BAST ENGLISH Free language learning resources.
© Samuel Haldane 2005-2006
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Transcription: Introduction

This website uses symbols to transcribe phonemes (sounds). For an explanation of what these symbols represent, click here: vowels, consonants. The following special symbols are used:
ə Λ ā ē ī ō ū ű œ θ δ š ž č ĵ ŋ
If your browser cannot display any of these characters, you are advised to move to a browser which can, such as Internet Explorer 6.0.
Note: an apostrophe ' is placed before the accented vowel.

This website aims to explain the pronunciation of English words. To do this, we need symbols for the phonemes (sounds) used in English.

The International Phonetic Association (IPA) to has created a script which can (in theory) express the sounds of any human language. I have chosen not to use the IPA script for these reasons:

1. I want each phoneme to be transcribed with a single character where possible. This is not completely possible, but where it cannot be done I have tried to use a single character with a diacritic attached to it. Thus I write /ē/ for the phoneme whose typical realisation is [eI] in the IPA script. This system of one symbol for one phoneme is easier to follow.

2. The same word is pronounced very differently in different dialects. I aim to write a phonemic transcription which can be read in many different pronunciations. If the symbol used were the pronunciation in one dialect only, that would defeat my aim.

Therefore, I have created a transcription system which uases, as far as possible, one symbol for each phoneme of English. The symbols used are as close as is reasonably possible in appearance to letters used for those sounds in the languages of Europe.

Symbols for vowels.
To understand English vowels it will help to understand rhoticity.

Symbols for consonants.
To understand English consonants it will help to understand palatalisation.

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