THE NEED FOR PHONETIC WRITING SYSTEM
It is quite clear that ordinary writing systems (i.e., alphabet or orthography) cannot illustrate pronunciation differences. In fact, there are many words that are written with the same set of letters but pronounced differently. There are also some words which are written with different sets of letters but pronounced the same. As such, phonologists and phoneticians felt the need for a new writing system, one in which the symbols fully represent the sounds of any language.
Standard English orthography (the writing system) cannot capture all the sounds of English pronunciation. The same is true for writing systems of many of the world's languages. Even if the writing system does a good job of capturing all the sounds of a language, what happens when the pronunciation of a word changes over time? Or when there are multiple pronunciations for a word? To overcome this, linguists use the phonetic alphabet, designed to represent all the possible sounds of the world's languages in a standard way. The most commonly-used alphabet is known as the Phonetic Alphabet designed by the International Phonetic Association (IPA) in the late 19th century.
The anomaly between writing and pronunciation was the main drive behind the development of the phonetic alphabet. Perhaps you have already noticed that some similar sounds have different representations in English orthography. Take the following examples:
In addition, different sounds in many languages may be used in the writing system with the same representation. Take the following English examples:
Language (all languages) changes over time. Spelling (orthography) is slower to change than pronunciation. As a consequence, the discrepancy between spelling and sounds gave impetus to a number of scholars to want to revise the alphabet so that each sound would be represented by one and only one symbol and each symbol would represent one and only one sound. Robert Robinson (1617), Cave Beck (1657), Bishop John Wilkins (1668), Francis Lodwick (1686) are some of the scholars who developed their own phonetic writing systems. In 1888, the International Phonetic Association (IPA) developed the most comprehensive phonetic chart which could be used to symbolize the sounds that appear in all languages of the world. The main characteristic of the phonetic alphabet is the one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol. In other words, each sound is represented by one and only one symbol and each symbol represents one and only one sound. Today, the phonetic alphabet is widely used to transcribe or write sounds in all languages of the world. Take the following example:
Each symbol in the ordinary orthography (alphabet) of a language is called a letter. Each symbol in the phonetic alphabet is called a sound segment. As such, the word truth is composed of five letters (t, r, u, t, h) but four phonemes /t/, /r/, /u:/, /θ/. The ordinary writing in a language (i.e., use of letters) is called orthography or writing while phonetic writing (i.e., use of phonemes) is usually called transcription. The inventory of phonemes in the IPA phonetic alphabet is so rich that it can be used to represent all sounds that appear in all languages of the world. However, some but not all of these sounds appear in the English language. The following table summarizes all the basic sounds that are employed by English speakers in their speech (i.e., English vowels, diphthongs, triphthongs, and consonants).
In addition to phonemes, a number of other symbols are used in the phonetic alphabet to represent the intricacies and nuances of sounds such as length, aspiration, etc. These symbols are normally put either above (superscript) or below (subscript) phonemes and indicate the features of phonemes. These symbols are called diacritics or sporadic features. Arabic is a language which uses sporadic features even in its ordinary orthography. In ordinary English orthography, too, a limited number of diacritics are used (e.g., ℃).
In addition to these, phonologists often use cover symbols to refer to classes of sounds. They use a capital C to refer to the class of consonants, a capital V to represent vowels, a capital L for liquids, a capital N for nasals, and a capital G for glides:
Phoneticians also repeat these symbols when they want to show a cluster of phonemes. For example, to show a consonant cluster, the symbol C is repeated.
