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Linguistics

Notes 2. Phonetic Transcription
A phonetic transcription “containing a lot of information about the exact quality of the sounds
would be called a narrow phonetic transcription, while the one which only include a little more
information than a phonemic transcription would be called a broad phonetic transcription “.
12.2 Phonetic Transcription

Phonetic transcription (or phonetic notation) is the visual system of symbolisation of the sounds
occurring in spoken human language. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic
alphabet (such as the International Phonetic Alphabet). Phonetic transcription becomes important,
because the spelling of a word does not tell us how you should pronounce it. Consider two words,
call and cell both the word begin with c but their pronunciations are different. In word call ‘c’ is
pronounced as /k/ and in word cell ‘c’ is pronounced as /s/. Phonetic transcription is based on the
principle of one sound-one symbol i.e., one symbol will always represent one sound.
Phonetic transcription may aim to transcribe the phonology of a language, or it may wish to go
further and specify the precise phonetic realisation. In all systems of transcription we may therefore
distinguish between broad transcription and narrow transcription. Broad transcription indicates,
only the more noticeable phonetic features of an utterance, whereas narrow transcription encodes
more information about the phonetic variations of the specific allophones in the utterance. The
difference between broad and narrow is a continuum. One particular form of a broad transcription is
a phonemic transcription, which disregards all allophonic difference, and, as the name implies, is not
really a phonetic transcription at all, but a representation of phonemic structure.
Phonetic transcription can be simply defined as the representation of the alphabet of any language in
the word into the special language sound symbols, as one given by the International Phonetic
Association, which is known as International Phonetic Alphabet. The English word ‘call’ when
transcribed into phonetic alphabet will look like /c :l/ and ‘cell’ will look like /sel/. We can see
from the above examples that the letter ‘c’ can be pronounced in two different ways, which can be
very well distinguished by the phonetic transcription of the words. In English there isn’t any
relationship between the spellings and the pronunciation of the word. There are various instances
when one letter is pronounced differently in different words. Therefore, the concept of phonetic
transcription can avoid lot of confusion and make this entire deal of pronunciation simple. Phonetic
transcription is based on the principle of one sound, one symbol.
Phonetic transcription can be of many types, but the widely used are phonemic or broad phonetic
transcription and allophonic or narrow phonetic transcription.
Initial Two Consonant Clusters
With reference to initial consonant clusters, Roach (2000: 71) refers to the cluster of two categories in
English, e.g. ‘smoke’ /sm ∂ uk/. The s is called the pre-initial consonant and the m is called the initial
consonant (see table 12.1.)
Table 12.1
Two Consonant Clusters with Pre-initial s

Pre- Initial
Initial
s plus p t k b d g f θ s ∫ HV ∂ z 3 m n ŋ

sp m st Ik sk Im – – – sf I ∂ – – – – – – – – smel sn ∂ U –
I
(Taken from Roach, 2000: 72)
The other sort begins with one of a set of about fifteen consonants, followed by one of the set l, r, w,
j, the first consonant of these clusters is called the initial consonant and the second is the post-initial
e.g., ‘play’ /ple 4 /, ’try’ /tra4 /, ‘quick’ /kwik/, ‘few’/fju:/, (lbid.: 73).

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