A. IPA STANDARD & ENGLISHSOUNDS.

I. CONSONANTS.

     30.   Figure 1 lists the consonant sounds according to their articulation. The 75 special symbols in black are letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Linguists intend these symbols to represent the sounds (phones) of any and all human languages. The gray squares marked with an x are deemed physically impossible to articulate. In order to have a separate symbol the sound must be contrastive in some language. It has been only very recently (2005) that the labiodental flap has been shown to qualify. Only about 22 of these different sounds are distinguished in dialects of English. I have added ten additional symbols in blue. Such complex symbols illustrate extensions of IPA used by some linguists to represent sounds that are composed of simpler sounds by co-articulation. The voiceless versions of these sounds are used in some of the most prominent languages of China. There are also a number of modifications to these symbols that represent various additional manners of articulation, some of which make important distinctive sounds in Chinese. The post-aveolar affricates are also familiar sounds of English.

     31.   Many of the IPA sounds are used in English, but not for contrast or emphasis. They occur in the normal pronunciation of words as allophones belonging to the standard phonemes. In some words and phrases the English speaker would hear some of these sounds as abnormal variants of their ideal articulations. In other places the sound comes across as the normal and expected articulation. In the first case the speaker sounds affected with some exotic accent. In the second case the sounds are said to be euphonious. For example, normally the “h” is pronounced as a voiceless glottal fricative [h]. However, in the word “huge” it is a voiceless palatal fricative [ç] due to the fact that the “u” has a palatal approximant on-set [j]. The articulatory description of “huge” is quite different from its simpler auditory or phonemic description /hyuwj/.
     32.   It should be noted that the use of IPA can be misleading because certain contrasts may be irrelevant in the language being described. For example, the contrast between the feature of “voiced” over against “voiceless,” although it is important for English does not arise in Chinese consonants. The reason some of the spaces in figure 1 are left blank is that although the sound is found as an allophone in some languages, it has not yet been shown to be used as a basic contrastive phoneme in any existing language. This will become readily apparent with vowels, where dialects of English show many variations. In Chinese the tone or pitch of the vowel is contrastive, different dialects having anywhere from four to nine different ones. These tones serve in Chinese much more flexibly than the single “voiced” feature does in English.

     33.   Figure 2 lists the IPA features for consonants. Those of importance for English are indicated with a color background. Many of these features are characterized as either present or absent on a particular phone (±). It is possible to view these features along three dimensions of articulation: place (position of tongue), manner (type of closure), and vocal vibrations. A particular language selects its own features and builds phonemes and their allophones along its own dimensions, not necessarily these three standardized ones. For example, while Ancient Greek had phonemes for a set of unvoiced plosives ( [p], [t], [k] ) that were unaspirated (Π, Τ, Κ), it also had corresponding ones with aspiration (Φ, Θ, Χ). In English the unvoiced plosives are unaspirated in combination after “s,” but aspirated when they are the sole syllable on-set. Another feature used by English plosives specifies whether the sound is released. A single plosive at the end of a syllable is typically unreleased.
     34.   There are many dialectal differences in the way English is spoken throughout the world. In most of England, Wales, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and even some parts of the United States the /r/ phoneme is not always pronounced. In these so-called non-rhotic accents the presence of an /r/ can only be surmised by the way in which the vowel in front of it is pronounced. The vowel is lengthened when the /r/ is followed directly by a consonant, so that “cart” /kart/ is pronounced as [ka:t], or by a pause, so that “so far” /sow far/ is pronounced as [so: fa:]. Indian English turns all the alveolar plosives into their retroflex correlates, and uses the dental plosives for the dental fricatives. The dialects of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and South Africa have an additional phoneme, the ch in loch, i.e., . In the United States the t that comes between vowels is a flap, so that its voice is not distinctive. Instead the word metal is kept distinct from medal by the slightly longer vowel in the second word — indication that the alveolar plosive (now flap) is to be interpreted as voiced. Similarly in order to distinguish ladder from latter the former gets a longer vowel sound.

II. VOWELS .

     35.   Figure 2 also lists features often found with vowels. Characteristic features for vowels often have several dimensions of a less discrete nature. In English they are often also variously described depending on the dialect and philosophy of the linguist describing them. The vowels do not contrast in being either rounded or unrounded. If the vowel is close (formed high in the mouth) or mid then it is rounded when made in the back of the mouth, and unrounded when made in the front of the mouth, otherwise it is unrounded. Such a rule that specifies the presence of features based on the presence or absence of features on the same segement are called redundancy rules.
     36.   Figure 3 is intended to show generally how some of the phonetic symbols for vowels might be placed on a grid according to the position of the tongue as they are formed. Most of the sounds have a version where the lips are rounded and one where they are unrounded for both of which the tongue is in the same position. The position corresponds to the highest part of the tongue (front, central, back) as it relates to the palate whether close to it or fully open. In practice the articulatory description for vowels has not been as successful as an acoustic description.

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