Good questions! You could certainly come up with an accepted, broad transcription in many ways. This would be simply writing out which phonemes are generally considered to be present in a given word. This is the sort of thing that a dictionary might give you, and really amounts to a phonetic spelling of the word. This is our equivalent of BBC English, often called “GA” (general american) or “newscaster english”. Although people from the (middle and south) western US are usually fairly close to this standard, everybody has little variations.

However, this would still be a representation, not a transcription. I’m quite tempted to say that unless the speaker was actually observed to speak in a certain way, it’s not actually a transcription at all.

To touch on your other question, there are definitely variations even within the same vowel among different speakers. People from Boston might generally hold their tongues slightly differently from a Louisianian, even when pronouncing the same IPA vowel, but such differences are nearly negligible. However, on the whole, if somebody who can read IPA sees an IPA symbol (or a word in IPA) and reads it aloud, they’re not going to have a dialect (or they’ll have the dialect of whoever was transcribed.

Thanks for asking questions, and I hope I was able to clarify some things!

Will

British English has the concept of “Received Pronounciation”, sometimes called “BBC English”. It was originally meant to be the pronounciation that you would use when you were “received” by the monarch at some type Royal event.

Isn’t there some equivalent in US English?

Also, thinking out loud, if a Bostonian pronounces the ‘a” in “park”, “yard” and “Harvard” one way, and a Louisania native pronounces it differently, wouldn’t they still pronouce a similar “a” correctly (to their ears) if they saw the symbol in an IPA representation of a word?

Yet apparently nothing exists, probably because the very people who could create such a thing are the people who read IPA fluently and don’t need it.

You’re quite right. Culling IPA from a dictionary (or Wiktionary) would get you broadly transcribed IPA versions of words. However, the problems stemming from variations in your own speech would still be present, and in the end, you’d just be putting things into a sort of “generic transcription”.

It might pass for somebody raised in, say, Denver or San Francisco, but the moment you come across somebody with any variety of accent that’s more specific than simple American speech, your widget will be very wrong, very quickly.

Claiming to be able to transcribe something into IPA without hearing a speaker pronounce it is a lot like claiming to be able to analyze handwriting based on a typed-and-printed copy of a letter. Sure, you can guess what the general letters might look like, but in the end, the purpose is defeated.

Please email the reply.

I would be easily able to write this widget, pulling the page for each word, digesting it to get the chosen pronunciation scheme, and re-presenting the culled data in the widget. Some other languages have pronunciation schemes, too.

I’m guessing a three month development cycle, but nobody’s paying, so it will be a while.

I’m a little reluctant to start doing that, as really, transcription is something that you need to do for your own voice (or the voice in question). I don’t know what you sound like, so I can’t really help.

Also, if I start doing that, I suspect that people in introductory linguistics classes might start requesting passages that are actually part of their homework.

I’ll happily educate, and feel free to email me if you feel you’ve got a great reason, but the IPA isn’t tough to learn. Give it a go :)

I’m so immersed in the IPA that I’d completely forgotten about the NATO Phonetic alphabet and its kin. You’re quite right that such a widget with the NATO alphabet would be not only possible, but fairly easy to construct, and I believe that the tools included with the next version of OS X will allow you to do that yourself.

I’m glad you’ve enjoyed my site, and I thank you for reminding me of the NATO alphabet and the like. I may well post on that soon as well.

LingMystic