Some Major Features of the International Phonetic Alphabet

Abstract

The International Phonetic Alphabet is nearly 100 years old, and there is no doubt that it would be appropriate to revise it so as to bring it more in line with contemporary linguistic thought.1 But unfortunately this is not a simple task, as there are two conflicting requirements that need to be considered. On the one hand it seems advisable to retain the practical nature of the IPA symbols. Much of the utility of these symbols rests on the fact that they are based on the familiar Roman alphabet. Any radical revision that undermined this would make the symbols less useful as mnemonic devices. On the other hand, a fairly large-scale revision is called for if it is going to take into account the advances that have been made in the study of phonetics during the last hundred years or so. It seems to us that the most fundamental insight gained during the last century has been the realization that it is the features rather than the sounds that are the basic building blocks of spoken language. The idea that sounds are composed of features has been understood-more or less-at least since the seventeenth century (Fromkin & Ladefoged 1981), and is certainly implicit in the organic alphabets devised by Bell 1867 and by Sweet 1881, who noted that the set of iconic symbols represent 'the elementary actions by which all sounds are formed'. However, this insight was not made explicit until the work of the Prague school, notably as presented by Jakobson 1938; and it is to this day not fully considered in all phonetic work. The failure to take this basic truth into account is in our view one of the major inadequacies of the IPA alphabet. We are thus faced with a dilemma: an alphabet, particularly one based on the familiar symbols of the Roman alphabet, almost inevitably emphasizes the segmental nature of speech; but we want a set of symbols that reflect the features that are necessary for understanding linguistic processes. This paper will attempt to resolve this dilemma by emphasizing the symbolic nature of the elements of the alphabet. A symbol is something that stands for somethingin this case an intersection of feature values. The aspect of the IPA alphabet that we are most concerned with here is not the symbols themselves, but the organization of the set of categories-the features-which the symbols represent. The IPA alphabet is defined in terms of a series of charts. With their column