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☛ How many discrete sounds can you count in each word below?

a) know; b) nose; c) thing; d) chewed; e) ship; f) box; g) make; h) whose; i) thick; j) thought

Answers: a) 2; b) 3; c) 3; d) 3; e) 3; f) 4; g) 3; h) 3; i) 3; j) 3

Systems other than IPA may also be used for transcribing speech. Printed dictionaries and some web‐based reference materials designed to help readers with word pronunciations use their own sets of symbols, together with a key. For these users, getting the right pronunciation of a new word depends on reading the symbols correctly. It is possible that these dictionary‐based systems will soon become obsolete because of the availability of links to audio recordings and synthetic speech apps that allow the user to hear a spoken production of a word with no need to interpret symbols.

Instead of IPA, speech technologists often prefer to use SAMPA (Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet ), ARPABET (Advanced Research Projects Agency + “BET” ), or some modified version of either one. Both systems permit a broad transcription of English words using standard ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange ) symbols, and are therefore very easy to type on a standard keyboard. SAMPA and ARPABET have fewer symbols than IPA, so they aren't suitable for narrow transcription. However, they are quite satisfactory for computer TEXT-TO-SPEECH ( TTS ) software, which converts text documents to synthetic speech. A critical step in TTS is the conversion of standard orthography into transcription. The process yields an unambiguous representation that can be used to generate a correctly‐pronounced synthetic utterance.

More details about TTS are presented in Chapter 9.

Table 3.2 compares IPA, ARPABET, SAMPA, and Merriam‐Webster Online symbols for a small selection of English sounds. As can be determined from the table, this is transcribed in IPA as /ðɪs/, in ARPABET as /DHIHS/, in SAMPA as /DIs/, and in the Merriam‐Webster system as \this\.

Table 3.2 Comparison of Several Transcription Systems

Standard Spelling	IPA	ARPABET	SAMPA	Merriam‐Webster Online
top	/t/	T	t	\t\
sit	/s/	S	s	\s\
chin	/tʃ/	CH	tS	\ch\
these	/ð/	DH	D	\th\
seat	/i/	IY	i:	\ē\
fit	/ɪ/	IH	I	\i\
cat	/æ/	AE	{	\a\