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Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice
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Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice e Barry Heselwood
© Barry Heselwood, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Times by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4073 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9101 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 9102 9 (epub) The right of Barry Heselwood to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
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List of Tablesix List of Figuresx Prefacexiii Acknowledgementsxv
Introduction1
1 Theoretical Preliminaries to Phonetic Notation and Transcription5 1.0 Introduction 5 1.1 Phonetic Transcription and Spelling 5 1.1.1 Logography and phonography 6 1.1.2 Sound–spelling correspondence 6 1.1.3 Speech, writing and the linguistic sign 9 1.1.4 Spoken and written languages as translation equivalents14 1.2 Phonetic Symbols and Speech Sounds 15 1.2.1 Speech sounds as discrete segments 15 1.2.2 Complexity of speech sounds 18 1.2.3 Speech sounds vs. analysis of speech sounds 19 1.3 Phonetic Notation, General Phonetic Models and the Role of Phonetic Theory 20 1.3.1 Phonetic transcription as descriptive phonetic models 24 1.3.2 Phonetic transcription as data reduction-by-analysis 25 1.4 Content of Phonetic Models 26 1.5 Respelling as Pseudo-Phonetic Transcription 28 1.5.1 Transliteration as pseudo-phonetic transcription 29 1.6 Orthographic Transcription 32 1.6.1 Interpretation of spellings and transcriptions 33 1.7 Status and Function of Notations and Transcriptions 35
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2 Origins and Development of Phonetic Transcription37 2.0 Introduction 37 2.1 Representation of Pronunciation in Writing Systems 37 2.2 Phonographic Processes in Writing Systems 38 2.2.1 The rebus principle 38 2.2.2 Syllabography 39 2.2.3 The acrophonic principle 40 2.2.4 The notion ‘segment’ revisited 41 2.2.5 Subsegmental analysis 45 2.2.6 Diffusion and borrowing of writing systems 46 2.2.7 Anti- phonography 47 2.3 The Development of Phonetic Theory 48 2.3.1 Phonetic theory in the pre-Modern world 49 2.3.2 Phonetic theory in the Early Modern world 51 2.3.3 Phonetic terminology in the ‘English School’ 65 2.3.4 Phonetic theory in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries66 2.3.5 From correspondence to representation 69 2.3.6 Spelling reform 70 3 Phonetic Notation73 3.0 Introduction 73 3.1 Organic-Iconic Notation 74 3.1.1 Korean Hangŭl75 3.1.2 Helmont’s interpretation of Hebrew letters 76 3.1.3 Wilkins’s organic-iconic symbols 77 3.1.4 Bell’s Visible Speech notation 79 3.1.5 Sweet’s organic-iconic notation 80 3.1.6 The Passy-Jones organic alphabet 82 3.2 Organic-Analogical Notation 83 3.2.1 Wilkins’s analogical notation 83 3.2.2 Lodwick’s analogical notation 86 3.2.3 Sproat’s analogical notation 88 3.2.4 Notation for a voiced alveolar trill in Wilkins, Bell/Sweet and Passy-Jones 90 3.3 Analphabetic Notation 92 3.3.1 Jespersen’s analphabetic notation 93 3.3.2 Pike’s analphabetic notation 95 3.4 Alphabetic Notation and the Structure of Symbols 97 3.4.1 Pre-nineteenth-century alphabetic notation 101 3.4.2 Lepsius’s Standard Alphabet106 3.4.3 Ellis’s palaeotype notation 109 3.4.4 Sweet’s romic notation 111 3.4.5 IPA notation 112 3.4.6 Extensions to the IPA 119 3.4.7 IPA Braille notation 124 3.4.8 Pitch notation 126
Contents
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3.4.9 Notation for voice quality and long domain categories 128 3.4.10 SAMPA notation 129 3.4.11 Notation for infant vocalisations 130 3.4.12 Using notations 132 3.5 Ordering of Components and Homography in Composite Symbols134 3.6 Hierarchical Notation 137 4 Types of Transcription141 4.0 Introduction 141 4.1 Specific and Generic Transcriptions 142 4.2 Orientation of Transcriptions 143 4.3 Broad and Narrow Transcriptions 144 4.4 Systematic and Impressionistic Transcriptions 145 4.5 General Phonetic Transcription 147 4.6 Phonemic Transcription 148 4.7 Allophonic Transcription 155 4.8 Archiphonemic Transcription 157 4.9 Morphophonemic Transcription 158 4.10 Exclusive and Inclusive Transcriptions 160 4.11 Dynamic Transcription 161 4.11.1 Parametric transcription 163 4.11.2 Gestural scores 165 4.11.3 Intonation and rhythm 166 4.12 Instrument-Dependent and Instrument-Independent Transcriptions170 4.13 Transcriptions as Performance Scores 170 4.13.1 Nonsense words 171 4.13.2 Transcriptions as prescriptive models 173 4.13.3 Spelling pronunciation 174 4.13.4 Active and passive readings of transcriptions 175 4.14 Third Party Transcriptions 175 4.15 Laying Out Transcriptions 175 5 Narrow Impressionistic Phonetic Transcription178 5.0 Introduction 178 5.1 Pressure-Waves, Auditory Events and Sounds 179 5.2 The Auditory System and Auditory Perception Of Speech 180 5.2.1 Just noticeable differences 184 5.3 Perception of Speech 185 5.4 Is Speech Processed Differently from Non-Speech Stimuli? 191 5.5 The Issue of Consistency 194 5.6 The Issue of Veridicality 195 5.7 The Content of Perceptual Objects 198 5.8 The Objects of Analysis for Impressionistic Transcription 201 5.9 Phonetic Judgements and Ascription 204 5.10 Objections to Impressionistic Transcription 206
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5.11 5.12 5.13 5.14
Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice Who Should Make Impressionistic Transcriptions? Conditions for Making Transcriptions Comparing Transcriptions and Consensus Transcriptions Are Some Kinds of Data Harder to Transcribe Than Others?
209 211 215 220
6 P honetic Transcription in Relation to Instrumental and Other Records223 6.0 Introduction 223 6.1 Instrument-Dependent Transcriptions 225 6.1.1 Instrument- determined transcriptions 225 6.1.2 Instrument- informed transcriptions 228 6.2 Functions of Instrument-Dependent Transcriptions 229 6.2.1 Annotating function 229 6.2.2 Summarising function 233 6.2.3 Corpus transcriptions 234 6.3 Indexed Transcriptions 235 6.4 Impressionistic Transcription and Instrumental Records 236 6.5 Phonetic Domains, Phonetic Theory and Their Relations 240 6.5.1 Articulatory domain 243 6.5.2 Aerodynamic domain 245 6.5.3 Acoustic domain 246 6.5.4 Auditory domain 247 6.5.5 Perceptual domain 248 6.5.6 Phonetic categories as domain-neutral 249 6.6 Multi-Tiered and Multilayered Transcriptions 250 7 Uses of Phonetic Transcription251 7.0 Introduction 251 7.1 Transcription in Dictionaries 251 7.2 Transcription in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching 253 7.3 Transcription in Phonetics Learning and Teaching 256 7.4 Transcription in Speech Pathology and Therapy 256 7.5 Transcription in Dialectology, Accent Studies and Sociophonetics257 7.6 Transcription in Conversation Analysis 261 7.7 Transcription in Forensic Phonetics 263 Glossary265 References268 Appendix: Phonetic Notation Charts IPA Chart Revised to 2005 295 Elaborated Consonant Chart from Esling (2010) 297 ExtIPA Chart Revised to 2008 298 VoQS Chart 1994 299 IPA Braille Chart 2009 300 Index304
List of Tables
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Table 1.1 Types of writing-system units and their corresponding pronunciation units 7 Table 1.2 Separate letters corresponding to front and back allophones of /ɡ/ in written Azeri 8 Table 2.1 Consonantal manner terminology in the ‘English School’ of phonetics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 65 Table 3.1 Examples of Jespersen’s notation for phonetic categories 94 Table 3.2 Conventions for interpreting Pike’s analphabetic notation for [t] 96 Table 5.1 Pressure-waves, auditory events and sounds 179 Table 5.2 Alignments of variant transcriptions 216 Table 5.3 Comparison of variant transcriptions and what they have in common219
List of Figures
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Figure 1.1 Two views of the relationship between language, speech and writing 9 Figure 1.2 Classification of notation in writing 10 Figure 1.3 The relationship of phonetic transcription to language 13 Figure 1.4 Correspondences and equivalences between expression-forms in translations 14 Figure 1.5 Segmentation of So does she keep chickens? into acoustic classes17 Figure 1.6 Categories, dimensions and models in a small, two-dimensional, abstract taxonomic space 21 Figure 1.7 The mapping of speech phenomena onto a theoretical model creates a descriptive model 25 Figure 1.8 Transliteration as pseudo-transcription and respelling 30 Figure 1.9 Classification of phonetic notation and transcription in terms of status 35 Figure 2.1 Units used for spelling the written signs of language A are used for representing the pronunciation of spoken signs in language B 46 Figure 2.2 Late twelfth-or early thirteenth-century vocal tract diagram entitled Sūrat makhārij al-hurūf ‘Picture of the outlets of the letters’ from Miftāh al-‘Ulūm ‘The Key to the Sciences’ by Al-Sakkāki51 Figure 2.3 (a) Robinson’s ‘scale of vowels’ diagram of 1617; (b) Bell’s ‘scale of lingual vowels’ of 1867 with his Visible Speech symbols; (c) Jones’s drawings of cardinal vowel tongue positions of 1918, based on X-ray photographs 56 Figure 2.4 Wallis’s 1653 sound chart ‘Synopsis of all letters’ 58 Figure 2.5 Wilkins’s sound chart of 1668 61 Figure 2.6 Holder’s table of consonants (left) and ‘scheme of the whole alphabet’ (right) 63 Figure 3.1 Articulatory configurations motivating the Hangŭl letters 75
List of Figures
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Figure 3.2 Helmont’s diagram of Hebrew bēth (left) and his vocal tract diagram (right) 77 Figure 3.3 Wilkins’s organic alphabet and articulatory diagrams of 166878 Figure 3.4 Bell’s vocal tract diagrams for consonants and vowels 79 Figure 3.5 Sweet’s (1906) organic symbols for (a) consonants and (b) vowels 81 Figure 3.6 The Passy-Jones organic alphabet 82 Figure 3.7 The analogical symbols of Wilkins 84 Figure 3.8 The analogical symbols of Lodwick with a transcription of the Lord’s Prayer 87 Figure 3.9 Sproat’s analogical symbols for consonants 89 Figure 3.10 Organic symbols for a voiced alveolar trill 90 Figure 3.11 Structural classification of alphabetic phonetic symbols with examples99 Figure 3.12 Vowel symbols of Iceland’s ‘First Grammarian’ 101 Figure 3.13 Hart’s new letter-shapes 104 Figure 3.14 EPG frames showing simultaneous central and lateral channels for airflow during (a) [lsˁ] in the word θˡˁaim ‘pain’ (Al-Rubū‘ah dialect), (b) [lzˁ] in the word ðˡˁahr ‘back’, and (c) [lzˁ] in the word ðˡˁabʕ ‘hyena’ (Rijāl Alma‘ dialect)123 Figure 3.15 Halliday’s use of musical staves to show pitch dynamics in speech126 Figure 3.16 Consonant chart from Canepari (2005: 168) 135 Figure 4.1 Steele’s (1775: 47) adaptation of musical notation 142 Figure 4.2 Overlapping but distinct sets of allophones of /d/ and /b/ at an assimilation site 151 Figure 4.3 Dynamic transcriptions in Pike’s ‘sequence diagrams’ for (a) [abop] and (b) [zʒɣn]162 Figure 4.4 Parametric transcription of Good morning 164 Figure 4.5 Gestural score for palm 166 Figure 4.6 Steele’s transcription of a ‘bombastic’ manner of reciting lines from Thomas Leland’s Orations of Demosthenes 167 Figure 4.7 (a) F0 trace; (b) orthographic transcription with accent and tone marking; (c) interlinear tonetic transcription with iconic representation of pitch height, accentual prominence, and pitch movement; (d) ToBI transcription 168 Figure 4.8 Relations between speech, instrumental records and transcriptions in instrument-determined, instrument-informed and instrument-independent transcriptions170 Figure 5.1 The human auditory response area 183 Figure 5.2 Korean ‘denasalised’ alveolar stop, with IPA symbol alternatives, from the phrase miguŋ nodoŋ ‘American labour’ 211 Figure 6.1 Praat waveforms, spectrogram and labelled text grids for segmentation and annotation 224
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Figure 6.2 Spectrogram of a dragonfly with aligned multi-tiered transcription showing segment overlap 225 Figure 6.3 Palatographic frames showing onset, steady state and offset of a lateral articulation 227 Figure 6.4 Example of an annotated spectrogram and waveform incorporating measurement data 229 Figure 6.5 Acoustic and palatographic displays of Libyan Arabic /miʃ ɡdar/ ‘was not able to’ showing total overlap of alveolar and velar articulations and the release of /d/ 230 Figure 6.6 Acoustic display of Libyan Arabic wagt ‘time’ with epenthetic [ə] separating /ɡ/ from /t/ 231 Figure 6.7 Spectrogram, waveform, laryngoscopic images and spectrum (FFT and LPC) of the Iraqi Arabic word /saʕiːd/ ‘happy’ realised as [saˁʕ̆iːd]232 Figure 6.8 Annotated waveform and spectrogram focusing on a particular realisation of English /t/ 233 Figure 6.9 Intensity, Fx (pitch) and Qx (closed quotient) traces from an utterance of What are you talking about? annotated with ExtIPA, IPA and VoQS notation 234 Figure 6.10 Averaged FFT spectrum and laryngogram indexed to a specific transcription of the Arabic word /waʕʕad/ ‘to make someone promise’ showing voice quality features in the realisation of the geminate pharyngeal /ʕʕ/235 Figure 6.11 Spectrograms indexed to a generic allophonic transcription of English lilt to show typical clear and dark allophones of /l/ with formant tracks 236 Figure 6.12 Multi-tiered transcription showing (A) signal-oriented transcription summarising acoustic records (spectrogram and speech waveform); (B) speaker-oriented transcription summarising an articulatory record (larynx waveform); (C) listener-oriented impressionistic transcription 240 Figure 6.13 Phonetic domains in a chain of cause and effect which map independently to phonetic categories 241 Figure 6.14 Domain-neutral theoretical model and domain-specific descriptive models 243 Figure 6.15 (a) Midsagittal vocal tract diagram representing generic physical articulatory space with IPA symbol [s] at the relevant place of articulation; (b) region of abstract articulatory space containing [s] as the product of category intersection244 Figure 6.16 Vowel plot as a model of normalised acoustic space showing the grand mean distributions and standard deviations of the English dress, trap and strut vowels for different groups of speakers 246 Figure 6.17 Centroid for a token of [s] 247 Figure 7.1 Pages from Ellis’s SED fieldwork notes with IPA transcriptions260
Preface
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Why write a book on phonetic transcription? After more than half a century of major advances in instrumental phonetics which have rightly taken credit for broadening and deepening our knowledge of the structure of speech, it can appear to many that symbols and transcription have had their day. What, it might be asked, can [d] ever tell us that spectrograms, palatograms and the like cannot? If traditional transcription is not to fade away or be made the amanuensis of automated forms of analysis, then a case must be made for it on the grounds that it can express something which instruments cannot. Arguments need to be put against the view that there is nothing to be gained in phonetics by listening analytically to people speaking and transcribing what we hear. Marshalling the arguments provides the opportunity not only to examine critically the aims and methods of transcription but also to think about how phonetic symbols work in relation to phonetic theory on the one hand and phonetic data on the other; to consider, that is, the manner of their semiosis. This book attempts to address these issues and to place them in the context of the historical emergence of transcriptional resources from resources for writing language, the development of phonetic theory, and their coming together to make what I refer to as proper phonetic transcription possible. If any time and place can be identified as when and where the ideas for this book originated, it is nearly twenty-five years ago when I started teaching phonetics to speech and language therapy students at Leeds Polytechnic, later Leeds Metropolitan University. There were quite intensive practical phonetics classes and tests involving transcriptions of clinical as well as non- clinical speech samples which had to be marked. Anyone who has had to transcribe difficult clinical speech data, and judge the accuracy of others’ transcriptions, might agree that there is nothing quite like it for making one realise that fair copies do not, and cannot, exist. And yet not all transcriptions are equally insightful. It was the knowledge, expertise and insightfulness of my then colleague Stephen Mallinson which showed me that the twists and turns of the transcription process which threaten to entrap one in endless indecision can be transformed from a maze of blind alleys into a labyrinth whose path, after leading you deeper into a chaotic world of sounds, leads you out again past a pleasingly ordered array of symbols
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and diacritics. It is a transformation that only takes place once one has a thorough practical grasp of phonetics, a good understanding of phonetic theory in all its aspects, and the right balance of faith and doubt in one’s ability to make a good transcription: belief that it is possible, but uncertainty that one has ever quite managed to do it. I have been fortunate enough to collaborate over many years with Sara Howard on various aspects of phonetic analysis and transcription, benefitting greatly from her knowledge and experience, and finding her appetite and enthusiasm for intractable phonetic data a true inspiration. Much of the content of this book would hardly have been imaginable otherwise. The scope of the book has had to be limited to keep it within constraints of space and pressures of time. Consequently I have not looked at shorthand systems, despite their obvious relevance and historical contribution to the representation of pronunciation, on the grounds that they are not used by phoneticians for phonetic transcription and are not as independent of language-specific lexical, grammatical, phonological and spelling systems as phonetic notation aims to be. Transcription of non-speech vocal phenomena inseparably woven into spoken communication, such as laughter and sighing, has not been included although infant pre-speech vocalisations are briefly looked at. Transcriptional resources for other aspects of human communicative behaviours such as gesture, gaze and proxemics, and notation for discourse structure, have also been omitted as being outside the usual meaning of ‘phonetic’ as pertaining to the sounds of speech. Intonationists will probably be disappointed in the greater emphasis on segmental transcription, but one aim of the book is to bolster the legitimacy of segments as theoretically respectable elements of auditory-perceptual speech analysis and denotata for phonetic symbols. Barry Heselwood February 2013
Acknowledgements
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Many people have indirectly influenced the content of this book, far too many to list. But I should like to mention, in alphabetical order, those whose direct advice and assistance, on small points or on larger issues, have been a help even if they were not aware of it at the time: Munira al-Azraqi, Michael Ashby, Martin Ball, Martin Barry, Helen Barthel, Monica Bray, Emanuela Buizza, Elena Coope- Bellido, Ian Crookston, James Dickins, Gerry Docherty, Martin Duckworth, Robert Englebretson, John Esling, Paul Foulkes, Tony Fox, Alaric Hall, Zeki Majeed Hassan, Sara Howard, Mark Jones, Miho Kamata, Pat Keating, Ghada Khattab, Maha Kolko, Young-Shin Kim, Rachael-Anne Knight, Sujuan Long, Michael MacMahon, Reem Maghrabi, Stephen Mallinson, Samia Naïm, Sue Peppé, Leendert Plug, Robin Le Poidevin, Rawya Ranjous, Raouf Shitaw, Mark Shouten, Fiona Skilling, Alison Tickle, Clive Upton, Gareth Walker, Juan Wang, Janet Watson, Dominic Watt, Frances Weightman, John Wells, Anne Wichmann; also all those, not already named, who attended meetings of the Phonetic Transcription Group in Leeds convened by Sara Howard and myself. Needless to say, they bear no responsibility for how I have used their advice and assistance, any errors and inconsistencies being entirely mine. I am also grateful to students who over the years have contributed their ideas in phonetic transcription classes, often noting things which I missed and raising issues I had not before thought about. Thanks also to David Thomas for agreeing to have his painting on the cover, to the Faculty of Arts and the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Leeds University for funded sabbatical leave, and to colleagues in Linguistics and Phonetics for their much-valued support and collegiality. I would also like to express gratitude to Gillian Leslie at Edinburgh University Press for her patience and advice in steering the book towards publication, and to Fiona Sewell for diligent copy-editing, Sue Lightfoot for compiling the index, and Rachel Arrowsmith for assistance with proof-reading. Last but very far from least, I am grateful to my wife and family for their forbearance while much of my time and attention was consumed in pursuit of completing this book.
(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Introduction
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Phonetic transcription is concerned with how the sounds used in spoken language are represented in written form. The medium of sound and the medium of writing are of course very different, having absolutely no common forms or substance whatsoever, but over the ages people have found ways to represent sounds using written symbols of one kind or another, ways that have been more or less successful for their purposes. This book aims to explore the history and development of phonetic transcription as a particular example of technographic writing and to examine critically the problems attending its theory and practice. A good many academic books include ‘theory and practice’ in their title, and I offer no apology for doing so in a work on phonetic transcription. Theory and practice have shaped the resources for transcription by pulling often in contrary directions through obedience to different priorities. Theory, being concerned with the logic and consistency of category construction, has made many attempts to impose itself on the design of phonetic notation systems, but practice has almost always rebelled, finding the demands of theory too inflexible and too forgetful of the practical need to make and read transcriptions with a minimum of difficulty. The failure of many proposed notation systems has illustrated that the only valid test for a notation is ‘practice, not abstract logical principles’ (Abercrombie 1965: 91). It is in phonetic transcription that theory and practice have to make compromises – practice must not ignore the rigour of theory or it will lose its accuracy of expression, and theory cannot afford to overlook the needs and constraints of practice or practitioners will lose patience with it. It might be objected that I have over-theorised in places, that we can get by perfectly well using symbols as imitation labels with attached definitions and be guided by professional intuition, but if we are to understand what we are really doing with notations and transcriptions and be able to justify them, then we do need to expose their theoretical foundations to critical scrutiny, and strengthen them if need be. It is as well to understand the tools of one’s trade conceptually and structurally if one can. The idea of representing something by means of something else is inherently problematic and contradictory but lies at the very heart of language itself. Phonological forms of words, themselves meaningless, are used in spoken
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language to stand for meaningful things; likewise orthographic forms in written language. How is it possible for one thing to stand for, or represent, something else? If I write the word roses no roses appear on the page. Even a good painting of roses gets us no closer. We might be tempted to think that a photograph of an object is somehow a more faithful representation than a word-form or an artist’s painting, but there are still no roses on a photograph of roses; and it may, after all, have been plastic or paper roses which were photographed. In representations of sound there is the same absence of the thing represented. No sounds emanate from the notes on a musical score, or from a page of phonetic symbols. Phonetic notation, orthographic word-forms, crotchets and quavers, artists’ paintings and even photographs can only represent something by convention. Whatever means are developed for representing things, they have to be interpreted, and there has to be sufficient agreement on how to interpret them if they are to do their job. Phonetic theory is the source of interpretation for phonetic symbols and is what essentially distinguishes them from the characters used in written language; it is the difference, for example, between the phonetic symbol [b] and the alphabetic letter . I have just said that representation works by one thing standing for something else, and yet it also has to stand for itself if it is to be recognised. The phonetic symbol [b] stands for a particular bundle of phonetic categories but it also stands for a type of graphic shape, or glyph, consisting of a bowl and an ascending stroke attached to the left of it, for without that shape it would not be recognised as that symbol. There is always, therefore, a self-signifying function in the figura (see Section 1.1.3) of any sign or symbol as well as a deictic function. It is as if it is saying ‘Look at me, I look like this and I stand for that.’ Once we have recognised it, however, we need to forget the symbol and attend to that which it represents. The less distracted we are by the symbol itself, the easier this will be. But this conflicts with the commonly held, and on the face of it reasonable, belief that a good representation should resemble the thing it represents as faithfully as possible, which implies profusion of detail. At the head of his section on ‘Symbols’, Jespersen (1889: 12) quotes from Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus: ‘In a symbol there is concealement [sic] and yet revelation.’ A central purpose of this book is to try to understand what it is that remains in concealement and to explicate what it is that is revealed when we use phonetic symbols, and to show that much of this depends on the principles according to which symbols are constructed; furthermore, that this in turn is crucially dependent on phonetic theory. The inevitable circularity in these relationships means that a symbol as part of a notation system cannot tell us anything theoretical that we do not already know, but can in transcriptions tell us particulars which we do not already know, and that indeed is symbols’ ultimate purpose in transcriptions. For example, if someone tells me that such-and-such a variety of English realises final singleton /t/ as [h], I know nothing more about /t/ or [h] as phonological and phonetic entities, but I do now know more about that variety of English. It would be a mistake, however, to think I now know everything about the realisation of final singleton /t/ in that variety because [h] as a representation normalises for all kinds of variables, such as pharyngeal volume and tongue elevation, not considered by phonetic theory to be important in relation to [h]. Theory, therefore, determines
Introduction
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what a symbol reveals and what it conceals, and symbol design determines how its revelations are displayed. A practical solution to the inflexibilities and impracticalities of theory, and to the problem of overly detailed representation, is to acknowledge with Abercrombie (1967: 120) the advantages of arbitrariness in symbol systems just as Saussure acknowledged it in his theory of the linguistic sign. It is the arbitrariness of the relation between a word-form and its meaning that gives human language its extensive and enduring power to signify, and the same principle applies to a sophisticated symbol system such as phonetic notation. The seventeenth- century project to design a universal philosophical language failed to acknowledge this fundamental point, and so have iconic and analogical phonetic notation systems. In both cases, theories about the phenomena to be represented have dictated the forms of representation, the consequence being that, should the theory be revised, the forms of representation become obsolete. The same happens to phonographically reformed spellings when pronunciations change. Sweet’s first response to Bell’s Visible Speech organic notation recognised this weakness (Sweet 1877: 100–1), but it was not long before Sweet succumbed to the familiar delusion of every age, that things are now, at last, properly understood well enough. Writing only four years later, he declared himself a committed champion of Bell’s approach with the justification that ‘[i]f we impartially survey the whole field of phonetic knowledge, we shall see that the great majority of the facts are really as firmly established as anything can well be’ (Sweet 1881: 184). One only has to call to mind a few of the many, many discoveries in phonetics over the course of the twentieth century, and the continuing additions to our knowledge and revisions to our theoretical frameworks as we make our way through the first quarter of the twenty-first, to see how wide of the mark Sweet was. Arbitrariness of symbols should not prevent us from appreciating their power to activate representations in the minds of those exposed to them and thus to appear, from a subjective point of view, to have a necessary connection with what they signify, becoming subjectively iconic in a Piercean sense. How many phoneticians trained in the cardinal vowel system can see [e] and not ‘hear’ cardinal vowel number 2, perhaps even hear Daniel Jones’s production on F natural in New Philharmonic pitch if they are familiar with his recordings, before starting to retrieve its IPA phonetic label? The iconic power symbols accrue, despite their logical arbitrariness, tends to protect and preserve symbol–denotatum relations, thereby conferring considerable stability on a notation system once it has been adopted, very much as with the spellings of written language. The relationship we have with symbols, as with written words, is more materially immediate than with what they signify, an insight which has led psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan to declare the primacy of the signifier from a psychological point of view in contrast to the logical parity of signifier and signified in Saussure’s conception of the structure of the linguistic sign (Benvenuto and Kennedy 1986: 24). Proposals to make changes to how things are symbolised have to be well founded and well argued to have a chance of success. That there is a certain irrationality in our psychological relations with symbols is evident if one asks how likely is it that anyone would seriously propose a swastika glyph for a new phonetic symbol. The world-wide success of IPA-style notation in the discipline of phonetics
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rides on the near-universal familiarity among literate peoples with the basic stock of symbol shapes experienced through exposure to written forms of languages using roman alphabetic letters. This is true even of users of other writing systems such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and Thai, who can hardly escape the reach of roman-based writing systems. No doubt this is due in large part to the spread of English as an international language in the wake of political and economic influence and domination by English-speaking nations. Roman alphabetic letters themselves have come about through adaptation of letters by literate speakers of many different languages over millennia in a process which is quite accurately captured in Joyce’s phrase ‘miscegenations on miscegenations’. To regard IPA notation as historically misbegotten, however, does not mean we should regard it as unfit for its purpose. Its fitness or otherwise will be determined by the practical needs of phoneticians requiring resources for transcription. Whether this notation will meet the needs of future generations of phoneticians is something we cannot be in a position to know, but it is unlikely that they will not engage with the practicalities of transcription whilst continuing to theorise about phonetics, and either stick with the principles of the IPA and its notation or give birth to a new ‘miscegenation’.
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e Theoretical Preliminaries to Phonetic Notation and Transcription
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1.0 Introduction In this first chapter, a number of points of theory need to be clarified concerning both the relationship between spoken and written language, and the status of phonetic transcription as a particular kind of technographic writing for representing speech. In the course of clarification I hope to define proper phonetic notation and proper phonetic transcription, to distinguish them from the notion of a phonographic orthography, and to give theoretical expression to respelling and transliteration in relation to phonetic transcription. An issue of overriding importance throughout the book is what exactly phonetic symbols denote and what transcriptions represent. The issue is tackled largely from an assumption that the notion of a ‘segment’ is valid providing we take a sophisticated view of it as being rooted in the mental world of perception, not the physical world of measurable properties. Arguments for this position are put forward in Section 1.2.1 and returned to in Chapter 2 Section 2.2.4. Like the concept of the phoneme in phonology, the segment is often denied, but something remarkably like it seems to be reinstated quickly if only to provide a concept about which statements can be predicated.
1.1 Phonetic Transcription and Spelling Much of the discussion of phonetic transcription in this chapter is concerned with the differences between transcription and spelling and thus between spoken and written language.1 In any consideration of written language there has to be some account of the many different writing systems that have arisen in the relatively short time since written language first appeared around the end of the fourth millennium bce. Writing also features prominently in Chapter 2, where the emergence of transcription out of phonographic processes in writing systems is traced. It will therefore be useful to outline briefly the main conceptual division of how writing represents language, that is to say whether its units represent meaningful words and morphemes (logography) or meaningless units of sound structure such as syllables, or consonants and vowels (phonography).2 The division is based on Sampson (1985: 32–5).
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1.1.1 Logography and phonography
Although none of the writing systems we know about are completely logographic, and few if any are completely phonographic, the distinction is a crucial one in principle. Logography means that a word or morpheme is written with its own character and contains no information about how the corresponding spoken word is pronounced. Words with identical or similar pronunciations may have entirely different written characters. In Chinese, for example, 握 ‘hold, grasp’ and 卧 ‘lie down’ are both pronounced [ˋwo] but the characters are silent about any phonetic similarity. By contrast, phonography means that each character corresponds to an expression unit of spoken language such as a syllable, a consonant or a vowel. Words with identical pronunciations will be written the same. The English words date (fruit) and date (calendar) are pronounced and spelt identically although they are clearly different lexical items synchronically and etymologically. While it is easy to see that logography has little to do with phonetic transcription, it is also easy to assume that phonetic transcription is a phonographic writing system, an assumption that has in fact been made by scholars of writing such as Sampson (1985: 33). I will explain below in Section 1.1.3 why I think this is a mistake. The logography–phonography distinction is in practice more of a continuum when actual writing systems are analysed and we see logographic and phonographic principles at work. For example, written Chinese is often held to be logographic (Sampson 1985: 145–71, but see DeFrancis 1989: 99–121, who argues it is morphosyllabic) but makes extensive use of phonography albeit in a rather opaque manner. Written English is more obviously phonographic but not all homophones are spelt the same – hair–hare, blue–blew, sight–site, moat–mote and so on. Even in Spanish, often cited as highly phonographic in its spellings, there are a few non-homographic homophones – for example vaca ‘cow’ and baca ‘roofrack’, both pronounced [ˈbaka], haya ‘beech tree’ and halla ‘there is’, both pronounced [ˈaja]. In written languages the extent to which logographic and phonographic principles are in evidence in typical written texts varies so that some writing systems, such as Ancient Egyptian and Chinese, are more logographically oriented than others, and some, like Spanish and the Japanese kana syllabaries, more phonographically oriented than others. Processes of phonography in writing increase the orientation towards pronunciation and create resources which can be used for transcription as well as for spelling (see Chapter 2 Section 2.2). A type of writing that manifests both logographic and phonographic features is what is sometimes called morphophonemic writing or morpho-phonography. English exhibits this category when morphemes are given invariant spellings despite variant phonological forms. The regular plural inflection, for example, has the phonological variants /-s, -z, -ɪz/ in spoken English but invariant in written English, although of course does not always spell the plural morpheme (see also Chapter 2 Section 2.2.7 and Chapter 4 Section 4.9). 1.1.2 Sound–spelling correspondence
Relationships between elements of writing and elements of pronunciation I shall, following common practice, talk of as correspondences. It will be useful first, and
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Theoretical Preliminaries
in preparation for discussions in later sections and chapters, to summarise and exemplify the different kinds of units in writing systems that can be put into correspondence with units of pronunciation. Daniels (1996: 4, 2001: 43–4) proposes six fundamental kinds of characters in writing systems, distinguished by their relationships of correspondence to units of pronunciation in spoken language, and which cannot be further analysed into components having their own correspondences. Logosyllabograms (or morphosyllabograms) are units that function in written language to spell whole words or morphemes but which also correspond to discrete syllables in spoken language if, in the language in question, words are typically monosyllabic as is the case in Chinese. The character 撒 ‘to scatter’ spells the whole written word and the spoken language equivalent is pronounced [ˇsa]. The character can therefore be said to correspond to the pronunciation-form [ˇsa]. A syllabogram is a unit of writing that corresponds to a discrete syllable in speech and which is used for spelling any words whose spoken equivalents contain that syllable regardless of meaning. The characters of an abjad, or consonantary, correspond only to consonants in spoken language while those of an abugida correspond to a consonant-plus-vowel sequence. Vowels in abugidas correspond to systematic additions to a base consonant character which on its own often represents a consonant plus /a/ as a kind of default vowel – an abugida is thus a vocalically augmented abjad. Note that an abjad can, as in Arabic, have optional diacritics corresponding to vowels whereas the vocalic augmentation in abugidas is obligatory. In an alphabet there are autonomous characters which can be put into correspondence with vowels as well as consonants. The final type is a featural system in which ‘the shapes of the characters correlate with distinctive features of the segments of the language’ (Daniels 1996: 4). Written Korean is given as an example; Arabic and Hebrew pointing, and the niguri and maru diacritics in Japanese kana scripts, are also featural (see Chapter 2 Section 2.2.5). Table 1.1 presents examples of the six types. TABLE 1.1: Types of writing-system units and their corresponding
pronunciation units 撒,苏,色
さ,す,せ
س
ሠ,ሡ,ሤ
s, a, u, e
ᄉ
/ ˇsa, ˉsu, `se/
/sa, su, se/
/s/
/sa, su, se/
/s, a, u, e/
[dental]a
Arabic abjad consonant letter
Amharic abugida consonant- plus-vowel letters
Spanish alphabet consonant and vowel letters
Korean featural feature letter
Japanese ‘scatter’, ‘revive’, hiragana ‘colour’ syllabograms Chinese logosyllabograms a
Sampson (1985: 124–5) calls this feature ‘sibilant’.
‘Sound–spelling correspondence’ is a general term, neutral with respect both to type of writing-system unit, and to the size of the sound elements of speech. It is common to come across the term ‘grapheme–phoneme correspondence’ in literature dealing with reading and writing but there are problems with it. ‘Grapheme’
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Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice
means different things in different theoretical approaches to writing systems, and ‘phoneme’ means different things in different phonological theories, the implications of which for phonemic transcription are considered in Chapter 4 Section 4.6. Concerning ‘grapheme’, some writers follow Pulgram (1965) in using it for the minimal distributional element of writing in a given writing system whether this be a logogram, syllabogram or alphabetic letter. Others, such as DeFrancis (1989: 54), reserve the term for written characters that correspond systematically to minimal elements of sound in spoken language. The latter use brings its own problems in cases of so-called ‘silent’ letters, which occur frequently in, for example, English and French spelling. English made is spelt and transcribed phonemically as /meɪd/ (or /mejd/). The final can be regarded either as part of a discontinuous digraph corresponding to the diphthong /eɪ/, or, as Venezky (1970: 50) advocates, as a diacritical letter telling us that the grapheme in this context corresponds to /eɪ/, preventing made becoming mad. Similar problems attend the in comb and climb. Daniels (2001: 66–7) favours ditching the term ‘grapheme’ altogether. The notoriously many and contentious definitions of ‘phoneme’ in the phonological literature preclude review here (see Chapter 4 Section 4.6), but on a very general level the term can be understood as a distinctive consonant or vowel without regard for contextual (allophonic) variation. It is rare for the allophones of a phoneme to have separate corresponding letters but Azeri furnishes an example. In this Turkic language /ɡ/ has a front allophone before front vowels and a back allophone before back vowels. Azeri, at different periods, has been written using Arabic, Roman and Cyrillic letters and in each case the two allophones of /ɡ/ have had their own letter as shown in Table 1.2. TABLE 1.2: Separate letters corresponding to front and back allophones of /g / in
written Azeri (from Coulmas 1996: 30)
Front allophone Back allophone
Roman
Cyrillic
Arabic
g q
Ҝ Γ
گ ق
The rarity of different allophones of a phoneme being in correspondence with different letters depends to some extent on how one does one’s phonological analysis. For example, many languages have vowel–glide pairs which are in complementary distribution, e.g. English [u] and [w], [i] and [j], and which have their own corresponding letters , . If these glides are regarded as non-nuclear allophones of vowels, then examples of allophone–letter correspondences may not be so hard to find. Letters can correspond to what structuralist phonologists call an ‘archiphoneme’, which is the result of the neutralisation of a phonemic opposition in a particular phonotactic context. Trubetzkoy (1933/2001: 12 n.1) gives the following three examples. The three-way oppositions between voiced, voiceless and aspirated plosives in Ancient Greek were neutralised before /s/. Letters were
Theoretical Preliminaries
9
invented to correspond to the sequence of the neutralised stop + /s/. For example, corresponded to the sequence comprising the archiphoneme /P/, resulting from neutralisation of the /b–p–pʰ/ oppositions, plus a following /s/. The letter in the Avestan alaphabet corresponded to an archiphoneme /T/ representing the neutralisation of /t–d/ () in prepausal and pre-obstruent positions. The Devanagari script has a letter representing the archiphoneme resulting from the neutralisation of the nasals /m–n–ɳ–ɲ–ŋ/ before stops (see Bright 1996: 385). The correspondence of letters to archiphonemes is rather surprising because it demonstrates that whoever invented letters for that purpose realised that there was something different, not necessarily about the sound itself at that position in the phonotactic structure, but about its distinctiveness in that position. It attests to some conscious appreciation of distinctiveness as an abstract structural property of a system. Some writing resources have thus developed as a consequence of an analysis as deep, if not as detailed, as any in modern phonological theory. By conceiving of the relationships between sound units of spoken language and graphic units of written language as relations of correspondence I am deliberately taking a non-representationalist view of written language. That is to say, I do not take the Aristotelian view (De Interpretatione 16a3) that writing represents speech (Figure 1.1a). I take instead the view, elaborated in Section 1.1.3, that language can be expressed in spoken and written forms but that its ontology as a system of lexis and grammar is equally independent of, and dependent on, both (Figure 1.1b). It is the purpose of phonetic transcription to embody an analysis of its spoken expression. A theoretical account of how it does so is outlined in Section 1.3. (a)
LANGUAGE
SPEECH
WRITING
LANGUAGE
(b)
SPEECH
WRITING
FIGURE 1.1: Two views of the relationship between language, speech and
writing: (a) that speech expresses language and writing represents speech; (b) that both speech and writing independently express language. The dotted arrow in (b) indicates that relations of correspondence can be set up between elements of speech and elements of writing. 1.1.3 Speech, writing and the linguistic sign
Resemblances between phonetic transcription and phonographic writing are obvious but potentially misleading. They are both forms of writing in the wider sense of graphic representations of some aspect of language, and they may even employ notation which is visually the same, but their purposes are quite different. Spelling uses notation to write items of lexis and grammar which by
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Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice
definition are language-specific, whereas phonetic transcription uses notation to write an analysis of pronunciation-forms using language-independent symbols. By a pronunciation-form I mean something pronounced, either real words of a particular language or nonsense words, looked at from a perspective which is neutral with respect to speaking and listening. The general term I shall use for the elements of spelling is character (Coulmas 1996: 72), a term that includes logograms, syllabograms, the letters of consonantaries and abugidas, alphabetic letters and also punctuation marks. For the elements of phonetic transcription I shall use the general term symbol to include all resources for segmental, suprasegmental and parametric transcription, including diacritics. The term glyph is a superordinate term for characters and symbols and is useful for referring to the graphic form of a character or symbol. Figure 1.2 shows this classification of notation by purpose. WRITING
NOTATION
Glyphs
SPELLING
TRANSCRIPTION
Characters
Symbols
Graphic resources
Graphic resources
for expressing lexis and grammar
for expressing analyses of pronunciation
FIGURE 1.2: Classification of notation in writing
The three attributes of a ‘letter’ discussed by Abercrombie (1949/1965) – figura, potestas and nomen – are applicable to symbols as well as characters. They obviously both have written shape (figura), and can be referred to by some kind of name (nomen), for example the names given to phonetic symbols in Pullum and Ladusaw (1996). What is meant by potestas ‘power, ability, value’ is not so straightforward. Abercrombie takes it to be the pronunciation, in which case there would be no difference between a character and a symbol, and indeed he points out that the term ‘letter’ has traditionally been ambiguous between written character and speech sound. It is perhaps more useful to interpret potestas as the value a character or symbol has in its contexts of usage, that is
Theoretical Preliminaries
11
to say, its power or ability to distinguish one linguistic form from another; this interpretation seems to have been given to it by the Icelandic ‘First Grammarian’ in the twelfth century who took the littera doctrine from the Ars Grammatica of Donatus (Haugen 1972: 51–61). The value of a character is that it is a distinguishable unit of spelling, while the value of a phonetic symbol is its ability to express an analysis of a distinguishable unit of pronunciation (see Figure 1.2) or, to put it another way, to denote a model onto which a distinguishable unit of pronunciation can be mapped (see Section 1.3). Because phonetic transcription is a form of writing, there is a temptation to think of it as an alternative way of spelling, one that is more faithful to pronunciation-forms than orthographies usually are, particularly in languages notorious for complicated sound–spelling correspondences such as English and French, or in languages that use writing systems which are more logographically oriented such as Chinese. This temptation is likely to be strengthened by the fact that most of the symbols of the IPA, currently the most commonly used phonetic notation system, are derived from roman alphabetic letters and have the same or similar shapes. But it is of fundamental importance to understand that phonetic transcription is not an orthography for the words and morphemes of any languages. Its purpose is to express, in a language-independent notation, an analysis of pronunciation-forms. There is also a widespread misunderstanding that the main purpose of spelling, especially in phonographically oriented writing, is to provide information about pronunciation, and that writing systems are defective to the extent that they cannot provide for one-to-one sound–spelling correspondences, and spellings are defective to the extent that they do not employ sound– spelling correspondences consistently and systematically. While information about pronunciation can be gleaned from spelling with varying degrees of reliability, the primary purpose of spelling is to identify which words and morphemes are being written. The reader will generally already know how to pronounce the spoken form of those words and morphemes. As the philologist Max Müller expressed it using Isaac Pitman’s 1876 alphabet in the magazine Fortnightly Review, ‘[r]aitiŋ woz never intended tu foutograf spouken laŋgwejez’ (quoted in Baker 1919: 209). To appreciate these points and their implications more fully, it is necessary to consider briefly what a linguistic system is, and the relationship between spoken and written language. There has been a long tradition, already alluded to in Section 1.1.2 above, stretching back to Aristotle in ancient Greece and persisting through to the writings of Saussure, that written language represents speech (Coulmas 2003: 2–12). The view still has currency, having been more recently expressed for example by DeFrancis (1989: 6–7) and Daniels (1996: 3). But challenges to this view have come from the recognition that spoken and written discourses have their own particular features such that the one cannot be seen merely as the transfer of the other into a different medium (Vachek 1945–9, 1973; McIntosh 1961; Pulgram 1965; Halliday 1985; Mulder 1994), and from theorising about the relationship between language, speech and writing. Critical perspectives on the relationship between spoken and written language are found in Harris (1986) and Olson (1994). For written language to be a representation of spoken language, concepts relating to linguistic structure such as ‘word’ and ‘syllable’, Olson argues, would
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Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice
already have to have been explicitly recognised before the invention of writing. Olson (ibid.: 68) proposes the reverse, that ‘awareness of linguistic structure is a product of a writing system not a precondition for its development’ (my italics). Olson’s claim, that linguistic structure is only accessible for analysis once language has a written form, may, however, be mistaken. A vigorous tradition of grammatical scholarship arose in India during the early centuries of the first millennium bce culminating in descriptions of Sanskrit still regarded as exemplary linguistic analyses, for example Pāṇini’s Astādhyāyī ‘Eight Books’. It is very possible that these analyses were first carried out in the absence of literacy and were orally transmitted from memory, only later being set down in written form (Allen 1953: 15; Misra 1966: 19; however, for evidence of Pāṇini’s possible literacy see Bronkhorst 2002). Whether Olson is correct or not, there is no logical precedence of spoken language over written language. While it is accepted that spoken language existed for tens of thousands of years before writing was invented, and that human beings acquire spoken language before learning to read and write, it is logically possible for there to be a written language without a corresponding spoken language. Words and morphemes, the basic abstract items of language that possess meaning and grammatical properties, are equally independent from sound and from visual marks, but without sound they cannot be spoken or heard and without visual marks they cannot be written or seen. The fact that phylogenetically and ontogenetically the linguistic harnessing of sound predates the linguistic harnessing of visual marks has little if anything to do with any intrinsic properties of lexis and grammar. Explanation for these historical and developmental facts has to be sought in the evolution of cultural practices in human society (Trigger 2004) and the course of biological maturation in individuals from birth through infancy into childhood and beyond (Locke 1993). Because originally language only manifested through speech, when language started to be written it might well seem as if it were speech that was being written. The adaptation of Saussure’s concept of the linguistic sign in Figure 1.3 shows that the relationship of phonetic transcription to spoken language is not analogous to the relationship of spelling to written language. Saussure’s linguistic sign has two aspects (Saussure 1974: 65–7): the ‘signified’, which can be interpreted broadly as the meaning of the sign, and the ‘signifier’, which I will interpret as pertaining to the observable manifestation of the sign.3 The terms ‘content’ and ‘expression’ are often used instead of signified and signifier respectively. ‘Expression’ can be thought of as the clothing that a sign wears so that it can be recognised. In written language, spelling is the clothing while in spoken language it is the pronunciation. Phonetic transcription is a way of setting down in notation an analysis of what the clothing of spoken language is made of. An analogous description of what the clothing of written language is made of would be the naming of the characters used in the spelling of written signs. We can also, of course, name the symbols used in a phonetic transcription using, for example, the symbol names given in Pullum and Ladusaw (1996) and recommended, although not officially adopted, by the IPA (IPA 1999: 31, 166–84, 188–92). In doing so, we are treating a transcription symbol as a sign whose content is its phonetic definition and whose expression is a glyph, that is to say the glyph is
13
Theoretical Preliminaries
the ‘spelling’ of the sign. The point is that, unlike spelling, phonetic transcription does not express linguistic-semantic meaning; it expresses an analysis of pronunciation. For example, the IPA transcription [ˈtʰeɪbəɫ] does not express the same as the spelling
and for single sounds; curiously, though, he has no objection to a single letter standing for a cluster of two sounds, as for final /-ks/, even proposing Greek for English final /-ps/, which suggests he did not fully understand the archiphonemic nature of in Greek orthography (see Trubetzkoy 1933/2001: 12 n.1). Hart displays a similar attitude when he makes the case for writing to be governed by ‘due order and reason’ (Hart 1569: title page) instead of the disorder he saw in contemporary English spellings. Hart’s descriptions of the production of sounds are more perceptive and detailed than Smith’s, and on the whole reasonably accurate as far as they go. He noted the presence of aspiration in English voiceless plosives, which Smith did not (though he remarks on it in Welsh), and represented it in writing, for example writing pipe as , albeit somewhat inconsistently in relation to /t/ and /k/ (Jespersen 1907: 13–14). He did not provide any description 54 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice or explanation of aspiration, though, beyond saying that ‘ui brẹð ðe h softli’ (Hart’s spellings). There are other important gaps in Hart’s accounts. He offers no description of the production of [l], for example, and nor did Smith; and although Hart distinguished between voiced and voiceless sounds, like the Greeks and Middle Eastern grammarians he did not appreciate the mechanism of voicing, describing the difference only in auditory-impressionistic vocabulary such as ‘soft’ (voiced) and ‘hard’ (voiceless). Salmon (1995: 142–6) gives an account of Hart’s attempt to establish triads of aspirated–voiceless–voiced stops in English on Thrax’s model for Greek, abandoning it when faced with the facts of his own phonetic analyses of English sounds. Smith also mentions the Greek categories as subdivisions of the ‘mute’ consonants, but never actually fully applied the terms to English, probably because he was unable to make them fit. Moreover, his statements that /p/ and /t/ are the same in English as in Latin indicate either that he was unaware of the unaspirated–aspirated difference between the two languages, or that he was referring to an English-accented Latin. Both Hart and Smith realised that the phonography of the Latin alphabet was inadequate for expressing the sounds of English and devised some notational devices of their own (see Chapter 3 Section 3.4.1). If we take their respective versions of letters for /ʃ/ and look at how they defined them we can see the extent to which their definitions are theoretical or ostensive.1 Taking first Smith’s [ ], which he names [ɛʃ], he gives a list of keywords such as she, shed, shine, ash, blush but provides no description of how the sound is produced. An experimental analysis is performed in which he compares it on the one hand to the sequence [sh-] constructed by prepending [s] to hell in order to show that the result does not sound like shell, and on the other to the sequence [sj-] constructed by prepending [s] to yell in order to show that this yields a pronunciation more like shell. Smith thus defines [ ] ostensively and justifies it experimentally by drawing attention to its palatality (without identifying it as such) but does not offer an account of its production. Hart gives two descriptions of the production of [ʃ] (Hart 1569: §38b, in Danielsson 1955: 195; Hart 1570: §2b, in Danielsson 1955: 242) for which he provides the new letter . Both descriptions are less than precise about tongue configuration, saying that the tongue is drawn ‘inward’ to the upper teeth and that [ʃ] is distinguished from [s] and [z] by the tongue not touching the palate. In contrast to Smith, Hart does attempt to define the uniqueness of [ʃ] in articulatory terms, although not as accurately as Danielsson (1955: 221) is prepared to give him credit for. But it does mean that of the two, Hart is the more theoretically inclined in providing an interpretation of his letter which is not solely ostensive. Consequently, Hart’s [ȣ] has more of the proper phonetic symbol about it than Smith’s [ ] and reaches a level of phonetic description comparable to that achieved by the medieval Middle Eastern linguists such as Sībawayh and Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), whose descriptions of Arabic [ʃ] refer to a narrowing relation between the middle part of the tongue and the hard palate (El-Saaran 1951: 247; Semaan 1963: 39–40; Al-Nassir 1993: 15). Danielsson (1955: 54) is clear that Hart ‘had devised his new orthography to serve both as a reformed spelling of English and as a general phonetic alphabet’. Origins and Development 55 Hart’s primary aim, however, was to reform spelling. In so far as he developed a phonetic theory it was to guide orthographic decisions away from the irregularities and morpho-phonographic tendencies of English spelling firmly towards a completely phonographic writing. His notation was there to provide the resources for it. It is clear that he desired to go a long way in the direction of phonography to provide spellings which are ‘shallow’ in Sampson’s (1985: 43–5) sense of being close to the surface phonetics of speech. His distinct spellings for strong and weak forms of English gradable words show sensitivity to differences in their pronunciation, and he provides spellings for assimilated and elided forms – for example, weak-form and spelled as before vowels and before consonants, as with before voiced sounds and before voiceless ones (Danielsson 1955: 187). Although primarily a spelling reformer, Hart shows the kind of observational acuity without which an adequate theory of phonetics cannot develop. He is part of the wider trend towards observation and description that formed the beginnings of the scientific methods that became more firmly established in the following century. Additional observations about speech sounds and speech production were made in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which helped to advance phonetic understanding and provide the knowledge for more detailed phonetic descriptions. In talking of the seventeenth-century scholars who wrote on phonetics, Abercrombie (1993: 310) has remarked: ‘Their contribution to the history of the subject is not to be despised. They succeeded in constructing the foundations of a true general phonetics.’ Robert Robinson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, published The Art of Pronuntiation in 1617 not so much to reform spelling as to devise a way of describing pronunciation so that learners of foreign langauges could learn native- like forms of speech. He created a vowel chart, perhaps the first ever, showing in a diagrammatic representation of the mouth the relationship of the tongue to five points along the palate (see Figure 2.3a). At each point Robinson indicated five associated vowel qualities, in short and long variants, using his own set of symbols, although neither the open–close dimension nor lip-shape is incorporated into the scheme. Figures 2.3b and 2.3c show that very similar scalar diagrams were used by Bell (1867: 74) and Jones (1918/1972: 32). For consonants, Robinson used his own adaptations of existing letters and designed new ones, using diacritics to distinguish between voiced and voiceless (Dobson 1957: xii–xiii, 23–4). He defined the characters in terms of five locations for vowels and three for consonants (‘outer’, ‘middle’ and ‘inner’), and four consonantal manner distinctions (‘mute’ = plosive, ‘semi-mute’ = nasal, ‘greater obstrict’ = fricative, ‘lesser obstrict’ = approximant) plus a fifth for ‘the peculiar’ [l] (ibid.: 14–24). Assignment of sounds to these categories is not always in agreement with modern phonetics: [θ] and [ð] are placed in the ‘inner’ region along with velars, behind [s] and [z]. Comparing his solution for [ʃ] with Smith’s and Hart’s, Robinson tells us in a passage reminiscent of Smith that he derived his symbol [xx] from the sequence [xox] (= [jsj]) because ‘it seems to be but one consonant sound, nor indeed can it be discerned to be otherwise, vnlesse by a very diligent obseruation’ (Robinson 1617 (not paginated), italics added). That he did not give [ʃ] the status of a primitive suggests he thought in reality 56 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice a) b) c) FIGURE 2.3: (a) Robinson’s ‘scale of vowels’ diagram of 1617. A = larynx, B = front of palate, C = tongue root. Robinson (1617), The Art of Pronuntiation, facsimile edition, edited by R. C. Alston, Menston: The Scolar Press, 1969; (b) Bell’s ‘scale of lingual vowels’ of 1867 with his Visible Speech symbols. Bell (1867), Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics, London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co.; (c) Jones’s drawings of cardinal vowel tongue positions of 1918, based on X-ray photographs. Jones (1918/1972), An Outline of English Phonetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ninth edition it was two sounds, which would explain why he did not classify it or give it a description to compare with Hart’s. Nevertheless, Robinson’s scheme marks an advance on the work of Hart for its conception of a notation free from the influence of any irregularities in the sound–spelling correspondences of traditional orthography, and for the setting up of a small number of theoretical phonetic categories to account for all the consonants and vowels he could discern. His notation therefore meets the requirement of a proper phonetic notation more fully than Smith’s or Hart’s because it is more explicitly based on theory, however inadequate we might nowadays judge that theory to be. Its purpose was not to replace extant orthography but to be able to represent the expression elements of spoken language. His symbols can therefore be said to denote general phonetic models that have theoretical definitions. Their use in proper phonetic transcription is exemplified in a number of surviving manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, most extensively in a transcription of a poem by Richard Barnfield, Origins and Development 57 Lady Pecunia, which runs to 56 six-line stanzas. Robinson may therefore arguably be the first phonetician to produce proper running phonetic transcriptions in English; they can be classed as generic, broad and systematic (see Chapter 4 Sections 4.1, 4.3 and 4.4). An interesting feature of Robinson’s notation is the way he represented voice and voicelessness as consonantal prosodies or ‘long domain’ features, which ‘strikingly anticipated Firthian prosodic analysis’ (Abercrombie 1993: 311). Voiced and voiceless cognates were given the same base symbol and an ‘aspirate’ mark was placed above the first consonant symbol of a syllable if the onset and/or coda contained any voiceless consonants: [↼] = voiceless onset, [⇁] = voiceless coda, [ϟ] = voiceless onset and coda. Dobson (1957: xiii) complains that this is ‘ill-conceived’, but it has some merit as an analysis of English onset and coda clusters in which, with a handful of optional exceptions, obstruents agree in voicing (Gimson 1980: 239–53). In the latter half of the seventeenth century four figures are generally credited with having made the most progress in the English School of phonetics: John Wallis, John Wilkins, William Holder and Francis Lodwick. Wallis (1616–1703) attracted controversy for accusations and counter- accusations regarding claims about his achievements, for which Firth (1946: 109) is unforgiving, but Kemp (1972: 13), while not excusing Wallis’s dishonesty, is a little more understanding of how academics sometimes succumb too much to vanity. In the Tractatus de Loquela, prefaced to his Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae of 1653, Wallis, a founding member of the Royal Society, presents a classificatory scheme for vowels and one for consonants.2 These are summarised in tables of intersecting categories much like the modern IPA chart in principle if not in detail (reproduced in Figure 2.4). Vowels are defined as the intersections of two dimensions, front–back and close–open, each having three values: guttural–palatal–labial and wide–medium–narrow respectively, specifying nine vowel qualities; Bell’s (1867: 73) nine primary vowels, and Sweet’s (1877: 12), are defined by almost identical categories (Kemp 1972: 46) but presented in tabular form more iconically with the high–mid–low categories on the vertical axis, where Wallis places his wide–medium–narrow on the horizontal axis. Wallis gives other dimensions (open, round, obscure, fat, thin) in the cells in a somewhat ad hoc manner. The table for consonants shows four dimensions: the manner dimension mute–semi-mute–semivowel built on the place dimension labial–palatal–guttural, and a thin–fat dimension (which Wallis describes variously as a spread–rounded or narrow–wide distinction) built on an aspirate–non-aspirate dimension (although the thin–fat distinction does not apply to non-aspirates). For an extensive discussion of Wallis’s knowledge of phonetics, how it compared to that of other scholars of the time, and the meanings of his terms, see Kemp (1972: 39–66). For our purposes we should note that his terminology originates in a theoretical approach even if it is at times rather vague (Kemp 1972: 48), and that Wallis tried to fit vowels and consonants into the same place-of-articulation dimension of ‘labial’, ‘palatal’ and ‘guttural’, anticipating some modern attempts such as Catford’s polar coordinates (Catford 1977: 182–7). 58 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice FIGURE 2.4: Wallis’s 1653 sound chart ‘Synopsis of all letters’ The significance of a tabular presentation of sounds in the development of phonetic theory can hardly be overestimated. By setting up phonetically defined dimensions whose categories intersect, phonetic models are generated which become the denotata for phonetic notation. That is to say, instead of symbols denoting real-world phenomena with all the problems that that conception of symbols brings (see Chapter 1 Section 1.2.3), they can denote products of a theory. In this manner, orthographic characters are transmuted into proper phonetic symbols. Tables with dimensions defined in terms of articulatory phonetic theory are models of an abstract taxonomic phonetic space in a way that labelled diagrams of the vocal tract such as Robinson’s for vowels and Al-Sakkākī’s for consonants are not. Labelled vocal tract diagrams associate parts of the vocal tract with particular sound qualities whereas tables define the articulated dimensions of a more abstract conception of phonetic space with at least the potential to be domain-neutral. Wallis may not, of course, have thought of his tabular arrangement in quite these terms, but it liberated symbols from their orthographic origins to guarantee them the potential for a freedom they had never had before, allowing them to be put to the service of phonetics Origins and Development 59 as a scientific notation. Abercrombie’s (1993: 312) verdict on Wallis, that ‘his De Loquela is an unsatisfactory book in many ways’, overlooks this very significant step in the often parallel development of phonetic theory and phonetic notation. We can see in Wallis’s table how it generates sound-types which he recognises as not occurring in speech (mugitus ‘mooing’, gemitus ‘groaning’),3 just as we saw in Chapter 1 Section 1.3 how the IPA chart generates ‘pharyngeal nasal’ although no such sound is possible. Compared to Robinson, Wallis is less venturesome in his symbol set – his only new symbol is [ɴ̄ ], which denotes a voiced velar nasal – but the models they denote have firmer theoretical foundations resulting from a more systematic attempt to chart taxonomic phonetic space. There is a line of development from Hart through Robinson to Wallis in which phonetic observations become more systematic though not always more accurate, phonetic theory is more prominent, and a more universalist perspective is evident. Where exactly we draw a line and say that proper phonetic notation in the western Early Modern world starts will be to some extent arbitrary, but there is enough to show that Wallis was clearly operating in a manner informed by observation and theorising which was closer in method to modern phonetics than his predecessors. He also showed more concern to make his scheme applicable to other languages, including the non-European languages Hebrew and Arabic. Like any other pre-Modern phonetician, he can be criticised for errors that seem elementary to us. For example, he says that in the production of [θ, ð] the air exits through ‘a round shaped hole’ while for [s, z] it escapes ‘through a slit’ (Wallis 1765: 23, tr. Kemp 1972: 173) and he fares no better than Robinson, and rather worse than Smith and Hart, on the ‘esh test’. Wallis excluded [ʃ], and the affricates [ʧ, ʤ], from his table, regarding them as compounds made up of the sequences [sj, tj, dj]. Kemp (1972: 60) conjectures that Wallis may have based his analyses on pre-coalescent pronunciations of words such as nation, nature, soldier (see Cruttenden 2001: 76, 190) rather than on words such as shop, ash, church, judge in which [ʃ, ʧ, ʤ] do not result from coalescence. This greater uncertainty about [ʃ] in the later writers Robinson and Wallis, also seen in eighteenth-century accounts of English pronunciation (e.g. Walker 1791: 4), may be connected with coalesced pronunciations of words such as sugar starting to be perceived as vulgarisms (see Beal 1999: 144–51). Bishop John Wilkins, brother-in-law to Oliver Cromwell and, like Wallis, a founder member of the Royal Society, lived from 1614 to 1672. His reputation among modern linguists is for his work on a ‘universal language’, the famous Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), that would by-pass natural languages and allow world-wide communication in terms of supposedly universal semantic categories each having its own written character. This semasiographic project was carried out in an intellectual climate much influenced by Francis Bacon (Salmon 1983: 128) in which there was little faith in the ability of natural languages to express truth clearly and distinctly. In the five years prior to his death in 1626, Bacon had written in his unfinished work, The Great Instauration, about what he called the ‘idols of the mind’, four types of preconceptions or inclinations in the minds of human beings which tend to 60 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice prevent us from apprehending truths. The type he called ‘idols of the marketplace’ were responsible for the false belief that we have rational control over our use of language, and for our failure to see that language can control our thought. In a sentence which looks forward to activation models of the mental lexicon, Bacon asserts that ‘words react on the understanding; and this it is that has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistical and inactive’ (Spedding, Ellis and Heath 1858: IV 60–1, quoted in Carlin 2009: 19). The desire to establish a universal philosophical language in the seventeenth century had both religious and scientific motivations. On the religious side, it was a programme to tackle the linguistic chaos which ensued, according to the Old Testament, after the destruction of the Tower of Babel. Latin had functioned as a kind of universal language in Roman Christendom but the rise of vernaculars, and the strength of the Reformation, had weakened its status (Clauss 1982: 532–3). In the opinion of many, a state of linguistic homogeneity needed to be restored to mankind. On the scientific side, advances in the taxonomic classification of the natural world led to a belief that all reality and human experience could be similarly classified and a system of universal categories set up as the content elements of a universal language. Reality and language would then ‘form two isomorphic systems’ (Hüllen 1986: 119) over which the idols of the marketplace would have no power. Each category would be assigned a written character which in some versions would be pronounced as the translation equivalent of the language of the reader – that is to say, the character would be a semasiogram – while in other versions, Wilkins’s being one, each character would be assigned a pronunciation. For this purpose, Wilkins tried to establish universal phonetic categories, much as does the IPA. The linking of a universal perspective on phonetics with the idealism of international communication came about again in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when spelling reformers and the Esperanto movement made common cause in challenging national orthographies and national languages, bolstering their positions with reasoning from phonetics. Wilkins is important for his contribution to both phonetic theory and phonetic notation. Regarding phonetic theory, his classification of consonants showed more awareness of articulatory structures than Wallis’s and he made a more succcessful attempt to incorporate vowels into the same scheme. His cross- classificatory sound chart, shown in Figure 2.5, is therefore a more sophisticated model of articulatory phonetic space and each symbol consequently denotes a more exact general phonetic model. Regarding notation, Wilkins devised symbols based on the postures of the speech organs during the production of consonants and vowels in so far as they were understood. The symbols of this ‘organic alphabet’ bear no relation to alphabetic letters but are motivated by the shapes of the articulators and the passage of the airstream, their iconicity depending on observation and theory. Wilkins makes no mention of the Dutch philosopher and alchemist Franciscus Mercurius ab Helmont, who the year before had published his account of the Hebrew alphabet (Helmont 1667) with cutaway sagittal drawings of the vocal tract to try to prove that Hebrew letters constituted a ‘natural’ organic alphabet. Wilkins’s drawings are stylistically and anatomically very similar, including an Origins and Development 61 FIGURE 2.5: Wilkins’s sound chart of 1668. Reproduced with the permission of the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library ‘at rest’ diagram with numbered articulators. Although Wilkins did not intend his organic symbols to be used as transcription symbols, they marked an important step away from orthographic thinking. The importance of this step is summed up by Heselwood et al. (2013: 12): 62 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice Organic symbols explicitly identify sounds as objects of study independently of any writing system and therefore imply the possibility of phonetics as a language-independent discipline drawing on the disciplines of anatomy and physiology. In their role as ‘pictures of the letters’ the organic symbols linked the letters to articulation to give them concrete phonetic interpretations, thus acting as shorthand definitions for the accompanying letters which were used as phonetic notation. For example, the organic symbol for [F] (= IPA [f]) shows the two lips touching but with a line bisecting them to indicate that air is passing between them. For [P] (= IPA [p]) there is no bisecting line, and for [V] (= IPA [v]) the line has a single oscillation at the left end to indicate vibration of the epiglottis, which Wilkins took to be the source of voicing (the vocal tract is oriented to face right; see Chapter 3 Section 3.1 on organic notation). One year after Wilkins’s Essay, William Holder’s Elements of Speech was published, although it was probably completed before Wilkins’s work appeared (Salmon 1972: 152). Holder lived from 1616 to 1698. That he continues the general Aristotelian view of writing’s relation to speech is evident when he says (Holder 1669: 63) that ‘[l]anguage is a connexion of audible signes [. . .] Written language is a description of the said audible signes by signes visible.’ Holder has a view of spoken language very similar to Smith’s and Hart’s in which the sounds we make are ‘natural elements’ but the meanings are ‘artificial’ and come about by ‘institution and agreement’ (ibid.: 9–11). How the ‘audible signes’ are to be written is something which can be reasoned about rather than resulting from the operation of ‘uncertain fabulous relations’ beyond our knowledge. Although he talks of written language as providing a ‘description’ of spoken language, Holder did not propose organic symbols. Like Smith, Hart and Wallis, he gave phonetic definitions to existing roman letters, took [θ] from Greek, and used a few extra ones, for example [ȣ] representing a ‘labio-guttural’ vowel, a glyph previously used by Hart for [ʃ]. Holder employed the diacritic [‘] to denote voicelessness when added to a sonorant consonant, for example [L‘] (= IPA [l ]̥ ), but for nasalisation when added to a fricative, for example [S‘] (= IPA [s̃]); see Figure 2.6. The general strategy of co-opting roman alphabetic letters, taking letters from other alphabets and adding new letters and diacritics to create a notation system was to become, over two centuries later, the recognised strategy of the IPA for enlarging its stock of symbols (see Chapter 3 Section 3.4.5). Albright (1958: 8–12) thinks Holder’s lasting importance in phonetics can be reduced to his invention of the [ŋ] symbol for a velar nasal, although the symbol itself did not appear because, as Holder explains, the printer had no type for it. In fact, Alexander Gill had already come up with something very similar in his Logonomia Anglica of 1619 (Abercrombie 1981: 212). Albright’s rather dismissive evaluation, perhaps premised on the erroneous view that Holder merely followed Wilkins (Albright 1958: 11), ignores some quite profound passages in Holder which have led Kemp (1981a: 42) to compare him to the ancient Indian grammarians and Abercrombie (1993: 315) to hail him as ‘the most important 17th century figure’ in phonetics. Holder’s description of voicing (Holder 1669: 23) is the first comprehensive account in western phonetic literature which, even 63 Origins and Development if it does not quite attain the accuracy of modern descriptions (Abercrombie 1986: 4–5, 1993: 318–19), ‘provides the conceptual rudiments of what we know as the aerodynamic-myoelastic theory of phonation, and the source–filter model of speech production’ (Heselwood et al. 2013: 12). It refers to breath from the lungs passing between approximated vibrating cartilages in the larynx to create a tone which is ‘sweetened and augmented’ by resonance in the supralaryngeal vocal tract. In Abercrombie’s (1986, 1993) discussions of the ‘hylomorphism’ of Holder’s framework, we can see a clear identification of ‘matter’ and ‘form’ in speech production with the ‘source’ and ‘filter’ respectively of modern speech acoustic theory. The matter, or material of speech, is the airstream, which can be voiced or voiceless and which remains undifferentiated until given different forms by the variable filter of the supralaryngeal vocal tract. Holder’s hylomorphic scheme and the modern source–filter scheme can be mapped onto the three functional components of speech production in parallel, as in (2.1). (2.1) Holder: Functional components: Acoustic theory: Matter Initiation Phonation Source Form Articulation Filter Some confusion over whether glottal [h] and [ʔ] count as sounds comes through in Holder (1669: 72–3), which is not a great surprise when we consider difficulties later writers have had in distinguishing between phonatory and articulatory functions in the larynx. Holder’s descriptions of several sounds are notable for detail and accuracy. FIGURE 2.6: Holder’s table of consonants (left) and ‘scheme of the whole alphabet’ (right). From Holder (1669: 62, 96) 64 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice His account of [l] and [r] would only look outdated in a modern phonetics textbook for its seventeenth-century language. Muscles are identified, and the trilling action of [r] is described in aerodynamic-myoelastic terms: ‘born stiffely, as with a Spring, by the Muscles, (especially by the Genioglosse) and agitated by strong impulse of Breath’ (Holder 1669: 50). The syntagmatic axis of speech gets more attention from Holder than from other writers of the time. He sees speech as successive openings and closings of the vocal tract, each cycle separated by an ‘appulse’, an approach of an active articulator towards a passive one, very much in the same vein as the ‘frame and content’ view of syllables based on mandibular cycles of Davis and MacNeilage (2005). Analysis of places and manners of articulation is more modern-sounding in Holder than in previous accounts, with greater consistency in situating the terminology in relation to the different domains of phonetics, and there is more emphasis on what would nowadays be called the phonemic or phonological function of speech sounds (Fromkin and Ladefoged 1981: 4). Finally, it is worth drawing attention to Holder’s account of the process of hearing in the Appendix to Elements of Speech, where he identifies the components of the outer and middle ear, the ‘three very little Bones’, and refers to the ‘inward ear’ which connects to the auditory nerve. The last of the English School phoneticians to be considered here is Francis Lodwick (1619–94). His Essay Towards an Universall Alphabet was published by the Royal Society in 1686 but had already been circulating for some years amongst scholars interested in universal languages (Abercrombie 1948/1965: 49). It presents an organic-analogical alphabet (see Chapter 3 Section 3.2.2, and Figure 3.8) in tabular form which only partly follows the structure of the vocal tract and uses numbers to label the rows and columns (‘ranks’ and ‘files’) instead of phonetic terminology. Although we can see the network of cross-classifications showing which consonantal correlations are proportional to other correlations, Lodwick does not identify the phonetic bases of these relationships, leaving the reader to work them out. This absence of phonetic explanation means that Lodwick did not really add very much to phonetic theory, although his principle ‘that no one Character have more than one Sound, nor any one Sound be expressed by more than one Character’ (Lodwick 1686: 127, in Salmon 1972: 236) is close to the IPA principle, first articulated in 1888, that ‘[t]here should be a separate letter for each distinctive sound’. One other interesting point of theory, although he gives no rationale for it, is that voiceless obstruents are derived from more ‘primitive’ voiced ones. In the history of how voiced and voiceless obstruents have been handled in descriptive frameworks, we have here perhaps for the first time the suggestion that voiced obstruents are more basic than voiceless ones. It is not clear whether Lodwick conceived of the relationship being one in which voicelessness is added to derive voiceless obstruents, or voice is taken away, though the former is implied by the device of adding a stroke to denote voicelessness. By the late seventeenth century phonetic knowledge in England had reached a level broadly comparable to the Middle Eastern grammarians of some eight hundred years before. It would not reach the level of attainment of the ancient Indian grammarians of over two thousand years before until the nineteenth century. 65 Origins and Development 2.3.3 Phonetic terminology in the ‘English School’ One indication of a mature scientific discipline is a stable and consistent terminology so that the same phenomena are referred to in the same way by different scholars. By this indicator, phonetics was still making its way through early adolescence in the seventeenth century, with no two writers using the same set of classificatory terms. Table 2.1 presents the manner of articulation terms employed by the major figures from Smith to Holder against the closest IPA equivalents; Lodwick has been left out because he did not use phonetic terminology to classify sounds. We get a sense of each scholar trying to find the most appropriate terms for the categories as they understood them. Influence from classical writings surfaces most clearly in Wallis but there are differences in how classically derived terms are used. For example, Robinson and Holder use ‘mute’ for plosives, in line with the term’s classical origins (from Greek aphōna via Latin mutae; Allen 1981: 117–18), and ‘mute’ was used in this sense as late as the early 1840s by Pitman (see Kelly 1981: 251–2), while Wallis and Wilkins use it for all voiceless sounds. There is conspicuous uncertainty here about whether ‘mute’ refers to absence of sound generated at places of articulation or in the glottis, probably because the mechanism of voicing was not known except by Holder. Terms vary in their relations to different phonetic domains. They had not settled into the predominantly articulatory basis of modern phonetic categories. ‘Mute’, ‘sonorous, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ are auditory-perceptual concepts; ‘obstrict’, ‘aspirate’, ‘breathless’, ‘breath’ and ‘pervious’ are aerodynamic; while ‘closed’, ‘occluse’, ‘open’ and ‘partial’ are articulatory, as are ‘thin’ and ‘fat’, which Wallis uses to refer to the size and shape of articulatory constrictions. Wilkins’s inclination towards aerodynamic terms may reflect the focus on airflow expressed in his organic-iconic diagrams and symbols (see Chapter 3 Figure 3.3). This mixture TABLE 2.1: Consonantal manner terminology in the ‘English School’ of phonetics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries IPA Smith Hart Robinson Wallis Wilkins Plosive Mute Stopped breath Mute Primitive/ Closed Breathless Plenary/ Occluse/ Mute Continual breath Greater obstrict Thin Derived/ Mouth- Open/ breathing Aspirate ‘Blæse’ Partial/ (lisping) Pervious and sibilant Fat Semi- vocal Fricative Approxi- Semi- Semi-vocal Lesser mant vocal/ obstrict Liquid Voiceless Hard Breath, hard Aspirate Mute Voiced Soft Sound, soft No term Semi-mute Nasal Semi- Semi- vocal/ vocals Liquid Semimute Semi-vocal Holder Mute Breath Sonorous Voice Nose- breathing Nasal 66 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice of terms from different domains shows an empirical taxonomic approach which had not yet decided on its methods of observation and classification and had not oriented itself into a single overall direction. It was later to do so by attending to physiological causes of speech sounds and the anatomical structures responsible for them. Much of the impetus in this direction came from the Indian tradition, which came to the notice of modern western linguists only towards the end of the eighteenth century, but we should not overlook the steps which were taken in this direction by the ‘English School’. For example, we have already seen that Holder had greater insight into phonation than his contemporaries because of knowledge of laryngeal structure and vibration. Holder’s conception of a basic distinction between ‘breath’ and ‘voice’ is the one the Indians operated with under the terms śvāsa and nāda (Allen 1953: 33–4), and which may have been independently developed in the medieval Middle East by Sībawayh, who coined the terms mahmūs (participle form of Arabic hams ‘whisper’) and majhūr (Arabic jahr ‘clear, outspoken’), possibly as a result of Greek influence. Holder may have got it from Hart’s ‘breath–sound’ dichotomy by applying his more accurate knowledge of phonation. It is the distinction used by Sweet (1906: 9–12), based on Bell (1867: 45–6), and perpetuated in Jones (1918/1972: 19–22), who equates breath with ‘voiceless’, the latter being preferred by Abercrombie (1967: 26–7) and now in widespread use. Of all the terms in Table 2.1, these are the only ones with a presence in modern phonetic taxonomy, although ‘sonorous’ and the concept of sonority have become centrally important in theories of the syllable (Laver 1994: 503–5; see also Botma 2011). 2.3.4 Phonetic theory in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries The eighteenth century saw very little progress in phonetics until the final quarter. This is in great contrast to the nineteenth, by the end of which huge advances had been made in phonetic theory and also in the application of technology to the study of speech. It is not an exaggeration to say that by the start of the twentieth century phonetics had become a science in Europe linked with the scientific study of anatomy and physiology and of acoustics (Albright 1958: 19), but first it had to forge its own identity separate from the interests of language teaching and spelling reform. It is in the nineteenth century, particularly the second half, that we see most directly the roots of modern theoretical and experimental phonetic science and the development of our current resources for phonetic transcription. Notation systems are dealt with in Chapter 3, where their relations to phonetic theory will be examined in some detail and in a historical context; consequently at this point comments on these matters will be kept brief. In general at this period phonetic theory was more closely tied to issues of notation than to instrumental methods and experimental procedures, the latter being carried out by physical scientists who viewed speech as the product of a system of pumps, tubes and valves rather than as the spoken manifestation of language. Symbols in notation systems had to be defined, and this was usually done in relation to how the symbolised sound was understood to be produced, that is to say in terms of articulatory phonetic theory. Several ingredients came together from the late eighteenth through to the Origins and Development 67 mid-nineteenth centuries which all contributed significantly to the formation of phonetics as a science. Marking the start of the last quarter of the eighteenth century was Joshua Steele’s (1700– 91) An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech of 1775. Steele was concerned with the prosodic structure of speech and particularly with its representation. He adapted terms and notational devices from music in his analyses of rhythm, intonation and other dynamic features. Steele’s work went largely unappreciated at the time (Sumera 1981: 103), but some of his resources have made a reappearance in the extensions to the IPA with the same applications to speech, for example allegro, f(orte), p(iano) (Duckworth, Allen, Hardcastle and Ball 1990); there are also resemblances to later interlinear intonational transcriptions (see Chapter 4 Section 4.11.3) and to Halliday’s (1970: 52) representations of intonational pitch. One of the first representations of vowels in an abstract vowel space was presented in the 1781 Dissertatio Physiologico-Medica de Formatione Loquelae of Christoph Hellwag (1754–1835) in the form of a ‘vowel triangle’ (Kemp 2001: 1469–70). It has clear similarities to the cardinal vowel system of Daniel Jones (e.g. Jones 1918/1972: 31–9) and the modern IPA vowel quadrilateral. Lexicography rather than general phonetics was more in the ascendency at this time as shown in the number of English pronouncing dictionaries which appeared with various ways of representing consonants, vowels and word-accent (Beal 2008). In his Grand Repository of the English Language of 1775 Thomas Spence (1750–1814) produced ‘a genuine, scientific, phonetic alphabet’ (Abercrombie (1948/1965: 68). The letters of this alphabet are modifications of the roman alphabet and are presented in alphabetical order with keyword exemplifications but without phonetic descriptions. It is questionable whether Spence really adds anything to general phonetic science, although he can be applauded for showing that it is possible to regularise the grapheme–phoneme correspondences of English into a ‘broad phonemic system’ (Beal 1999: 89). John Walker (1732–1807) achieved greater fame than Spence with his A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of 1791. Walker’s classification scheme shows no advance on those of Wilkins or Holder, and his phonetic descriptions are sometimes less perceptive. He does not appear to have understood Holder’s account of voicing despite referring to it. Labiodental fricatives he describes as produced ‘by pressing the upper teeth upon the under lip’ (Walker 1791: 6), which fails to assign active and passive roles accurately to the articulators. He seems unsure whether the sounds corresponding to English orthographic and | are single sounds or not, describing them rather confusedly as ‘mixed or aspirated’, having ‘a hiss or aspiration joined with them, which mingles with the letter’ (Walker 1791: 4–5). While Walker seems to have had an acute ear for detecting subtleties of sound, he lacked a corresponding acuity in matters of phonetic theory. A huge influence on phonetics, because of the need to apply it as a tool in historical and comparative linguistics, came from the work of Sir William Jones, a British legal official stationed in India. Although resemblances between Sanskrit and European languages had been noted from the late sixteenth century (Robins 1990: 150), it was Jones’s presentation of his famous paper with the unpromising title Third Anniversary Discourse in 1786 that established beyond doubt the systematic relationship of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin, and set historical linguistics 68 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice on a footing where it could apply the taxonomic approaches current in botany and biology to historical linguistic data. Interest in Sanskrit and the availability of Sanskrit texts brought ancient Indian phonetics into European scholarship such that, according to Allen (1953: 7) as we saw above (Section 2.3.1), ‘Henry Sweet takes over where the Indian treatises leave off’, although Alexander J. Ellis had already made a study of Indian ideas, as had the German-trained American linguistic W. D. Whitney. The two biggest influences on Sweet were probably Ellis and Bell, but he also greatly admired the Norwegian phonetician Johan Storm and took serious note of what was going on in Germany in the work of Carl Merkel, Eduard Sievers and Wilhelm Viëtor. Sweet’s contributions to phonetic theory have been evaluated by Kelly and Local (1984), who stress the attention to detail, consistency of description and comprehensiveness of scope of his work compared to his predecessors such as Bell. A. J. Ellis (1814–90) is best known for his researches on, and conjectured phonetic descriptions of, English pronunciation from the Old English period through to his own time, and for his work with Isaac Pitman on systems of notation (see Kelly 1981) leading to his own palaeotype system (Ellis 1867). Alexander Melville Bell (1819–1905) is probably best known for his Visible Speech, also dated 1867, an experiment in organic alphabet creation based on detailed analyses of consonant and vowel production. It combines the principles of Wilkins’s organic and systematic alphabets so that ‘all Relations of Sound are symbolized by Relations of Form’ (Bell 1867: 35). Sweet at first resisted the organic approach to notation but soon became a convert (see Chapter 3 Sections 3.1.4 and 3.1.5). Advances in phonetic theory at this time owed much to comparative and historical linguistics on the one hand, and to medical understandings of anatomy and physiology on the other. Although the development of the comparative method in the first half of the century by scholars such as Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp and Jakob Grimm sought to establish language relationships through shared sounds, the emphasis was on their lexical distribution rather than the phonetic structure of the sounds themselves (Morpurgo Davies 1998: 163). It soon became clear, however, in the attempts at internal reconstruction by scholars such as August Schleicher and Friedrich Schlegel, that their methods would require a phonetic theory sophisticated enough to account for phenomena covered by sound laws such as Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law. On the practical side, a good notation system makes for more concise, accurate and systematic descriptions of historical and comparative data, as Ellis (1867: 1–2) remarked. From the 1850s, articulatory and acoustic frameworks of phonetic description became available in Germany through the work of the physiologists Ernst Brücke and Carl Merkel, and the physicist Herrmann von Helmholtz, who used their scientific knowledge to study properties of speech sounds. Helmholtz (1821–94), for example, identified separate vowel resonances in the mouth and pharynx, and undertook experiments in synthetic speech (Dudley and Tarnoczy 1950). By applying advances in medical technology, techniques of laryngoscopy, aerometry and direct palatography were developed for investigation of the articulatory domain of phonetics, and the acoustic domain started to become more amenable to investigation with Scott’s Phonautograph, invented in 1859. These developments in the understand- Origins and Development 69 ing of the physical properties of speech made it possible to give a more explanatory account of historical sound changes, and formed the foundation for Eduard Sievers’s achievements in general phonetic theory and its application to historical linguistics and linguistic phonetics (see Kohler 1981). But perhaps the invention with the greatest impact on phonetic transcription took place in 1877, the year after Sievers’s Grundzüge der Lautphysiologie and the year of Sweet’s Handbook of Phonetics. This was the invention by Thomas Alva Edison, himself hard of hearing since childhood, of a device for audio recording and playback. Without audio recording we would not be able to collect speech from different speakers and store it for later analysis, nor would we be able to listen to the same utterance again and again, which is essential for analytic listening. All impressionistic transcription would have to be live, and its inability to keep up with continuous speech would make it a rather poor tool. Nowadays we take recorded speech very much for granted, but as phoneticians we should probably be more thankful for this invention than for anything else to be found in phonetics laboratories. It is hard to overestimate the impact that sound recording has had on the development of phonetics as a data-driven science. Henry Sweet’s Handbook of Phonetics of 1877 and Sievers’s Grundzüge der Phonetik of 1881 show us the state of phonetic theory in western Europe in the years leading up to the formation of the IPA. Both authors stressed the importance of accurate phonetic descriptions of living languages and the value of practical phonetic skills. Both were also suspicious of instrumental phonetics and tried to discourage it, which in hindsight looks rather Canute-like given the ubiquity of instrumental methods in phonetics today, and somewhat misplaced in the light of what they have revealed to us about the articulatory and acoustic structure of speech. Nevertheless, it would be unwise to dismiss Sweet’s plea that instrumental methods should not be allowed to supersede auditory methods, a plea taken up later in this book in Chapters 5 and 6. The context in which the International Phonetic Alphabet, the most well- known and widely used phonetic notation system, had its beginnings was formed from the influences outlined above coupled with the desire to make pronunciation clearly representable in written form. Two groups who made common cause in pursuit of this desire were spelling reformers and teachers of modern languages, and several of the most influential and energetic founders of the International Phonetic Association were both, including the leading figure Paul Passy. 2.3.5 From correspondence to representation In summary, the process by which the phonographic orientation of writing and the development of phonetic theory have made possible a proper phonetic notation and proper phonetic transcription is one where relations of correspondence change into relations of denotation and representation. Phonography provides written characters which correspond to units of pronunciation. Phonetic theory provides models for units of pronunciation. If written characters are used to denote these models then they are being used as general phonetic symbols. When speech phenomena are mapped onto these models, then the phonetic symbols denote descriptive models and can be said to represent those phenomena. It is 70 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice the difference in function between correspondence and representation that essentially distinguishes spelling from phonetic transcription. Failure to distinguish correspondence relations from representation relations is responsible for the Aristotelian doctrine that written language represents spoken language, and it sustains the energies of spelling reformers who wish to regularise sound–spelling correspondences. Even in a fully regular and consistent phonographic writing in which sound–spelling correspondences were entirely isomorphic with symbol– sound representations, spelling and transcription would still be different activities with different purposes and interpretations: the former identifies meaningful items of linguistic content in written language, the latter embodies an analysis of meaningless items of linguistic expression in spoken language. Pseudo-phonetic transcription was possible more or less from the beginning of glottographic writing. Writing a foreign name in Ancient Egyptian uniconsonantal characters results in a spelling of that name, but the procedure by which the spelling is constructed is one which exploits the possibility of a representational relation between the speech phonemona observed when the name is pronounced and the pre-theoretical models abstracted from experiences of hearing similar sounds. That is to say, pseudo-transcription has always been one way of producing new spellings. 2.3.6 Spelling reform We have seen how phonetics in sixteenth-century England began in the service of spelling reform to make literacy easier to acquire and foreign languages easier to study, and then became increasingly focused on description and taxonomy. The emergence of phonetics as a more scientific discipline in the nineteenth century gave a surer basis to taxonomic categories and terminology. It also loosened the ties with spelling reform, but it was some time before it cut them. The 1949 Principles of the International Phonetic Association recognises reformed spelling as an application of IPA symbols, thus giving symbols the status of letters, an aim dropped in the 1999 version. The application of phonetics to language learning and teaching does not now have such a strong presence in the IPA’s journal as it did in the early 1990s. Phonetics is not now primarily seen as existing to support the learning and teaching of languages but as a body of theoretical and practical knowledge about how speech is structured to be put more in the service of phonology, sociolinguistics and speech technology than language pedagogy. Spelling reform is usually thought of as a policy to increase the transparency of sound–spelling correspondences, but several of the lasting examples of reformed spellings in the history of English orthography have in fact had the opposite effect. They date from the fifteenth through to the seventeenth centuries, when some letters were introduced into spellings for etymological reasons where the spoken forms had no corresponding sounds to motivate them (Scragg 1974: 56–9). The consequence is that sound–spelling correspondence becomes complicated and increasingly lexically specific. The introduced into the French loan dette to give us debt through conscious reference to Latin debitum raises the question as to whether we should say that corresponds to /ɛ/, or corresponds to /t/, or even corresponds to /ɛt/, or whether we can simply leave Origins and Development 71 out of correspondence relations altogether as preferred by Carney (1994: 213). All options are lexically restricted (cf. bet, met, set, get, let, web) such that the spelling has similarities to a xenogram (see Section 1.1.4): we use the Latin- influenced spelling for the written language form of debt, and pronounce it /dɛt/ in the spoken form. The lasting success of Latinising etymologically driven changes to English spelling, whether based on true or false etymologies, further exemplifies the power of anti-phonography in glottographic writing and the systemic independence of written and spoken language despite their obvious close association. Phonographically motivated spelling reformers have generally had an uphill battle. They advocate in effect a state of affairs in which spelling would be isomorphic with transcription and spellings would be performance scores functioning as prescriptive models. Their motives are socially progressive, arguing that it will facilitate literacy for the masses and open up greater access to foreign languages by making them easier to learn from written sources. However, the egalitarian aims of spelling reform tend to be undermined when it comes to deciding whose pronunciation a reformed spelling should be based on. John Hart, one of the earliest proponents of reforming English spelling phonographically (see Section 2.3.2), was forthright in his views on this, deliberately echoing Quintilian in saying it should be based on the speech of the learned, and most emphatically not on the speech of ‘the unexpert vulgar’. How it should be decided whose pronunciation will shape a reformed orthography is a serious problem which is likely to cause attempts at spelling reform to flounder, particularly in the case of a language like English with social and geographical variation extending over nations and continents. If reformed spellings were to follow the speech of the learned elite in Quintilian’s quomodo sonat fashion, then an Alcuinian policy of ad litteras (see Chapter 4 Section 4.13.3) would have to be imposed on the ‘unexpert vulgar’ if they were to gain any benefit from the enterprise. The benefit would come at the price of abandoning local norms of speech in a top-down, centralised policy of prescriptive accent levelling. Henry Sweet (1877: 196), for example, advocated the teaching and testing of pronunciation in schools so that it would match a reformed spelling. If bath and trap words were to have different vowel letters because different vowel qualities are used by the social elite, then either everyone has to use those vowel qualities or the spelling reform is only meaningful to those native speakers who already make the vowel quality distinction and do not need to be told; it would of course have benefits for non-native learners of English. Spelling reform in a language exhibiting large-scale social and regional variation can hardly be other than anti-democratic if it is to have any significant effect for its native-speaker population. The only way to avoid this totalitarianism is for each variety to develop its own spellings, in which case reading will be either more restricted or more demanding, and cross-variety written communication put in jeopardy. The strongest linguistic arguments against phonographically driven spelling reform are founded on the view, expressed in Section 1.1, that the ontology of language as a lexico-grammatical system is equally independent of writing and speech, and that characters and sounds are alternative sets of clothing enabling language to be made manifest in different media for communicative purposes of 72 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice all kinds. Any correspondence relations that can be set up between speech and writing are merely incidental and irrelevant for the functioning of the language qua language. Weighing against this view, however, is the undeniable importance of phonographic processes in the history of written language, as outlined in Section 2.2, which seems to be evidence that literate language users have always valued at least some transparency in sound–spelling correspondence. It may be that two different needs have to be reconciled: the need for spoken language and written language each to function effectively on its own terms, including social- indexical functions, and the need for literate users to be able to translate between spoken and written language as effectively as possible. Trying to force reforms to meet the latter need may upset the balance that has to be struck. Nevertheless, the phonographic tendencies in written language which have given hope to spelling reformers have been fortuitous for the development of resources for phonetic notation and transcription. Notes 1. The term ‘letter’ did not mean the same among earlier writers as it does today. Instead of meaning only the alphabetic letters of written language, it was formerly used to mean an element, or unit, of linguistic analysis neutral with respect to written and spoken language which could manifest as a written character or a sound (see Abercrombie 1949, 1993: 316–18). 2. The first edition was 1653. The edition consulted is the sixth, of 1765, in Kemp’s (1972) facsimile edition with translation from the original Latin. 3. In fact these categories would generate nasalised continuants which do occur. 3 e Phonetic Notation e 3.0 Introduction The purpose of a system of phonetic notation is to function as a resource for denoting theoretical models which become descriptive models when used in transcriptions (see Chapter 1 Section 1.3.1, Chapter 4 Section 4.0). There are two sides to phonetic notation, namely the design of the glyph and its denotation. The history of written language and phonetic notation is full of the same glyph being used with different values. Just to take a random example, the ‘bullseye’ glyph ‘ʘ’ seems to have started life as a variant of the Greek letter theta in the Umbrian alphabet, for which it was also used in Tocharian; it was drafted several centuries later into the Gothic alphabet invented by the Greek Bishop Ulfilas (aka Wulfila) in the fourth century ce for IPA [w] (Coulmas 1996: 168), appears with the phonetic value [nd] in the Turkish Yenisei runes (ibid.: 515), corresponds to [s] in the Berber Tifinagh alphabet (ibid.: 504), was used in late eighteenth-century America by William Thornton for IPA [ʍ] (Abercrombie 1981: 210, 216), turns up in the Vai syllabary in 1820s Liberia for [ku] (Coulmas 1996: 538), and then in 1976 became the IPA symbol for the bilabial click (Pullum and Ladusaw 1996: 132). Fascinating as the history of individual glyphs is, the focus in this chapter will be on the principles behind notation systems and how they function as a whole to denote phonetic categories. Phonetic notations come in different types. They can be constructed according to different principles and be used in transcriptions to express analyses at different levels of phonetic, phonological and morpho-phonological structure. This chapter is concerned with describing principles of notation construction and how they relate to phonetic theory; Chapter 4 will consider the different types of transcriptions which can be made by employing notation systems. Any phonetician engaged in transcription is likely to be in sympathy with Sweet (1877: 100) when he asserts that ‘[t]he notation of sounds is scarcely less important than their analysis’. Of course, analysis is more important than notation because without it there is nothing to symbolise, but without notation we cannot express analyses so succinctly and conveniently. Once sufficient familiarity with phonetic theory and transcription conventions is attained, phonetic analysis can 74 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice be read from notation relatively quickly and easily providing the notation is user- friendly. The ultimate aim of a system of proper phonetic notation is to be able to denote all the categories of phonetic classification that one’s phonetic theory identifies, and thus to denote all points in taxonomic phonetic space. Each point in that space is a model onto which phonetic data can be mapped (see Chapter 1 Section 1.3). Another way to think of this is to say that a notation system should be able to populate the taxonomic phonetic space mapped out by phonetic theory with symbols so as to leave no yawning gaps. How symbols denote categories is an issue that leads to looking at the internal structure of symbols as well as relationships between symbols and denotata. These issues will be addressed for each type of notation considered in the following sections. The issue of whether there is information value in the sequential arrangement of symbol components – that is to say, the question of whether symbols are functionally ordered or functionally simultaneous – will be considered in Section 3.5. 3.1 Organic-Iconic Notation An organic notation is one in which symbols denote categories defined in terms of articulators or articulatory states and actions. It is therefore anchored firmly in the articulatory domain and can be thought of as populating abstract articulatory space with symbols. In organic notation, abstract articulatory space is the taxonomic phonetic space. It has been customary to classify as ‘organic’ only those notation systems which explicitly and systematically set out to denote sounds by their articulatory formation such that each symbol can be analysed into components denoting individual articulators. I shall follow this custom, but it should be noted that any phonetic notation is organic to the extent that the conventions for its interpretation take an articulatory perspective. The great problem with an organic bias in phonetic notation is that in practice most phonetic analysis is not directly articulatory but either perceptual or, since the invention of spectrography, acoustic. In the history of phonetic notation, organic systems have either been iconic, so that there is some visual similarity between the symbol and what it denotes, or analogical, so that the same denotatum is always denoted by the same symbol but without visual similarity. In analogical notation the relation between symbol and denotatum is therefore arbitrary. Examples of the iconic type are Bishop John Wilkins’s organic alphabet of 1668 and Alexander Melville Bell’s Visible Speech symbols of 1867. The analogical type is exemplified by the symbols of Francis Lodwick’s 1686 Universall Alphabet and Amasa D. Sproat’s symbols of 1857. The division into iconic and analogical notations is not, however, always clear-cut. The characters of the Korean Hangŭl orthography and the symbols of the Passy-Jones alphabet are somewhere in the middle, but they will be dealt with under the ‘organic-iconic’ heading here. The most complete and transparent kind of organic-iconic notation would be one where the whole configuration of the vocal tract during the production of a sound was depicted in a symbol, but such symbols would not be easy to read and write, being in effect highly detailed drawings of physical vocal tract space; nor would they be selective in expressing an analysis of the particular sound being represented – all parts of the vocal tract would appear to be equally implicated Phonetic Notation 75 and equally important in contributing to the formation of the sound. To be useful and informative, segmental organic-iconic symbols need to be selective, stylised diagrams of those articulators identified as responsible for producing the sound in question, the selection being the responsibility of phonetic theory. There should be a one-to-one relationship between an organic-iconic symbol and an articulatory category such that, for example, labiality is always denoted by the same graphic representation of the lips, and plosiveness, and voicing, and so on. Each organic-iconic symbol thus denotes an articulatory category. Whole consonants and vowels are then represented by composite multi-category symbols. The great advantage claimed for a good organic-iconic notation is that it is maximally analytic and maximally transparent to any reader with sufficient knowledge of the vocal tract. One great disadvantage is that it tends to be difficult to use in practice, but a further disadvantage is that it cannot be used to denote dimensions of classification which cannot be tied to a particular articulatory parameter, for example sonority, sibilance or rhoticity. These disadvantages are no doubt partly responsible for the fact that none of the organic-iconic notations which have been devised have been widely or lastingly adopted by phoneticians, despite enthusiastic support from leading phoneticians such as Henry Sweet (e.g. Sweet 1881). Some examples of organic-iconic notation systems are discussed in the following sections. 3.1.1 Korean Hangu˘l The first known notation system on organic-iconic principles is the Korean Hangŭl orthography (see Chapter 2 Section 2.2.5) introduced in the fifteenth century to replace Chinese characters for the spelling of Korean words. Most Hangŭl letters are complexes constructed from characters that represent particular articulatory configurations, as shown in Figure 3.1. For example, in the FIGURE 3.1: Articulatory configurations motivating the Hangŭl letters. Reproduced with kind permission from King Sejong the Great: The Everlasting Light of Korea, p. 92 76 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice letters (transliterated respectively as ), the upper horizontal line is a component character corresponding to the palate oriented with the front to the left; the lines contacting it correspond, respectively, to closures at the alveolar and velar places of articulation. Under the influence of the structure of Chinese characters, Hangŭl letters are composed into blocks corresponding to syllables, so that trisyllabic datugo ‘fighting, quarrelling’ is written with three syllable blocks (separated from each other here for ease of identification) as 다 투 고. The Hangŭl letters belong to an orthography but have a phonetic theory underpinning their design (Sampson 1985: 124–9; King 1996: 219–20). They therefore constitute a proto-phonetic notation system as well as an orthographic system. This system has been developed into a proper phonetic notation system by Hyun Bok Lee of Seoul National University. Called the International Korean Phonetic Alphabet (IKPA), it was first published by the Korean Language Society in 1971. Using the Hangŭl organic principles for the construction of complex symbols, Lee uses diacritics and modifying strokes to extend the notation to cover sounds not found in Korean and arranges the symbols linearly instead of in syllable blocks. Transcription of datugo then becomes [ᄃ ᅡ ᄐ ᅮ ᄀ ᅩ] with each consonant and vowel clearly separate in sequence from left to right. IKPA transforms Hangŭl characters from proto-symbols into proper phonetic symbols, although organic-iconicity is difficult to identify in relation to some of the characters and they are not all systematically deployed throughout the system. The category ‘fricative’, for example, is denoted by a subscript circle similar to the IPA voicelessness diacritic, but not all fricative symbols have it. However, in principle, each articulatory category is denoted by a separate symbol the graphic shape of which is based on some aspect of how the vocal tract implements that category. An example transcription using IKPA is given in Lee (1999: 123). 3.1.2 Helmont’s interpretation of Hebrew letters A curious twist on the organic-iconic approach is found in a book by the Dutch philosopher and alchemist Franciscus Mercurius ab Helmont published in 1667. Helmont tried to show that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet represented the articulatory configurations for the corresponding sounds. But his interpretations of the letters as a kind of phonetic tablature notation, as if they were like Korean Hangŭl, led him to incorrect conclusions about the formation of the sounds. His description of [b], based on the shape of the letter bēth < > ב, would have it that ‘[l]ingua cum maxima corporis sui parte, valide admodem palato applicatur, adeo, ut propterea mucro ejus antrorsum quadantenus incurvetur’ (‘the largest part of the body of the tongue is applied fully to the palate, so much so that its tip is to some extent curved forwards’) (Helmont 1667: 60–1). A similar tongue position is attributed to [m] from the letter-shape of mēm < > ם: ‘Lingua palatum leniter attingit, prout et labia sese leniter exosculantur’ (‘the tongue strikes the palate softly, and according as the lips are gently kissed by each other’) (ibid.: 74). His diagram for [b] is given in Figure 3.2 alongside his vocal tract diagram. Phonetic Notation 77 FIGURE 3.2: Helmont’s diagram of Hebrew bēth (left) and his vocal tract diagram (right). Reproduced with the permission of the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library 3.1.3 Wilkins’s organic-iconic symbols The Frenchman Honorat Rambaud may have been the first European to experiment with an organic alphabet (Abercrombie 1948/1965: 50), but better known and more influential is the one devised by John Wilkins, bishop of Chester, in the seventeenth century (see Chapter 2 Section 2.3.2). As with Hangŭl and IKPA, the organising principle is that each subsegmental category is denoted by a symbol, and symbols combine into complex symbols – ‘natural Pictures of the Letters’ – to represent segment-sized sounds. Wilkins’s organic alphabet is reproduced in Figure 3.3, which shows for each sound how, according to the phonetic understanding of the time, the vocal tract is modified compared to the partly labelled at-rest diagram in the lower right of the table. For voiced sounds the epiglottis is shown in two positions to indicate its oscillation, which Wilkins erroneously thought was the voicing mechanism, despite his claim to have read Holder (Wilkins 1668: 357). Airflow is also represented for all sounds except oral stops and the first three vowels, the latter presumably because the view is frontal in order to show lip-shape; airflow is shown bifurcated in the case of laterals and issuing from the nose in the case of nasals. In the top right of each picture is an organic-iconic symbol intended to capture the essential articulatory state shown in the diagram; note that these symbols are oriented to the right whereas the diagrams are oriented to the left. Wilkins did not intend these organic symbols to be used in transcriptions; instead he assigned to each one a non-organic upper case roman alphabetic symbol, shown in the top left corner. 78 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice FIGURE 3.3: Wilkins’s organic alphabet and articulatory diagrams of 1668. Reproduced with the permission of the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library Phonetic Notation 79 3.1.4 Bell’s Visible Speech notation The Visible Speech notation of Alexander Melville Bell (Bell 1867) is nowadays the most well-known organic-iconic notation system (MacMahon 1996: 838). As Bell himself explained, ‘[i]t is the aim of this System of Letters to write every sound which the mouth can make, and to represent it exactly as the mouth makes it’ (Bell 1867: 70, italics added). It is devised on basically the same principles as Wilkins’s organic alphabet, but there are differences in the categories denoted and how they are expressed. Bell provides diagrams of the vocal tract for consonants and vowels, reproduced here in Figure 3.4. The principal organs of speech are labelled with numbers and shown in their neutral at-rest positions except for the tongue-body and tongue-tip, which are shown in both lowered and raised positions. The epiglottis is represented (not with great anatomical accuracy) but not labelled, reflecting the fact that Bell knew it played no role in voicing, which he correctly attributed to vibration of the vocal ligaments (Bell 1867: 46). Voicing as a separate feature is denoted by the symbol [ɪ], indicative of the vocal folds meeting along the midline of the glottis; when combined with other features into a segmental symbol, it becomes a short line ‘inserted within the consonant curve’ (ibid.: 66), for example [] represents a velar articulation, [] a velar articulation with voicing. Bell’s symbols are less explicitly organic and more diagrammatic than Wilkins’s but they go a considerable way towards FIGURE 3.4: Bell’s vocal tract diagrams for consonants and vowels (Bell 1867: 38) 80 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice justifying his claim that ‘the sound of every symbol is deducible from the form of the symbol itself’ (ibid.: 99), though the further claim that this can be done ‘without any encumbrance to the reader’s memory’ is perhaps less justifiable. Although the symbols are iconically motivated, one has to learn and remember what they stand for; it is hardly self-evident. One thing which is soon apparent when looking at proposed organic-iconic notations is that the same vocal organ can motivate different iconic representations. The symbol [] could denote open lips if attention were to be focused on the right-hand part of the symbol, and there is nothing intrinsic in [] to tell us it stands for a low back vowel with widened pharynx if we have not memorised the conventions. Interpretative conventions are no less necessary with iconic symbols than with other kinds. That is to say, their denotation is not completely determined by their form. It is also questionable whether users find it more convenient to interpret a complex symbol in terms of its constituent parts than to memorise it as a whole. The great value of Bell’s Visible Speech to us nowadays, apart from its value as an experiment in organic-iconic notation, is that it shows us explicitly the state of phonetic theory in the latter half of the nineteenth century, reminding us that much of what we take to be the sophistication of modern phonetics was in fact current at that time despite the absence of modern instrumentation. His appreciation of English contextual devoicing is a good example (Bell 1867: 67). 3.1.5 Sweet’s organic-iconic notation Although Sweet recognised that Bell’s organic symbols were at the mercy of changes in phonetic theory (Sweet 1877: 100–1), within three or four years he had come to the view that enough was known for certain about speech production to justify opting for an organic-iconic notation system (Sweet 1881: 183). Any tinkering about with it that might become necessary was, in his opinion, a small price (a) Phonetic Notation 81 (b) FIGURE 3.5: Sweet’s (1906) organic symbols for (a) consonants and (b) vowels to pay for avoiding the arbitrariness and ‘cross-associations’ of symbols based on roman alphabetic letters. By ‘cross-associations’ Sweet meant the problem of, for example, English and French phoneticians interpreting roman-based symbols in terms of their typical letter–sound correspondences in English and French, which he saw as particularly likely in the case of vowels (Sweet 1881: 181–2). Sweet revised aspects of Bell’s notation (see Figure 3.5) to increase the simplicity and distinctiveness of certain symbols, for example the symbols for 82 Phonetic Transcription in Theory and Practice nasals, thus making them easier to use. But he also made changes based on theoretical differences concerning the production of certain sounds, for example glides. While he was highly respectful of Bell’s analysis of vowels, Sweet did not adopt Bell’s set of glide symbols, objecting to his category ‘glide’ on two grounds (Sweet 1881: 197–9). The first was that it confused two distinctions: consonant–vowel and syllabic–non- syllabic (cf. the consonant–contoid and vowel–vocoid distinctions introduced by Pike (1943: 143–5)). Secondly, Sweet did not accept that there could be a category of stricture between close vowel and fricative consonant. It is not clear from Bell’s description of glides as ‘intermediate to consonants and vowels’ (Bell 1867: 69) whether he really meant intermediate in stricture or in some other sense, but modern phonetic theory does in fact recognise that the stricture for [j], for example, tends to be closer than for [i], as can be seen when they occur in sequence in English yeast, but not close enough to produce the friction of [ʝ]. Sweet proposed that non-syllabic vowels be symbolised by reducing the size of the vowel symbol, so that IPA [j] becomes [], a smaller version of [] (= IPA [i]), being then the same height as a consonant symbol (Sweet 1881: 204–5). Sweet (1906: 52–62) then used the term ‘glide’ for coarticulatory transitional sound qualities produced epiphenomenally as a result of the vocal tract moving from the articulation of one sound to the articulation of the following sound, or between a sound and silence. 3.1.6 The Passy-Jones organic alphabet The last serious attempt to launch an organic notation was by Paul Passy and Daniel Jones (see Passy 1907). Although the symbol shapes are obviously heavily influenced by those of Bell and Sweet (see Figure 3.6), they are made to look more like familiar roman letters (Collins and Mees 1999: 52–3) and thus to loosen their iconic connection with vocal tract structures. In consequence, any advantages conferred by iconicity are diminished, while the disadvantages of unfamiliarity remain, which may be one reason why this notation was soon abandoned. FIGURE 3.6: The Passy-Jones organic alphabet (Le Maître phonétique 1907, Supplement) Phonetic Notation 83 In the Passy-Jones system, the size of the symbol also has signification. A small version of a symbol denotes a retracted place of articulation relative to the larger version. Labiodental symbols are smaller versions of bilabial ones, alveolars of dental ones, and uvulars of velar ones. The system also contains ‘bronchiales’ (probably because of Sweet’s view that Arabic [ħ] and [ʕ] are produced below the glottis (Sweet 1904: 37)) which are symbolised by smaller versions of the ‘laryngeale’ symbols. An obvious problem with the distinctive use of symbol size is knowing which is intended if a symbol is used on its own. Size is also used to distinguish between a ‘roulée’ (trill) and a ‘semi- roulée’ (tap or flap). The straight line inside the consonant curve is halved in length, no doubt motivated by the idea that a tap is like half a trill, i.e. one beat instead of the typical two or three beats found in singleton trills (Laver 1994: 219). Jones (1918/1972: 47) describes a trill as ‘a rapid succession of taps’ and a flap as ‘a single tap’ without mentioning the very different mechanisms modern phonetic theory takes to be responsible for their production (see Laver 1994: 224). 3.2 Organic-Analogical Notation Symbols in organic-analogical notation systems are more arbitrary than those in organic-iconic systems. The principle of analogical notation is that each phonetic category is consistently denoted by the same symbol or symbol component. However, the way this is done varies considerably in different notation systems, as does the way in which the notation system relates to phonetic theory in terms of explicitness and accuracy. These differences can be seen in the examples considered in the following sections. 3.2.1 Wilkins’s analogical notation In the same work in which he published his organic symbols, Wilkins provided a chart of analogical symbols (Wilkins 1668: 376). It is reproduced here in Figure 3.7, where we can see his list of consonantal roman letters and digraphs (and one trigraph) given in lower case in column 1 and upper case in column 9. In row 1 he gives the vowel letters ([ ] = the strut vowel, IPA [ʌ]; see Wilkins 1668: 363). Column 2 and row 2 contain, respectively, the equivalent analogical symbols for the consonants and vowels in isolation. Sounds represented in rows 3–17 are based on a straight vertical stroke, which is tilted for the semivowels – backwards for [w], forwards for [j], perhaps motivated by their respective relationships to front and back vowels. 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