Phonetic Transcription System Research Articles

"Dialectal Texts. Supplement to the Moldavian Linguistic Atlas (ALM)": Reissue Problems

The preparation of a new edition of the work Dialectal Texts. Supplement to the Moldavian Linguistic Atlas (ALM) required the solution of o series of problems, taking into account both the new realities due to the changes that have occurred in the last decades in the Republic of Moldova on a social-political and cultural level, the return to the Latin script and the recognition of the unity of the language spoken on both banks of the Prut river, as well as the principles of editing Romanian dialectal texts, so that the volumes of dialectal texts published in Chisinau could be integrated into the series of similar works published in Romania, forming a whole with them. The paper highlights the solutions identified to reduce the differences compared to the volumes edited by Romanian dialectologists in terms of the way the texts are presented and to transpose as accurately as possible the texts from the phonetic transcription system of the Moldavian Linguistic Atlas, based on the Cyrillic script, into that of the Romanian Linguistic Atlas, which represents the optimal system to transcribe spoken Romanian language.

Investigating The Hausa Students' Familiarity And Satisfaction With The Applicability And Efficiency Of X-SAMPA For Transcribing African Languages

This article investigates the applicability and efficiency of the X-SAMPA phonetic transcription system for African languages, with a particular focus on the Hausa language. The study aims to assess the familiarity and proficiency of final-year Hausa language students in using X-SAMPA to transcribe Hausa speech sounds accurately. Data for the study was collected through electronic questionnaires distributed to final-year Hausa language students at different universities in Nigeria. The study findings indicate that X-SAMPA is a valuable tool for transcribing the Hausa language, as it provides a standardized and simplified transcription system that can be used across different research works. However, many Hausa language students were unfamiliar with X-SAMPA and required more training to become proficient in its use. Lack of time and practice opportunities were identified as the primary barriers to learning X-SAMPA. The study concludes that X-SAMPA has the potential for wider usage in phonetic transcription of African languages, but more resources such as written or video tutorials and practice exercises are needed to help learners become proficient in its use. Based on the research findings, the article recommends organizing training workshops or courses to enhance the knowledge of Hausa language students interested in learning X-SAMPA.

한국어 말하기 자동평가를 위한 발음 오류 분석 - 중국어, 베트남어, 태국어 화자를 중심으로 -

This study aims to propose a phonetic transcription and annotation system for automated speaking assessment of Korean. We analyzed the pronunciation errors discovered in the speech data of 2,250 sentences (32,610 words) read by 30 speakers of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai. We were able to predict the observed errors based on the comparative analyses between the phonetic and phonological system of Korean and those of the native languages of the learners, and thus suggested using the frequency of errors for the assessment of segmental accuracy. These results are expected to contribute to the on-going discussions of automated assessment of Korean speaking tests and the future development of automated tools for Korean language education.

Phonetic transcription system of Quranic text: new opportunities and prospects

Phonetic transcription system of Quranic text: new opportunities and prospects

A Brief Analysis of Shannxi Cuisine’s English Translation - Taking Menu Translation as an example

Dissemination of Chinese culinary culture is important for Chinese culture to go global. Shannxi, a western province of China, features abundant cuisine which is representative of Shannxi local’s lifestyle. However, there are many spelling mistakes and other translation mistakes in some time-honoured Chinese restaurants’ English menu. Appropriate translation strategies, including domestication, foreignization and Pinyin, a phonetic transcription system for Chinese characters,should be adopted to explore practical and feasible translation of the culinary culture.

A cross-linguistic database of phonetic transcription systems

AbstractContrary to what non-practitioners might expect, the systems of phonetic notation used by linguists are highly idiosyncratic. Not only do various linguistic subfields disagree on the specific symbols they use to denote the speech sounds of languages, but also in large databases of sound inventories considerable variation can be found. Inspired by recent efforts to link cross-linguistic data with help of reference catalogues (Glottolog, Concepticon) across different resources, we present initial efforts to link different phonetic notation systems to a catalogue of speech sounds. This is achieved with the help of a database accompanied by a software framework that uses a limited but easily extendable set of non-binary feature values to allow for quick and convenient registration of different transcription systems, while at the same time linking to additional datasets with restricted inventories. Linking different transcription systems enables us to conveniently translate between different phonetic transcription systems, while linking sounds to databases allows users quick access to various kinds of metadata, including feature values, statistics on phoneme inventories, and information on prosody and sound classes. In order to prove the feasibility of this enterprise, we supplement an initial version of our cross-linguistic database of phonetic transcription systems (CLTS), which currently registers five transcription systems and links to fifteen datasets, as well as a web application, which permits users to conveniently test the power of the automatic translation across transcription systems.

Romance Linguistic Elements in a Šavrini Hills Dialect Text

This article examines Romance linguistic elements in the text “Šavrinka drži tri kantone od hiše, četrtega pa osel” (A Šavrini Woman Supports Three Corners of a House, and a Donkey Supports the Fourth), which was written in the Šavrini Hills local dialect of Puče by a local woman, Viktorija Pucer Štromar. The text was transcribed using the Slovenian phonetic transcription system and translated into standard Slovenian. The Romance borrowings in the dialect text have been marked and etymologically explained.

System for Automatic Transcription of Sessions of the Polish Senate

Abstract This paper describes research behind a Large-Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) system for the transcription of Senate speeches for the Polish language. The system utilizes severalcomponents: a phonetic transcription system, language and acoustic model training systems, a Voice Activity Detector (VAD), a LVCSR decoder, and a subtitle generator and presentation system. Some of the modules relied on already available tools and some had to be made from the beginning but the authors ensured that they used the most advanced techniques they had available at the time. Finally, several experiments were performed to compare the performance of both more modern and more conventional technologies.

An Early 20th Century Korean Phonetic Alphabet

In this paper, we examine early efforts in English language education in Korea, focusing on a student’s glossary of Chinese characters that contains Mandarin Chinese, English, and Japanese glosses of the meanings of each character. This book, the Ahak Pyeon, employs a modified version of the Korean Hangul writing system in order to phonetically render the English words, thereby facilitating the acquisition of English pronunciation for Korean learners. We examine the system proposed in this work in detail, noting issues of phonetic accuracy and clarity and assess it with respect to its suitability as a linguistically-sophisticated phonetic transcription system suitable for the representation of English teaching. In this paper we discuss the principles employed in the Ahak Pyeon to render a reasonably accurate phonetic characterization of the pronunciation of the English words included in the book as well as a discussion of the challenges faced by the developer of the system. We discuss this work in terms of the general adaptability of the original Hangul writing system, the creativity of the revised system, and the potential of this system for developing phonemic awareness among Korean learners of English.

Monroy-Casas, R. (2011). Systems for the Phonetic Transcription of English. Theory and Texts. Frankfurt: Peter Lang

Monroy-Casas, R. (2011). Systems for the Phonetic Transcription of English. Theory and Texts. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 280 pages. ISBN 978-3034300599 The history and practice of phonetic transcription of (chiefly British) English, has long been a major interest of mine. So I was very pleased to be able to see a new book on this subject especially as it's been written by my good friend Professor Rafael Monroy-Casas of the University of Murcia in southern Spain. This book has just appeared as the 106th volume of a series begun in 2001 entitled Linguistic Insights: Studies in Language and Communication from the international academic publishing house of Peter Lang of Bern, Switzerland. It's a smartly presented paperback whose 280 pages are well printed with certain very minor exceptions. It's divided into four main sections. The first, Phonetic transcription systems deals with the International Phonetic Association's alphabet and the typology of phonetic and phonemic transcriptions. The second section, From theory to practice, goes into detail on the transcription of the consonants and vowels, and describes English vowel variation as reflected in the so-called strong and weak forms. It's interspersed with some various transcription exercises. Its last few pages have a few items where ill-advisedly-small print is squeezed into presentational 'boxes'. The third section, Corpus of oral texts, provides in ordinary orthography eighteen passages, a varied mixture of monologues and dialogues in length ranging from a half to a whole page. They are mostly quite interesting and some even quite entertaining. Nothing is revealed about their sources but the names are given of the two male and two female readers who recorded them very effectively for the very useful accompanying CD which is, as is now customary, conveniently attached inside the book's back cover. This whole set of texts is used for each of the six types he selected for illustration in the fourth section Transcription systems for English, the major final division of the book. These are termed by the author: 1. EPD pp. 88ff[ie Jones's 'Simplified' type]; 2. Edinburgh pp 119ff[ie Abercrombie's type]; 3. Windsor Lewis pp 141ff; 4. EPD-14 pp 167ff; 5. EPD/LPD pp 191ff; 6. OPD pp 226ff. Comparing one version with another would've been much easier if at each page of a transcribed passage the corresponding page numbers had been given for each of the other five and for the corpus texts. At each of the six sections the transcribed passages are preceded by often detailed discussions and exercises. This ambitious work is in effect three books in one: a historical record, an account of the diverse current practices and an instructional manual. Its content is full of interest though at times a few matters perhaps might've been more felicitously expressed. Certain mainly minor items will be relevant to the interests of so few of its likely readers that they might well have been omitted. One such is a complete set of the eighteen passages transcribed into the computer-readable SAMPA notation. The most widely welcome material will probably be its lively selection of passages with their well-recorded accompanying CD. …

Benjamin Smith Lyman as a phonetician

Abstract Benjamin Smith Lyman was a geologist who worked for the Meiji government as a foreign expert in the 1870s. His 1894 article on rendaku later made him famous among linguists, but in 1878 he published a detailed account of Japanese pronunciation, which he claimed was motivated in part by a desire to help learners of Japanese as a foreign language. Lyman’s descriptions were quite sophisticated for the time, but it is clear in hindsight that he was hampered by the lack of a universal phonetic transcription system and by the unavailability of the phonemic principle. Lyman’s descriptions went far beyond those of his missionary contemporaries, but for ordinary learners, the kind of detail he provided would have been overkill and not much practical help.

Inferring Hierarchical Pronunciation Rules from a Phonetic Dictionary

This work presents a new phonetic transcription system based on a tree of hierarchical pronunciation rules expressed as context-specific grapheme-phoneme correspondences. The tree is automatically inferred from a phonetic dictionary by incrementally analyzing deeper context levels, eventually representing a minimum set of exhaustive rules that pronounce without errors all the words in the training dictionary and that can be applied to out-of-vocabulary words. The proposed approach improves upon existing rule-tree-based techniques in that it makes use of graphemes, rather than letters, as elementary orthographic units. A new linear algorithm for the segmentation of a word in graphemes is introduced to enable outof-vocabulary grapheme-based phonetic transcription. Exhaustive rule trees provide a canonical representation of the pronunciation rules of a language that can be used not only to pronounce out-of-vocabulary words, but also to analyze and compare the pronunciation rules inferred from different dictionaries. The proposed approach has been implemented in C and tested on Oxford British English and Basic English. Experimental results show that grapheme-based rule trees represent phonetically sound rules and provide better performance than letter-based rule trees. Keywords—Automatic phonetic transcription; pronunciation rules; hierarchical tree inference.

Unresolved issues in the representation and phonetic description of click articulation in Xhosa and Zulu

The paper addresses three issues that are regarded as unresolved with respect to the representation and description of click sounds in Xhosa and Zulu. These issues relate to (i) different phonetic transcription systems for clicks, (ii) a controversy regarding the specification of places of articulation for clicks, and (iii) the phonetic content of socalled ‘noisy’ or affricated clicks. Current practices regarding the use of the revised IPA symbols for clicks are discussed against the backdrop of experimental phonetic results on click articulations as obtained through electropalatographic (EPG) techniques. It is argued that the use of the symbols usually used for velar stops as components of a click representation is unfounded and that it actually obscures other salient features of click articulations. A simplified system is proposed for Bantu languages such as Zulu and Xhosa. The place of articulation of palatal clicks in Zulu is confirmed through the presentation of EPG data linking it to the [!] phonetic symbol that is more generally used to denote alveolar clicks. The traditional views on the phonetic content of noisy (affricated) dental and alveo-lateral clicks are challenged in view of data obtained through an innovative speech processing technique (Smoothed Pseudo-Wigner Distribution Analysis) that combines the good frequency resolution of narrow band spectrograms and the good time resolution of wide band spectrograms. It is shown that these sounds are not affricated, but in fact pre-affricated and that traditional interpretations of waveforms are incorrect.

Machine readable phonetic transcription system for Chinese dialects spoken in Taiwan.

Since existing ASCII versions of phonetic transcription systems appear to aim at transcribing European languages only, they prove to be insufficient to accommodate syllable based tonal languages such as Chinese. An ASCII encoding of phonetic transcription system for speech database of Chinese was designed. Major characteristics of the proposed design are: 1. Though based on the principles of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the current design includes two levels of transcription, namely, segmental and prosodic. The consequence is a more elaborate system than the IPA or its equivalent. 2. The proposed system specifically aims to transcribe three major Chinese dialects spoken in Taiwan, namely, Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka. The consequence is a more language-dependent system rather than a general system as the IPA.

Taxonomies in Biology, Phonetics, Phonology, and Speech Motor Control

This article begins with a review explaining the different purposes of biological taxonomies. Taxonomic units are often dependent on the purpose for which the taxonomy has been constructed. Biological taxonomies provide an analogy that we use to emphasize some of the distinctions among the units of phonetic transcription systems, competence phonologies, and performance phonologies. The units of both phonology and phonetic transcription are considered as possible units of the speech motor system, and some of the difficulties of this assumption are explained. Although phonemic units, like units of phonetic transcription, are useful for many purposes, it is not theoretically necessary to use units derived as part of competence phonologies in systems attempting to explain phonological performance or speech motor performance. In this regard, we challenge the concept of coarticulation, because it is based on assumptions about the role of phonological or phonetic units in speech motor control. We offer an integrated perspective that has implications for research in speech motor control and deficits of the speech motor system. We see speech motor deficits as distinct from, yet possibly interacting with, phonological deficits.

Perceptual Characteristics of Consonant Production by Apraxic Speakers

Single-word repetitions by 4 brain-damaged adults with apraxia of speech (AOS) but without concomitant aphasia were transcribed using a standard narrow phonetic transcription system. Analysis of consonant productions yielded a profile of AOS slightly different from the traditionally accepted one. Among the results was the atypical finding that consonant distortions exceeded all other error types including sound substitutions. In addition, errors predominated in the medial position of words, and monosyllabic words had approximately the same error rate per number of consonants as did multisyllabic words. Results are discussed with reference to previous perceptual descriptions of AOS and in relationship to Broca's aphasia. Results are also interpreted relative to linguistic and motoric components of speech production models.