of his famous English Pronouncing Dictionary, a work which in revised form is still in print, it was here. The problem of the phonetic description of vowels is of long standing, going back to the era of the ancient Indian linguists. Three nineteenth-century British phoneticians worked on this topic. Alexander Melville Bell devised an ingenious iconic phonetic alphabet which included an elaborate system for vowels.
Alexander Ellis had suggested vowel symbols for his phonetic alphabets. Henry Sweet did much work on the systematic description of vowels, producing an elaborate system of vowel description involving a multitude of symbols. Jones however was the one, credited with having gone much of the way towards a practical solution through his scheme of'Cardinal Vowels', a simple system of reference vowels which for many years has been taught systematically to students within the British tradition. Much of the inspiration for this scheme can be found in the earlier publications of Paul Passy. In the original form of the Cardinal Vowels, Jones employed a dual-parameter system of description based on the supposed height of the tongue arch together with the shape of the lips; this he reduced to a simple quadrilateral diagram which could be used to help visualize how vowels are articulated. Tongue height is represented on the vertical axis and front vs. back on the horizontal axis indicates the portion of the tongue raised on the horizontal axis.
Lip-rounding is built into the system, so that front vowels have spread or neutral lip postures, but the back vowels have more marked lip-rounding as vowel height increases. Jones thus arrived at a set of eight "primary Cardinal Vowels", recorded these on gramophone disc for HMV in 1917. Modifications to his theory allowed for an additional set of eight "secondary Cardinal Vowels" with reverse lip shapes, permitting the representation of eight secondary cardinal vowels. Jones devised symbols for central vowels and positioned these on the vowel diagram, he made two further disc recordings for Linguaphone in 1943 and 1956. With the passing years, the accuracy of many of Jones's statements on vowels has come under question, most linguists now consider that the vowel quadrilateral must be viewed as a way of representing auditory space in visual form, rather than the defined articulatory scheme envisaged by Jones; the International Phonetic Association still uses a version of Jones's model, includes a Jones-type vowel diagram on its influential International Phonetic Alphabet leaflet contained in the "Handbook of the International Association".
Many phoneticians resort to it as a quick and convenient form of reference. Although Jones is remembered for his work on the phonetics and phonology of English, he ranged far more widely, he produced phonetic/phonolological treatments which were masterly for their time on the sound systems of Cantonese, Tswana and Russian. He was the first phonetician to produce, in his "Sechuana Reader", a competent description of an African tone language, including the concept of downstep. Jones helped develop new alphabets for African languages, suggested systems of romanisation for Indian languages and Japanese, he busied himself with support for revised spelling for English through the Simplified Spelling Society. Apart from his own vast array of published work, Jones will be remembered for having acted as mentor to numerous scholars who went on to become famous linguists in their own right; these included such names as Lilias Armstrong, Harold Palmer, Ida Ward, Hélène Coustenoble, Arthur Lloyd James, Dennis Fry, A.
C. Gimson, Gordon Arnold, J. D. O'Connor, Clive Sans
Roundedness
In phonetics, vowel roundedness refers to the amount of rounding in the lips during the articulation of a vowel. It is labialization of a vowel; when a rounded vowel is pronounced, the lips form a circular opening, unrounded vowels are pronounced with the lips relaxed. In most languages, front vowels tend to be unrounded, back vowels tend to be rounded. However, some languages, such as French and German, distinguish rounded and unrounded front vowels of the same height, Vietnamese distinguishes rounded and unrounded back vowels of the same height. Alekano has only unrounded vowels. In the International Phonetic Alphabet vowel chart, rounded vowels are the ones that appear on the right in each pair of vowels. There are diacritics, U+0339 ̹ COMBINING RIGHT HALF RING BELOW and U+031C ̜ COMBINING LEFT HALF RING BELOW, to indicate greater and lesser degrees of rounding, respectively. There are two types of vowel rounding: compression. In protruded rounding, the corners of the mouth are drawn together and the lips protrude like a tube, with their inner surface visible.
In compressed rounding, the corners of the mouth are drawn together, but the lips are drawn together horizontally and do not protrude, with only their outer surface visible. That is, in protruded vowels the inner surfaces of the lips form the opening, whereas in compressed vowels it is the margins of the lips which form the opening. Observes that back and central rounded vowels, such as German /o/ and /u/, are protruded, whereas front rounded vowels such as German /ø/ and /y/ are compressed. Back or central compressed vowels and front protruded vowels are uncommon, a contrast between the two types has been found to be phonemic in only one instance. There are no dedicated IPA diacritics to represent the distinction, but the superscript IPA letter ⟨◌ᵝ⟩ can be used for compression and ⟨◌ʷ⟩, ⟨◌ᶣ⟩ or ⟨◌̫⟩ for protrusion. Compressed vowels may be pronounced either with the corners of the mouth drawn in, by some definitions rounded, or with the corners spread and, by the same definitions, unrounded.
The distinction may be transcribed ⟨ɨᵝ ɯᵝ⟩ and ⟨ʉᵝ uᵝ⟩. The distinction between protruded and compressed holds for the semivowels and as well as labialization. In Akan, for example, the is compressed, as are labio-palatalized consonants as in Twi "Twi" and adwuma "work", whereas and labialized consonants are protruded. In Japanese, the /w/ is compressed rather than protruded, paralleling the Japanese /u/; the distinction applies marginally to other consonants. In Southern Teke, the sole language reported to have a phonemic /ɱ/, the labiodental sound is "accompanied by strong protrusion of both lips", whereas the found as an allophone of /m/ before /f, v/ in languages such as English is not protruded, as the lip contacts the teeth along its upper or outer edge. In at least one account of speech acquisition, a child's pronunciation of clown involves a lateral with the upper teeth contacting the upper-outer edge of the lip, but in crown, a non-lateral is pronounced with the teeth contacting the inner surface of the protruded lower lip.
Some vowels transcribed with rounded IPA letters may not be rounded at all. An example is /ɒ/, which in English has little if any rounding of the lips; the "throaty" sound of English /ɒ/ is instead accomplished with sulcalization, a furrowing of the back of the tongue found in non-rhotic /ɜː/. It is possible to mimic the acoustic effect of rounded vowels by narrowing the cheeks, so-called "cheek rounding", inherent in back protruded vowels; the technique is used by ventriloquists to mask the visible rounding of back vowels like. It is not clear; the central and the back have not been reported to occur in any language. The lip position of unrounded vowels may be classified into two groups: neutral. Front vowels are pronounced with the lips spread, the spreading becomes more significant as the height of the vowel increases. Open vowels are neutral, i.e. neither rounded nor spread, because the open jaw allows for limited rounding or spreading of the lips. This is reflected in the IPA's definition of the cardinal, unrounded yet not spread either.
Protruded rounding is the vocalic equivalent of consonantal labialization. Thus, rounded vowels and labialized consonants affect one another by phonetic assimilation: Rounded vowels labialize consonants, labialized consonants round vowels. In many languages, such effects are minor phonetic detail. For example, in Standard Chinese, the vowel /ɔ/ is pronounced after labial consonants, an allophonic effect, so important that it is encoded in pinyin transliteration: alveolar /tu̯ɔ˥˥/'many' vs. labial /pu̯ɔ˥˥/'wave'. In Vietnamese, the opposite assimilation takes place: velar codas /k/ and /ŋ/ are pronounced as labialized and or labial-velar and, after the rounded vowels /u/ and /o/. In the Northwest Caucasian languages of the Caucasus and the Sepik languages of Papua New Guinea rounded vowels have become unrounded, with the rounding being taken up by the consonant, thus and are phonemically /kwɨ/ and /kwə/. In the extinct Ubykh, were phonemically /kʷə/ and /kʷa/. A few ancient Indo-European languages like Latin had labiovelar consonants.
It is rare for accents of English to differentiate vowels only by their roundedness. Minimal pairs like this can be found in some British dialects (such as the Cardiff dialect, Geordie and P
Scottish Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic or Scots Gaelic, sometimes referred to as Gaelic, is a Celtic language native to the Gaels of Scotland. A member of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages, Scottish Gaelic, like Modern Irish and Manx, developed out of Middle Irish. Most of modern Scotland was once Gaelic-speaking, as evidenced by Gaelic-language placenames. In the 2011 census of Scotland, 57,375 people reported as able to speak Gaelic, 1,275 fewer than in 2001; the highest percentages of Gaelic speakers were in the Outer Hebrides. There are revival efforts, the number of speakers of the language under age 20 did not decrease between the 2001 and 2011 censuses. Outside Scotland, Canadian Gaelic is spoken in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Scottish Gaelic is not an official language of either the United Kingdom. However, it is classed as an indigenous language under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which the British government has ratified, the Gaelic Language Act 2005 established a language development body, Bòrd na Gàidhlig.
Aside from "Scottish Gaelic", the language may be referred to as "Gaelic", pronounced or in English. "Gaelic" may refer to the Irish language. Scottish Gaelic is distinct from Scots, the Middle English-derived language varieties which had come to be spoken in most of the Lowlands of Scotland by the early modern era. Prior to the 15th century, these dialects were known as Inglis by its own speakers, with Gaelic being called Scottis. From the late 15th century, however, it became common for such speakers to refer to Scottish Gaelic as Erse and the Lowland vernacular as Scottis. Today, Scottish Gaelic is recognised as a separate language from Irish, so the word Erse in reference to Scottish Gaelic is no longer used. Gaelic was believed to have been brought to Scotland, in the 4th–5th centuries CE, by settlers from Ireland who founded the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata on Scotland's west coast in present-day Argyll.:551:66 However, archaeologist Dr Ewan Campbell has argued that there is no archaeological or placename evidence of a migration or takeover.
This view of the medieval accounts is shared by other historians. Regardless of how it came to be spoken in the region, Gaelic in Scotland was confined to Dál Riata until the eighth century, when it began expanding into Pictish areas north of the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde. By 900, Pictish appears to have become extinct replaced by Gaelic.:238–244 An exception might be made for the Northern Isles, where Pictish was more supplanted by Norse rather than by Gaelic. During the reign of Caustantín mac Áeda, outsiders began to refer to the region as the kingdom of Alba rather than as the kingdom of the Picts. However, though the Pictish language did not disappear a process of Gaelicisation was under way during the reigns of Caustantín and his successors. By a certain point during the 11th century, all the inhabitants of Alba had become Gaelicised Scots, Pictish identity was forgotten. In 1018, after the conquest of the Lothians by the Kingdom of Scotland, Gaelic reached its social, cultural and geographic zenith.:16–18 Colloquial speech in Scotland had been developing independently of that in Ireland since the eighth century.
For the first time, the entire region of modern-day Scotland was called Scotia in Latin, Gaelic was the lingua Scotica.:276:554 In southern Scotland, Gaelic was strong in Galloway, adjoining areas to the north and west, West Lothian, parts of western Midlothian. It was spoken to a lesser degree in north Ayrshire, the Clyde Valley and eastern Dumfriesshire. In south-eastern Scotland, there is no evidence that Gaelic was widely spoken. Many historians mark the reign of King Malcom Canmore as the beginning of Gaelic's eclipse in Scotland, his wife Margaret of Wessex spoke no Gaelic, gave her children Anglo-Saxon rather than Gaelic names, brought many English bishops and monastics to Scotland.:19 When Malcolm and Margaret died in 1093, the Gaelic aristocracy rejected their anglicised sons and instead backed Malcolm's brother Donald Bàn. Donald had spent 17 years in Gaelic Ireland and his power base was in the Gaelic west of Scotland, he was the last Scottish monarch to be buried on Iona, the traditional burial place of the Gaelic Kings of Dàl Riada and the Kingdom of Alba.
However, during the reigns of Malcolm Canmore's sons, Alexander I and David I, Anglo-Norman names and practices spread throughout Scotland south of the Forth–Clyde line and along the northeastern coastal plain as far north as Moray. Norman French displaced Gaelic at court; the establishment of royal burghs throughout the same area under David I, attracted large numbers of foreigners speaking Old English. This was the beginning of Gaelic's status as a predominantly rural language in Scotland.:19-23 Clan chiefs in the northern and western parts of Scotland continued to support Gaelic bards who remained a central feature of court life there. The semi-independent Lordship of the Isles in the Hebrides and western coastal mainland remained Gaelic since the language's recovery there in the 12th century, providing a political foundation for cultural prestige down to the end of the 15th century.:553-6By the mid-14th century what came to be called Scots emerged as the official language of government and law.:139 Scotland's emergent nat
Cameroon
Cameroon the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the north. Cameroon's coastline lies on the Bight of part of the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean. Although Cameroon is not an ECOWAS member state, it is geographically and in West Africa with the Southern Cameroons which now form her Northwest and Southwest Regions having a strong West African history; the country is sometimes identified as West African and other times as Central African due to its strategic position at the crossroads between West and Central Africa. French and English are the official languages of Cameroon; the country is referred to as "Africa in miniature" for its geological and cultural diversity. Natural features include beaches, mountains and savannas; the highest point at 4,100 metres is Mount Cameroon in the Southwest Region of the country, the largest cities in population-terms are Douala on the Wouri river, its economic capital and main seaport, Yaoundé, its political capital, Garoua.
The country is well known for its native styles of music makossa and bikutsi, for its successful national football team. Early inhabitants of the territory included the Sao civilisation around Lake Chad and the Baka hunter-gatherers in the southeastern rainforest. Portuguese explorers reached the coast in the 15th century and named the area Rio dos Camarões, which became Cameroon in English. Fulani soldiers founded the Adamawa Emirate in the north in the 19th century, various ethnic groups of the west and northwest established powerful chiefdoms and fondoms. Cameroon became a German colony in 1884 known as Kamerun. After World War I, the territory was divided between France and the United Kingdom as League of Nations mandates; the Union des Populations du Cameroun political party advocated independence, but was outlawed by France in the 1950s, leading to the Bamileke War fought between French and UPC militant forces until early 1971. In 1960, the French-administered part of Cameroon became independent as the Republic of Cameroun under President Ahmadou Ahidjo.
The southern part of British Cameroons federated with it in 1961 to form the Federal Republic of Cameroon. The federation was abandoned in 1972; the country was renamed the United Republic of Cameroon in 1972 and the Republic of Cameroon in 1984. Large numbers of Cameroonians live as subsistence farmers. Since 1982 Paul Biya has been President, governing with his Cameroon People's Democratic Movement party; the country has experienced tensions coming from the English-speaking territories. Politicians in the English-speaking regions have advocated for greater decentralisation and complete separation or independence from Cameroon. In 2017, tensions in the English-speaking territories escalated into open warfare; the territory of present-day Cameroon was first settled during the Neolithic Era. The longest continuous inhabitants are groups such as the Baka. From here, Bantu migrations into eastern and central Africa are believed to have originated about 2,000 years ago; the Sao culture arose around Lake Chad, c. 500 AD, gave way to the Kanem and its successor state, the Bornu Empire.
Kingdoms and chiefdoms arose in the west. Portuguese sailors reached the coast in 1472, they noted an abundance of the ghost shrimp Lepidophthalmus turneranus in the Wouri River and named it Rio dos Camarões, which became Cameroon in English. Over the following few centuries, European interests regularised trade with the coastal peoples, Christian missionaries pushed inland. In the early 19th century, Modibo Adama led Fulani soldiers on a jihad in the north against non-Muslim and Muslim peoples and established the Adamawa Emirate. Settled peoples who fled the Fulani caused a major redistribution of population; the Bamum tribe have a writing system, known as Shu Mom. The script was given to them by Sultan Ibrahim Njoya in 1896, is taught in Cameroon by the Bamum Scripts and Archives Project. Germany began to establish roots in Cameroon in 1868 when the Woermann Company of Hamburg built a warehouse, it was built on the estuary of the Wouri River. Gustav Nachtigal made a treaty with one of the local kings to annex the region for the German emperor.
The German Empire claimed the territory as the colony of Kamerun in 1884 and began a steady push inland. The Germans ran into resistance with the native people who did not want the Germans to establish themselves on this land. Under the influence of Germany, commercial companies were left to regulate local administrations; these concessions used forced labour of the Africans to make a profit. The labour was used on banana, palm oil, cocoa plantations, they initiated projects to improve the colony's infrastructure, relying on a harsh system of forced labour, much criticised by the other colonial powers. With the defeat of Germany in World War I, Kamerun became a League of Nations mandate territory and was split into French Cameroons and British Cameroons in 1919. France integrated the economy of Cameroon with that of France and improved the infrastructure with capital investments and skilled workers, modifying the system of forced labour; the British administered their territory from neighbouring Nigeria.
Natives complained that this made them a neglected "colony of a colony". Nigerian migrant workers flocked to Southern Cameroons, ending forced labour altogether but angering the local natives, who felt swamped. T
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