![]() At the very least the transcription system will need to be made more elaborate, and therefore more complicated, by devising ways of symbolizing those sounds of English that are not found in Korean, Japanese, or Turkish respectively. In its crudest form, this has the major drawback of treating English as if its sound system were the same as that of the learner’s first language. The easiest transcription system for the beginner is arguably a respelling using the orthographic conventions of the first language: for example, showing English pronunciation in a Korean-English bilingual dictionary by transcribing English pronunciation into han’gŭl, in a Japanese-English bilingual dictionary by transcribing it into katakana, or in a Turkish-English bilingual dictionary by writing it in Latin letters with Turkish spelling conventions. All of these can be regarded as types of phonetic transcription, though they may well vary considerably in quality. There are various ways of giving information about pronunciation: respelling using orthographic conventions of the learner’s language, respelling using orthographic conventions of the target language, or phonetic notation. As well as telling you what a word means (by translation or otherwise), it should at least give relevant information about its grammatical status and about its pronunciation. The dictionary entryĪ good dictionary gives information on a whole range of matters. In what follows I shall concentrate on the teaching and learning of English but many of the points apply to other languages too. Almost everyone can benefit from explicit pronunciation teaching, in which the use of phonetic transcription has an important role. However, mere exposure to authentic language material, while it will certainly improve a learner’s comprehension ability, is not sufficient to ensure a good productive command of the language or a good pronunciation. Television, video tapes, cassettes and CDs give today’s learners an advantage which earlier generations did not have. Nowadays learners of foreign languages ought to have ample opportunities of hearing the language spoken, and not just by their teacher and their fellow-pupils. Without this information, a learner risks being misled either by an inadequately trained ear or by the dazzling effect of the ordinary spelling. But even in languages with so-called phonetic orthography, such as Swahili, Finnish or Korean han’gŭl, there may be sporadic mismatches between the sound and the spelling of words, while there are almost always phonetic characteristics of continuous speech that are not reflected in the orthography.įor the language learner, a passive acquaintance with phonetic transcription enables him or her to extract precise and explicit information on pronunciation from a dictionary, bilingual or monolingual. This is obvious when we consider a language such as English, whose spelling is blatantly irregular or a language such as Chinese, with a non-alphabetic orthography, whose written form generally does not give any direct information about pronunciation (and of course this applies also to Chinese characters used in writing Japanese or Korean). If ordinary spelling reliably indicated actual pronunciation, phonetic transcription might be unnecessary but often it does not. ![]() When we transcribe a word or an utterance, we give a direct specification of its pronunciation. The principal reason for using phonetic transcription is easily stated. Nevertheless, there are many language teachers who appear to be far from converted, and I believe that certain arguments do need to be spelled out. Since most of you here are phoneticians, you are presumably already convinced of this I may be preaching to the converted. In this talk I want to discuss the usefulness and importance of phonetic transcription for people studying languages. This talk was given at Seoul National University, Korea, in 1996 and published in Malsori (Phonetics), the Journal of the Phonetic Society of Korea, No.
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