Transcribing English vowels
There are many problems in trying to represent the sounds of English in writing - the differences between individual speakers, for example; and their groupings (by age, gender, education and geographical area as a natural consequence. All descriptions of speech sounds are necessarily generalizations. AWE does not pretend to deal with any but the broadest phonemic descriptions.
There is one specific difficulty for students of language which we attempt to deal with on this page: inconsistencies in the use that different writers (and reference books) make of the International Phonetic Alphabet. That is intended to provide as objective and scientific a method as possible of describing the sounds of speech. But the symbols used to show vowel sounds are labelled differently by different authors. This is caused, partly at least, by the fact that the cardinal vowels are points on a continuum in an infinite variety of tongue movements. In continuous speech, rather than laboratory pronunciations of individual sounds, these are influenced by the sounds around them (their phonetic context), so that the precise position of the tongue in forming the vowel of 'get' is not the same as that of 'set' or ''egg'. (To describe these precisely is the province of phonetics, a subject in which AWE pretends no knowledge (see Phonemic, phonetic, phonology - further information).
What follows is a list of transcription of English vowels in a few of the sources which may be consulted by readers of AWE.
| vowels in: as realized in general RP |
Gimson Used by Crystal (1995) |
Jones, 1917 | Fromkin & Rodman based on Kenyon & Knott |
LPD | OED | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| see, me, field | iË | iË | i | iË | iË | ||
| him, big, village village for some speakers |
ɪ | i | ɪ | ɪ | ɪ | OED reserves i for terminals such as happy | |
| get, fetch, ready | e | e | ɛ | e | ɛ | AWE prefers ɛ as it is different from element #1 in the diphthongs /eɪ/ & /ɛə/ | |
| sat, hand, plait | æ | æ | æ | æ | a | ||
| are, father, calm | É‘Ë | É‘Ë | a | É‘Ë | É‘Ë | ||
| cup, son, blood | ʌ | ʌ | ʌ | ʌ | ʌ | ||
| dog, swan, cough | É’ | É” | a | É’ | É’ |
- Adapted, and enlarged, from Crystal (1995)
