Читать книгу Applying Phonetics - Murray J. Munro - Страница 39

Phonetic transcription is an IMPRESSIONISTIC process used by linguists to represent the discrete, recombinable sound units of language in visual form. By this we mean that phoneticians use their ears to identify the sequence of sounds that someone has produced and then record their analyses as a series of written symbols. Impressionistic phonetic transcription can be used in a BROAD way to capture the basic sound categories used by the speaker or in NARROW fashion to specify many of the fine details in speech. Skilled phoneticians can transcribe speech reliably and with a high degree of precision, but training and experience are essential, and even experts don't always agree on how a particular utterance should be transcribed. Sometimes there are debates about the use of particular symbols, and other disagreements arise about terminology. Still another complication has resulted from the typesetting difficulties that phonetic transcription posed in much of the twentieth century. Everyday typewriters did not have symbols like /ʃ/ and /ð/, and even commercial printers were often unable to reproduce phonetically transcribed utterances. As a result, more easily typed symbols were sometimes used, such as /š/for /ʃ/. With contemporary word‐processing applications, these problems have largely disappeared, but many older sources of speech data are still in use. For all these reasons, you will find that textbooks (and instructors) sometimes differ in the particular choices they make when doing transcription. You will also discover that American, Australian, British, and Canadian sources differ from one another because of dialectal variation. While these matters may seem challenging, there is no use in worrying or complaining. Speech is a complex phenomenon that even phoneticians only partially understand. This is a reality with which everyone who works in the field must come to terms. This book uses transcription mainly as a tool for discussion of other concepts. For the most part, we will use broad transcription in which only the major speech sound distinctions are captured, each with a different symbol.

In this context, the term impressionistic does not mean “casual” or “unscientific.” Instead, it refers to “systematic analysis by ear,” rather than with instrumentation. Experienced, highly‐trained phoneticians are capable of perceiving remarkable levels of detail in speech and of capturing what they hear on the printed page.