The “panphonic” text of “The North Wind and the Sun” for the illustration of the International Phonetic Alphabet of Japanese consonants and its use in the phonetic analysis of Japanese speech

Abstract

A “panphonic” version of the text of “The North Wind and the Sun” for the illustration of the IPA of Japanese (Tokyo dialect) consonants has previously been devised by the present authors [Hiki et al., Proc. 17th Int’l. Cong. on Phonetic Sciences, Hong Kong, 871–873 (2011)]. The present paper describes the main characteristics of this panphonic text in relation to its use in the phonetic analysis of Japanese speech utterances, providing examples of the result of the analysis of sample recitations. The panphonic text embraces all 16 consonant phonemes, their 11 major positional allophones, and 5 free variants in a short, simple text that consists of 8 sentences (113 words, 294 syllables). The relation among consonant phonemes and their allophones is shown effectively by a new arrangement of rows and columns in the IPA consonant chart. Possible pause locations are systematically indicated using appropriate pause symbols. The text is useful in examining the phonetic properties of Japanese utterances, for example, the effect of consonants on vowel devoicing, and large-scale segmentation of utterances by pauses of different durations.