1.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally 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 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, for example, the sound was originally 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, 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, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association 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 largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, 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. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
2.
X-SAMPA
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The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London and it is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The result is a SAMPA-inspired remapping of the IPA into 7-bit ASCII, SAMPA was devised as a hack to work around the inability of text encodings to represent IPA symbols. Later, as Unicode support for IPA symbols became more widespread, however, X-SAMPA is still useful as the basis for an input method for true IPA. The IPA symbols that are ordinary lower-case letters have the value in X-SAMPA as they do in the IPA. X-SAMPA uses backslashes as modifying suffixes to create new symbols, for example, O is a distinct sound from O\, to which it bears no relation. Such use of the character can be a problem, since many programs interpret it as an escape character for the character following it. For example, you use such X-SAMPA symbols in EMU. X-SAMPA diacritics follow the symbols they modify, except for ~ for nasalization, = for syllabicity, and for retroflexion and rhotacization, diacritics are joined to the character with the underscore character _. The underscore character is used to encode the IPA tiebar. The numbers _1 to _6 are reserved diacritics as shorthand for language-specific tone numbers, asterisks mark sounds that do not have X-SAMPA symbols. Daggers mark IPA symbols that have recently added to Unicode. Since April 2008, the latter is the case of the labiodental flap, a dedicated symbol for the labiodental flap does not yet exist in X-SAMPA. International Phonetic Alphabet International Phonetic Alphabet for English Kirshenbaum and WorldBet, list of phonetics topics SAMPA, a language-specific predecessor of X-SAMPA. SAMPA chart for English Computer-coding the IPA, A proposed extension of SAMPA Translate English texts into IPA phonetics with PhoTransEdit and this free software tool allows to export transcriptions to X-SAMPA. Online converter between IPA and X-Sampa Web-based translator for X-SAMPA documents, produces Unicode text, XML text, PostScript, PDF, or LaTeX TIPA. Z-SAMPA, an extension of X-SAMPA sometimes used for conlangs Web-based X-SAMPA to IPA Converter
3.
Kirshenbaum
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Kirshenbaum, sometimes called ASCII-IPA or erkIPA, is a system used to represent the International Phonetic Alphabet in ASCII. This way it allows typewriting IPA-symbols by regular keyboard and it was developed for Usenet, notably the newsgroups sci. lang and alt. usage. english. It is named after Evan Kirshenbaum, who led the collaboration that created it, the system uses almost all lower-case letters to represent the directly corresponding IPA character, but unlike X-SAMPA, has the notable exception of the letter r. Examples where the two systems have a different mapping between characters and sounds are, This chart is based on information provided in the Kirshenbaum specification and it may also be helpful to compare it to the SAMPA chart or X-SAMPA chart. Stress is indicated by for primary stress, and, for secondary stress, the Kirshenbaum started developing in August 1992 through a usenet group, after being fed up with describing the sound of words by using other words. It should be usable for both phonemic and narrow phonetic transcription and it should be possible to represent all symbols and diacritics in the IPA. It should be possible to translate from the representation to a character set which includes IPA. The reverse would also be nice, the developers decided to use the existing IPA alphabet, mapping each segment to a single keyboard character, and adding extra ASCII characters optionally for IPA diacritics. An early, different set in ASCII was derived from the guide in Merriam-Websters New Collegiate Dictionary. Kirshenbaum specification Tutorial and guide with sound samples History
4.
IPA Braille
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IPA Braille is the modern standard Braille encoding of the International Phonetic Alphabet, as recognized by the International Council on English Braille. A braille version of the IPA was first created by Merrick and Potthoff in 1934 and it was used in France, Germany, and anglophone countries. However, it was not updated as the IPA evolved, in 1990 it was officially reissued by BAUK, but in a corrupted form that made it largely unworkable. In 1997 BANA created a new system for the United States. However, it was incompatible with braille IPA elsewhere in the world and in addition proved to be cumbersome, in 2008 Robert Englebretson revised the Merrick and Potthoff notation and by 2011 this had been accepted by BANA. It is largely true to the original in consonants and vowels, though the diacritics were completely reworked, the diacritics were also made more systematic, and follow rather than precede the base letters. However, it has no procedure for marking tone. IPA Braille does not use the conventions of English Braille and it is set off by slash or square brackets, which indicate that the intervening material is IPA rather than national orthography. Thus brackets are required in braille even when not used in print, the choice for ⟨ɹ⟩ may reflect the shape of that letter in print. Many of the vowels are used for modified vowels in national alphabets, a few other letters such as ⠹ occur, but only as parts of digraphs. Other IPA letters are indicated with digraphs or even trigraphs usinɡ 5th-decade letters, the component letter ⠲. for example, is equivalent to the tail of the retroflex consonants. This presumably derives from the old IPA practice of using a dot for retroflex consonants. It also marks vowels which in print are formed by rotating the letter, is treated as a rotated ⟨o⟩, and ⟨ɯ⟩ as a rotated ⟨u⟩ rather than ⟨m⟩, perhaps facilitated by braille ⟨u⟩ and ⟨m⟩ themselves being a rotated pair. The basic braille letters ⠹ and ⠯, which do not occur on their own in IPA usage, ⠨ is also used with letters of the fifth decade for transcriber-defined symbols, which need to be specified for each text, as they have no set meaning. These are ⠨⠂, ⠨⠆, ⠨⠒, ⠨⠲, ⠨⠢, ⠨⠖, ⠨⠶, ⠨⠦, ⠨⠔, ⠨⠴. ⠴ is used for barred vowels. ⠖ is used for other hooks, as in flaps, ⠯ is used for click letters. These are far more legible in braille than in print, ligatures, regardless of whether these are written with a tie bar or as actual ligatures in print, are indicated by dot 5, so ⟨t͜ʃ⟩ and ⟨ʧ⟩ are both ⠞⠐⠱. This includes the historic ligatures ⟨ɮ⟩ ⠇⠐⠮ and ⟨ɚ⟩ ⠢⠐⠗, ejectives are written as ligatures with an apostrophe, ⠄, so ⟨tʼ⟩ is ⠞⠐⠄. IPA Braille diacritics are written in two cells, the first indicates the position, whether superscript, mid-line, or subscript
5.
Consonant
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In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. For example, the sound spelled th in this is a different consonant than the th sound in thin, the word consonant comes from Latin oblique stem cōnsonant-, from cōnsonāns sounding-together, a calque of Greek σύμφωνον sýmphōnon. Dionysius Thrax calls consonants sýmphōna pronounced with because they can only be pronounced with a vowel, the word consonant is also used to refer to a letter of an alphabet that denotes a consonant sound. The 21 consonant letters in the English alphabet are B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Z, and usually W and Y. The letter Y stands for the consonant /j/ in yoke, the vowel /ɪ/ in myth, the vowel /i/ in funny, and the diphthong /aɪ/ in my. W always represents a consonant except in combination with a letter, as in growth, raw, and how. In some other languages, such as Finnish, y represents a vowel sound. Such syllables may be abbreviated CV, V, and CVC and this can be argued to be the only pattern found in most of the worlds languages, and perhaps the primary pattern in all of them. However, the distinction between consonant and vowel is not always clear cut, there are consonants and non-syllabic vowels in many of the worlds languages. One blurry area is in segments variously called semivowels, semiconsonants, on one side, there are vowel-like segments that are not in themselves syllabic, but form diphthongs as part of the syllable nucleus, as the i in English boil. On the other, there are approximants that behave like consonants in forming onsets, some phonologists model these as both being the underlying vowel /i/, so that the English word bit would phonemically be /bit/, beet would be /bii̯t/, and yield would be phonemically /i̯ii̯ld/. Likewise, foot would be /fut/, food would be /fuu̯d/, wood would be /u̯ud/, the other problematic area is that of syllabic consonants, segments articulated as consonants but occupying the nucleus of a syllable. Other languages use fricative and often trilled segments as syllabic nuclei, as in Czech and several languages in Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Mandarin, they are historically allophones of /i/, and spelled that way in Pinyin. Ladefoged and Maddieson call these fricative vowels and say that they can usually be thought of as syllabic fricatives that are allophones of vowels and that is, phonetically they are consonants, but phonemically they behave as vowels. Many Slavic languages allow the trill and the lateral as syllabic nuclei, in languages like Nuxalk, it is difficult to know what the nucleus of a syllable is, or if all syllables even have nuclei. If the concept of syllable applies in Nuxalk, there are consonants in words like /sx̩s/ seal fat. Miyako in Japan is similar, with /f̩ks̩/ to build and /ps̩ks̩/ to pull, each spoken consonant can be distinguished by several phonetic features, The manner of articulation is how air escapes from the vocal tract when the consonant or approximant sound is made. Manners include stops, fricatives, and nasals, the place of articulation is where in the vocal tract the obstruction of the consonant occurs, and which speech organs are involved
6.
Speech
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Speech is the vocalized form of communication based upon the syntactic combination of lexicals and names that are drawn from very large vocabularies. Each spoken word is created out of the combination of a limited set of vowel. These vocabularies, the syntax that structures them, and their sets of speech sound units differ, creating thousands of different. Most human speakers are able to communicate in two or more of them, hence being polyglots, the vocal abilities that enable humans to produce speech also enable them to sing. A gestural form of human communication exists for the deaf in the form of sign language, speech in some cultures has become the basis of a written language, often one that differs in its vocabulary, syntax and phonetics from its associated spoken one, a situation called diglossia. Speech is researched in terms of the production and speech perception of the sounds used in vocal language. Several academic disciplines study these, including acoustics, psychology, speech pathology, linguistics, cognitive science, communication studies, otolaryngology, another area of research is how the human brain in its different areas such as the Brocas area and Wernickes area underlies speech. It is controversial how far human speech is unique, in animals also communicate with vocalizations. The origins of speech are unknown and subject to much debate, in linguistics, manner of articulation describes how the tongue, lips, jaw, vocal cords, and other speech organs used to produce sounds, make contact with each other. Often the concept is used for the production of consonants. For any place of articulation, there may be several manners of articulation, normal human speech is produced with pressure from the lungs, which creates phonation in the glottis in the larynx, which is then modified by the vocal tract into different vowels and consonants. However humans can pronounce words without the use of the lungs and glottis in alaryngeal speech, speech perception refers to the processes by which humans can interpret and understand the sounds used in language. The study of perception is closely linked to the fields of phonetics and phonology in linguistics and cognitive psychology. Research in speech perception seeks to understand how human listeners recognize speech sounds, speech research has applications in building computer systems that can recognize speech, as well as improving speech recognition for hearing- and language-impaired listeners. Spoken vocalizations are quickly turned from sensory inputs into motor instructions needed for their immediate or delayed vocal imitation and this occurs independently of speech perception. This type of mapping plays a key role in enabling children to expand their spoken vocabulary, speech is a complex activity, as a result, errors are often made in speech. Speech errors have been analyzed by scientists to understand the nature of the involved in the production of speech. There are several organic and psychological factors that can affect speech, among these are, Diseases and disorders of the lungs or the vocal cords, including paralysis, respiratory infections, vocal fold nodules and cancers of the lungs and throat
7.
Language
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Language is the ability to acquire and use complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so, and a language is any specific example of such a system. The scientific study of language is called linguistics, questions concerning the philosophy of language, such as whether words can represent experience, have been debated since Gorgias and Plato in Ancient Greece. Thinkers such as Rousseau have argued that language originated from emotions while others like Kant have held that it originated from rational and logical thought, 20th-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein argued that philosophy is really the study of language. Major figures in linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky, estimates of the number of languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. However, any precise estimate depends on an arbitrary distinction between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken or signed, but any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, in whistling, signed and this is because human language is modality-independent. All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings, human language has the properties of productivity and displacement, and relies entirely on social convention and learning. Its complex structure affords a wider range of expressions than any known system of animal communication. Language is processed in different locations in the human brain. Humans acquire language through interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently when they are approximately three years old. The use of language is deeply entrenched in human culture, a group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family. The languages of the Dravidian family that are mostly in Southern India include Tamil. Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the 21st century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100. The English word language derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s tongue, speech, language through Latin lingua, language, tongue, and Old French language. The word is used to refer to codes, ciphers. Unlike conventional human languages, a language in this sense is a system of signs for encoding and decoding information. This article specifically concerns the properties of human language as it is studied in the discipline of linguistics. As an object of study, language has two primary meanings, an abstract concept, and a specific linguistic system, e. g. French
8.
Manner of articulation
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In articulatory phonetics, the manner of articulation is the configuration and interaction of the articulators when making a speech sound. One parameter of manner is stricture, that is, how closely the speech organs approach one another, others include those involved in the r-like sounds, and the sibilancy of fricatives. For consonants, the place of articulation and the degree of phonation of voicing are considered separately from manner, homorganic consonants, which have the same place of articulation, may have different manners of articulation. Often nasality and laterality are included in manner, but some phoneticians, such as Peter Ladefoged, from greatest to least stricture, speech sounds may be classified along a cline as stop consonants, fricative consonants, approximants, and vowels. Affricates often behave as if they were intermediate stops and fricatives, but phonetically they are sequences of a stop and fricative. Over time, sounds in a language may move along this cline toward less stricture in a process called lenition, sibilants are distinguished from other fricatives by the shape of the tongue and how the airflow is directed over the teeth. Fricatives at coronal places of articulation may be sibilant or non-sibilant, taps and flaps are similar to very brief stops. However, their articulation and behavior are enough to be considered a separate manner, rather than just length. Trills involve the vibration of one of the speech organs, since trilling is a separate parameter from stricture, the two may be combined. Increasing the stricture of a typical trill results in a trilled fricative, nasal airflow may be added as an independent parameter to any speech sound. It is most commonly found in nasal occlusives and nasal vowels, but nasalized fricatives, taps, when a sound is not nasal, it is called oral. Laterality is the release of airflow at the side of the tongue and this can be combined with other manners, resulting in lateral approximants, lateral flaps, and lateral fricatives and affricates. Stop, an oral occlusive, where there is occlusion of the vocal tract. Examples include English /p t k/ and /b d ɡ/, if the consonant is voiced, the voicing is the only sound made during occlusion, if it is voiceless, a stop is completely silent. What we hear as a /p/ or /k/ is the effect that the onset of the occlusion has on the vowel, as well as the release burst. The shape and position of the tongue determine the resonant cavity that gives different stops their characteristic sounds, nasal, a nasal occlusive, where there is occlusion of the oral tract, but air passes through the nose. The shape and position of the tongue determine the resonant cavity that gives different nasals their characteristic sounds, nearly all languages have nasals, the only exceptions being in the area of Puget Sound and a single language on Bougainville Island. Fricative, sometimes called spirant, where there is continuous frication at the place of articulation, examples include English /f, s/, /v, z/, etc
9.
Approximant consonant
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Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no turbulence and this class of sounds includes lateral approximants like, non-lateral approximants like, and semivowels like and. Before Peter Ladefoged coined the term approximant in the 1960s, the term frictionless continuant referred to non-lateral approximants, some approximants resemble vowels in acoustic and articulatory properties and the terms semivowel and glide are often used for these non-syllabic vowel-like segments. The correlation between semivowels and vowels is strong enough that cross-language differences between semivowels correspond with the differences between their related vowels, vowels and their corresponding semivowels alternate in many languages depending on the phonological environment, or for grammatical reasons, as is the case with Indo-European ablaut. Similarly, languages often avoid configurations where a semivowel precedes its corresponding vowel, a number of phoneticians distinguish between semivowels and approximants by their location in a syllable. This means that opaque contrasts can occur in languages like Italian, ^* Because of the articulatory complexities of the American English rhotic, there is some variation in its phonetic description. A transcription with the IPA character for an alveolar approximant is common, actual retroflexion may occur as well and both occur as variations of the same sound. ^** Because the vowels are articulated with spread lips, spreading is implied for their approximant analogues, however, these sounds generally have little or no lip-spreading. The fricative letters with a diacritic, ⟨ʝ˕ ɣ˕⟩, may therefore be justified for a neutral articulation between spread and rounded. In articulation and often diachronically, palatal approximants correspond to front vowels, velar approximants to back vowels, in American English, the rhotic approximant corresponds to the rhotic vowel. In addition to alternations, glides can be inserted to the left or the right of their corresponding vowels when they next to a hiatus. Sievers law describes this behaviour for Germanic, in colloquial Nepali speech, a process of glide-formation occurs, where one of two adjacent vowels becomes non-syllabic, the process includes mid vowels so that features a non-syllabic mid vowel. Spanish features a similar process and even nonsyllabic /a/ can occur so that ahorita is pronounced and it is not often clear, however, whether such sequences involve a semivowel or a diphthong, and in many cases, it may not be a meaningful distinction. Although many languages have central vowels, which lie between back/velar and front/palatal, there are few cases of a corresponding approximant, in addition to less turbulence, approximants also differ from fricatives in the precision required to produce them. When emphasized, approximants may be slightly fricated, which is reminiscent of fricatives, for example, the Spanish word ayuda features a palatal approximant that is pronounced as a fricative in emphatic speech. Spanish can be analyzed as having a distinction between fricative, approximant, and intermediate /ʝ ʝ˕ j/. However, such frication is generally slight and intermittent, unlike the strong turbulence of fricative consonants and this is why, for example, the voiceless labialized velar approximant has traditionally been labeled a fricative, and no language is known to contrast it with a voiceless labialized velar fricative. Similarly, Standard Tibetan has a lateral approximant, and Welsh has a voiceless lateral fricative
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