Phonetic transcription

Standard orthography in some languages, such as English and Tibetan, is often irregular and makes it difficult to predict pronunciation from spelling.The advantage of narrower transcription is that it can help learners to produce exactly the right sound and allows linguists to make detailed analyses of language variation.Furthermore, in Australian accents especially, the first-syllable vowel of little tends to be higher than in North America, leading to the possibility of employing an even narrower phonetic transcription to indicate this, such as [ˈɫɪ̝ɾɫ̩].On the other hand, a broad phonemic transcription of little is also possible that ignores all the above specifics of these aforementioned dialects; this can be useful in situations where minor details are not important to distinguish or where the emphasis is on overarching patterns.[citation needed] Broad transcription usually allows statements to be made which apply across accents and dialects, and is thus more appropriate for the pronunciation data in ordinary dictionaries, which may discuss phonetic details in the preface but rarely give them for each entry.Most phonetic transcription is based on the assumption that linguistic sounds are segmentable into discrete units that can be represented by symbols.It soon developed beyond its original purpose as a tool of foreign language pedagogy and is now also used extensively as a practical alphabet of phoneticians and linguists.Another commonly encountered alphabetic tradition was originally created by American linguists for the transcription of Native American and European languages and is still commonly used [citation needed] by linguists of Slavic, Indic, Semitic, Uralic (here known as the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet) and Caucasian languages.If one is unsure, it is best to use brackets since by setting off a transcription with slashes, one makes a theoretical claim that every symbol phonemically contrasts for the language being transcribed.For example, in some dialects the English word pretzel in a narrow transcription would be [ˈpɹ̥ʷɛʔts.ɫ̩], which notes several phonetic features that may not be evident even to a native speaker.It is equally possible within a phonemic transcription to use the symbol /ɹ/, which in IPA usage refers to an alveolar approximant; this is the more common realization for English pronunciation in America and England.For example, the English word church may be transcribed as /tʃɝːtʃ/, a close approximation of its actual pronunciation, or more abstractly as /crc/, which is easier to type.To avoid confusion with IPA symbols, it may be desirable to specify when native orthography is being used, so that, for example, the English word jet is not read as "yet".An example of iconic phonetic notation is the Visible Speech system, created by Scottish phonetician Alexander Melville Bell (Ellis 1869:15).