This document provides an overview of phonetic transcription and the analysis of sounds in language. It discusses the major categories of sounds in English including consonants and vowels. For consonants, it lists the place and manner of articulation for common consonant sounds. It notes there are 6 stop consonants, 9 fricatives, 2 affricates, 4 nasals, and 2 other sonorants. For vowels, it indicates they are harder to characterize articulatorily but notes some of the vowel symbols used in the International Phonetic Alphabet and Americanist phonetic notation. The document emphasizes phonetic transcription aims to characterize the inventory of sounds in a language through symbols while accounting for cross-speaker and contextual sound variations.

2.  Transcribing: descriptive phonetics?
transcriptional phonetics? No standard name.
 Articulatory phonetics
 Acoustic phonetics
 Perceptual phonetics (Psychology)
 Computational phonetics (CS)

5.  There is a (1-dimensional) sequence of units that define or
characterize the utterance – rather than 2 or more parallel
streams. We think of the articulators as being a single
instrument rather than as an orchestra.
 We can slice the utterances into pieces vertically, in time, and
ignore most differences in duration.
 Sounds follow one another, and that’s it: there is no packing of
them into groups.

6. Consonants: first, the stops:
 b as in bat, sob, cubby
 d as in date, hid, ado
 g as in gas, lag, ragged
 p as in pet, tap, repeat
 t as in tap, pet, attack
 k as in king, pick, picking
When we need to emphasize
that we are using a phonetic
transcription, we put square
brackets [b] around the symbols.

7.  f as in fail, life
 v as in veil, live
 Ɵ as in thin, wrath
 ð as in this, bathe
 s as in soft, miss
 z as in zoo, as
 š (American) or ʃ (IPA) as in shame, mash
 ž (American) or ǯ (IPA)as in triage, garage,
azure,
 h as in help, vehicular

8.  č (American) or tʃ (IPA) as in cheap, hatch
 ǰ (American) or ʤ (IPA) as in jump, hedge

9.  m as in map, him
 n as in knot, tin (alveolar POA)
 ñ as in canyon
 ŋ as in sing, gingham, dinghy

10.  l as in large, gull
 r as in red, jar

11.  y (American) or j (IPA) as in boy, yellow
 w as in wall, cow

12.  6 stops
 2 affricates
 9 fricatives
 4 nasals
 2 liquids
 2 glides

13. Front:
I as in bit
Ɛ as in bet
æ as in bat
Back
as in put
ʌ as in putt
 as in bought
a or ɑ as in Mott, ma,
spot
ǝ “schwa” as in
about

14.  iy or i as in beet
 ey or ej as in bait
 ay as in bite
 oy as in boy
 uw or u as in boot
 ow as in boat
 aw as how

15.  We’ve listened to the sounds of “our” English, and
assigned a set of symbols to them.
 We abstracted away from pitch, loudness, and duration.
 We hope to better understanding our language’s sounds
by analyzing them as being composed of a sequence of
identifiable sounds, each of which occurs frequently in
words of the language.

16.  Frequently? If a sound occurs in just 2 or 3 words, we
don’t take it seriously (glottal stop, velar fricative)
 We do this against the background knowledge that the
inventory of sounds in English is not necessary as human
languages go: they are what they are against a much
wider backdrop of possible linguistic sounds.

17.  We also attempt to physically characterize these sounds:
acoustically and articulatorily. Consonants are easier to
characterize articulatorily, vowels acoustically.
 We are particularly interested in those ways in which the
English of Speaker 1 is different from the English of
Speaker 2: again, working against the background
knowledge of variation.

18.  We also characterize differences of sounds across sound
contexts: we say, notice the different sound that occurs
in front of a voiceless consonant in height.
 Looking ahead to phonology, we will attempt to get a
handle on variation in sounds in two ways:
 Two sounds are similar if (roughly) we can characterize one of
them as a variant of the other used in a particular context
(“under the influence of that context,” so to speak)
 Two sounds are distinct (hence, different) if two distinct words
differ only with regard to these two sounds, in otherwise
identical positions

19.  We try to characterize the inventory of sounds in
a language, knowing that that language chose one
set of sounds when a vast range of other
possibilities might have been chosen.

20.  We assign symbols to these sounds; in
addition, we want to characterize them as
best we can articulatorily and acoustically.
Sounds can be divided into two major groups,
consonants and vowels; or set along a
continuum known as the sonority hierarchy:

21.  Vowels
 Glides
 Liquids
 Nasals
 Obstruents:
 Fricatives
 Affricates
 Stops

22.  Consonants = obstruents + sonorants
 Obstruents: (oral) stops, affricates, and
fricatives
 Sonorants: nasals and liquids (l,r)

23. The crucial points of articulation for English
consonants are:
 Labial
 Labio-dental
 Dental
 Alveolar: at the alveolar ridge, behind the teeth
 Post-alveolar/palato-alveolar/alveopalatal:
multiple names for the same thing
 Retroflex (r only)
 Palatal (y, ñ)
 Velar
 Laryngeal

24. Obstruents:
 6 stops
 9 fricatives
 2 affricates
 Nasals (4)
 2 other sonorants (what are they?)
 2 glides

26.  Vowels are harder to characterize
articulatorily, but we try!
 The fact that it’s harder is reflected in the
fact that there is more than one way in
which it’s done. IPA is one way; American is
another.

30. From: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/music/vocres.html

31. /i/ green
/ae/ hat
/u/ boot
graphics thanks to
Kevin Russell, Univ of Manitoba

32. “Hi” /haj/
we were away a year ago FORMANTS