Republic of the Philippines

PROVINCE OF BULACAN
City of Malolos

BULACAN POLYTECHNIC COLLEGE

Name of Instructor: MARIELLA R. MALLARI

Academic Year: 2019 – 2020
Date: March 16 – 21, 2020
Subject: Speech and Oral Communication
Topic: International Phonetic Alphabet
Discussion:

International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based
primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the
late 19th century as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language.The IPA is
used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech-language
pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators and translators.

IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two basic types, letters and diacritics. For
example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a single letter, [t], or with
a letter plus diacritics, [t̺ ʰ], depending on how precise one wishes to be. Often, slashes are used to
signal broad or phonemic transcription; thus, /t/ is less specific than, and could refer to,
either [t̺ ʰ] or [t], depending on the context and language.

The general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound (speech segment),
although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. This means that:

 It does not normally use combinations of letters to represent single sounds, the

way English does with ⟨sh⟩, ⟨th⟩ and ⟨ng⟩, or single letters to represent multiple sounds the way
⟨x⟩ represents /ks/ or /ɡz/ in English.
 There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do "hard" and
"soft" ⟨c⟩ or ⟨g⟩ in several European languages.
 The IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes
a distinction between them, a property known as "selectiveness".
The alphabet is designed for transcribing sounds (phones), not phonemes, though it is used for
phonemic transcription as well. A few letters that did not indicate specific sounds have been retired
(⟨ˇ⟩, once used for the 'compound' tone of Swedish and Norwegian, and ⟨ƞ⟩, once used for
the moraic nasal of Japanese), though one remains: ⟨ɧ⟩, used for the sj-sound of Swedish. When the
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IPA is used for phonemic transcription, the letter–sound correspondence can be rather loose. For
example, ⟨c⟩ and ⟨ɟ⟩ are used in the IPA Handbook for /t͡ʃ/ and /d͡ʒ/.
Among the symbols of the IPA, 107 letters represent consonants and vowels, 31 diacritics are used
to modify these, and 19 additional signs indicate suprasegmental qualities such
as length, tone, stress, and intonation. These are organized into a chart; the chart displayed here is
the official chart as posted at the website of the IPA.

The International Phonetic Alphabet is the most widely used system for representing the sounds of
any language.
A reproduction of the latest version of the International Phonetic Alphabet (2005) is available on the
website of the International Phonetic Association.
Abbreviation 
IPA
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Examples and Observations

 "One of the most important achievements of phonetics in the past century has been to arrive
at a system of phonetic symbols that anyone can learn to use and that can be used to
represent the sounds of any language. This is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)."
(Peter Roach, Phonetics. Oxford Univ. Press, 2004)
 "Though they are primarily designed for representing speech sounds (objective physical
events), the IPA symbols are naturally also widely used for representing the phonemes of
particular languages. For example, the initial consonant of English think is phonetically the
dental fricative [θ] for most speakers, and so the phoneme realized in this way is commonly
represented as /θ/. But note carefully that a conventional phoneme symbol consisting of an
IPA symbol in phoneme slashes may not in fact be pronounced in the way the IPA symbol
would suggest; for example, the phoneme at the beginning of English red is customarily
represented as /r/, for orthographical convenience, but probably no native speaker of English
ever pronounces this word with the trill [r]. . . . An IPA symbol in square brackets is (or should
be) intended to represent a real speech sound accurately; an IPA symbol in phoneme
slashes is just a convenient way of representing some phoneme in some language and may
not be a faithful guide to phonetic reality."
(R.L. Trask, Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts. Routledge, 2007)

TASK SHEETS

A. Using the table above, translate these sentences from IPA into English:
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1. ʃi: selz si: ʃelz baɪ ðə si ʃɔ:

2. ɪt ɪz ə tɹu:θ junɪversəli: əknɒlɪdʒd ðæt ə sɪŋgəl mæn ɪn pəzeʃən əv ə lɑ:dʒ fɔtʃjun mʌsd bi: ɪn wɒnt əv ə
waɪf (dʒeɪn ɒstɪn)

3. lɑ:st naɪt aɪ dremt aɪ went tə mændəli: əgeɪn (dæfnɪ djuː mɒrɪeɪ)

4. maɪ hɑ:t eɪkz ænd ə dɹaʊzi: nʌmnəs peɪnz maɪ sens (dʒɒn kiːts)

5. ɪf ju: tel ðə tru:θ ju: dəʊnt hæv tu: rɪˈmembə enɪθɪŋ (mɑːk tweɪn)

6. ɔːlweɪz fərɡɪv jɔː enəmiz nʌθɪŋ ənɔɪz ðem səʊ mʌtʃ (ɒskə waɪld)

7. ə nɔɪzɪ nɔɪz ənɔɪz ən ɔɪstə

8. aɪ teɪk ɪt ju: ɔlredɪ nəʊ əv tʌf ən baʊ ənd kɒf ən dəʊ

B. Translate the following words into IPA:

1. among

2. boat

3. eel

4. graffiti

5. king

6. nothing

7. ocean

8. please

9. quiz

10. zebra

Name of Instructor: JAYSON M. HIMOR

 Republic of the Philippines
PROVINCE OF BULACAN
City of Malolos

BULACAN POLYTECHNIC COLLEGE

Academic Year: 2019 – 2020
Date: March 23 – 31, 2020
Subject: Speech and Oral Communication
Topic: SCHWA SOUNDS
Discussion:

SCHWA SOUNDS
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (/ʃwɑː/, rarely /ʃwɔː/ or /ʃvɑː/;[1] sometimes
spelled shwa) is the mid central vowel sound (rounded or unrounded) in the middle of the vowel
chart, denoted by the IPA symbol ə, or another vowel sound close to that position. An example in
English is the vowel sound of the "a" in the word about. Schwa in English is mainly found
in unstressed positions, but in some other languages it occurs more frequently as a stressed vowel.
In relation to certain languages, the name "schwa" and the symbol ə may be used for some
other unstressed and toneless neutral vowel, not necessarily mid-central.

Sometimes the term "schwa" is used for any epenthetic vowel, but some languages use different
epenthetic vowels (Navajo uses [i]).
In English, schwa is the most common vowel sound.[5] It is a reduced vowel in many
unstressed syllables especially if syllabic consonants are not used. Depending on dialect, it may be
written using any of the following letters:

 'a', as in about [əˈbaʊt]
 'e', as in taken [ˈtʰeɪkən]
 'i', as in pencil [ˈpʰɛnsəl]
 'o', as in memory [ˈmɛməri]
 'u', as in supply [səˈplaɪ]
 'y', as in sibyl [ˈsɪbəl]
 unwritten, as in rhythm [ˈɹɪðəm]
Schwa is a very short neutral vowel sound, and like all other vowels, its precise quality varies
depending on the adjacent consonants. In most varieties of English, schwa occurs almost
exclusively in unstressed syllables. (There is also an open-mid central unrounded vowel or "long
schwa", represented as ɜː, which occurs in some non-rhotic dialect stressed syllables, as
in bird and alert.)
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In New Zealand English, the high front lax vowel (as in the word bit /ˈbɪt/) has shifted open and back
to sound like schwa, and both stressed and unstressed schwas exist. To a certain extent, that is true
for South African English as well.
In General American, schwa and /ɜː/ are the two vowel sounds that can be r-colored (rhotacized); r-
colored schwa is used in words with unstressed "er" syllables, such as dinner. See also stress and
vowel reduction in English.
Welsh uses the letter ⟨y⟩ to represent schwa, which is a phonemic vowel rather than the realisation
of an unstressed vowel. The letter ⟨y⟩ represents schwa in all positions except in final syllables
where it represents /ɪ/ or /i/. For example, the word ysbyty ("hospital") is pronounced /əsˈbəti/.
Quite a few languages have a sound similar to schwa. It is similar to a short French unaccented ⟨e⟩,
which is rounded and less central, more like an open-mid or close-mid front rounded vowel. It is
almost always unstressed, but Albanian, Bulgarian, Slovene and Afrikaans are some of the
languages that allow stressed schwas.
In most dialects of Russian unstressed ⟨a⟩ and ⟨o⟩ reduce to either [ɐ] or schwa. In dialects
of Kashubian a schwa occurs in place of the Old Polish short consonants u, i, y.
Many Caucasian languages and some Uralic languages (like Komi) also use phonemic schwa, and
allow schwas to be stressed. In the Eastern dialects of Catalan, including the standard variety,
based in the dialect spoken in and around Barcelona, an unstressed ⟨a⟩ or ⟨e⟩ is pronounced as a
schwa (called "vocal neutra", 'neutral vowel'). A stressed schwa can occur in the Catalan dialects
spoken in the Balearic Islands, as well as in Romanian, as in mătură [ˈməturə] ('broom').
In European and some African dialects of Portuguese, the schwa occurs in many unstressed
syllables that end in ⟨e⟩, such as noite ('night'), tarde ('afternoon'), pêssego ('peach'),
and pecado ('sin'). However, that is rare in Brazilian Portuguese except in such areas
as Curitiba in Paraná.
In Neapolitan, a final, unstressed ⟨a⟩, and unstressed ⟨e⟩ and ⟨o⟩ are pronounced as a
schwa: pìzza ('pizza'), semmàna ('week'), purtuàllo ('orange').
The inherent vowel in the Devanagari script, an abugida used to
write Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and Sanskrit is a schwa, written ⟨अ⟩ either in isolation or word-initially.
Other characters used to represent this sound include ⟨ը⟩ in Armenian, ⟨ă⟩ in Romanian, and ⟨ë⟩ in
Albanian. In Bulgarian Cyrillic, the letter ⟨ъ⟩, which has a very different orthographic function in
Modern Russian, is used.
In languages such as Polish and Spanish there is no such sound that would resemble the "schwa"
characteristics.
In Korean, the letter (or rather jamo) is used, but it may also represent a "null" vowel used in the
transcription of foreign consonant clusters, when it may be deleted. In most Sanskrit-based
languages, the schwa ⟨अ⟩ is the implied vowel after every consonant and so has no didactic marks.
For example, in Hindi, the character क is pronounced "kə" without marking, but के is pronounced "ke"
(pronounced "kay") with a marking.
A subscript small schwa (ₔ) is used in Indo-European studies.
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ACTIVITY:
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