Page 105 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 8: Diphthongs and Its Phonetic Transcription

Collins English Dictionary, the Oxford Pocket Dictionary, and the Hutchinson Encyclopedic Dictionary, Notes
as well as in my own Longman Pronunciation Dictionary and in the 14th and 15th editions of
Daniel Jones’s English Pronouncing Dictionary, now edited by Peter Roach. It is what you will
find in Gimson’s Introduction to the Pronunciation of English and in the second edition of
O’Connor’s Better English Pronunciation. It is used in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary,
the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and the Collins Cobuild Dictionary. Almost all
recent EFL textbooks published in Britain have adopted it.
w bit • put, foot
e bet ^ cut, blood
F bat Z lot
Here (left) is how the short c ago vowels are represented in this scheme. To them we must
add schwa (right), the weak vowel of ago, banana.
To the right we see the symbols for the long vowels (monophthongs). Note that in every case
not only is there a length mark, but the symbol shape is different from that for the corresponding
short vowel.
i + beat u + boot
f+ nurse
Z+ cart ]+ caught
Lastly we have the diphthongs. These are vowels whose quality noticeably alters as the tongue
moves in the course of their production. They are represented by two letters, one indicating the
start of the diphthongal movement, the other indicating its end or general direction.
ew face c goat
aw price a mouth
]w choice
wc near c poor
ec square
There are also the sequences to be ae fire ae power

w
heard in words such as fire, power, which some people analyse as triphthongs: they are
represented by the diphthong symbols as in price, mouth plus schwa. Some authors recognize
other similar sequences as well (player, slower...), but there really seems to be no need to list
them separately.
English, like all languages, gradually changes over time. The transcription of some words has
to change accordingly. Dictionaries still generally prescribe / e / for words such as poor, but it
has to be admitted that more and more people pronounce / ] :/ instead, making poor like pour,
pore, paw, and similarly with other / e / words.
Another recent trend is that of i happy u situation
pronouncing the vowel at the end of happy, coffee, valley tense, like beat, rather than lax like bit.
This is actually another weak vowel, restricted like schwa to unstressed syllables. Traditionally
it was identified with the vowel of bit, and transcribed identically, /w/. However LDOCE
decided instead to use the symbol /i/ (without length marks) for this vowel. This was intended
as a kind of cover symbol, which everyone could interpret in their own way: traditionalists
could think of it as identical with /w/, whereas users of the tenser vowel might want to identify
it with /i:/. I followed this lead in my LPD and so subsequently did Roach in EPD—15 and
Ashby in the Oxford ALD. (In fact we need two extra weak vowels: /i/ in happy and /u/ in
situation.)
It is fair to say that by the 90’s, with these minor tweakings, the Gimson quantitative-qualitative
scheme had become the standard IPA transcription system for RP-oriented phonetics.

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