For my graduate phonetics class, I was asked to phonetically transcribe a poem using the IPA. The poem given was called “The Chaos”, by Gerard Nolst Trenité. It’s a rhyming poem in the English language written to show off some of the most interesting spelling irregularities in the English language.

The assignment itself was just a great deal of transcription, but the wonderful bonus to it all was finally seeing a poem rhyme.

English spelling isn’t terribly phonetic, to put it nicely. The same letter combinations can have the different pronunciations in different words (”gh” in “ghost” and “rough”), and only through years of teaching, spelling bees, and repetition are we able to finally figure out how to read things written in our own alphabet.

So, not surprisingly, unless you speak the language, it’s nearly impossible to detect a rhyme looking at the text of a poem alone. To illustrate that point, here are the first twelve verses of “The Chaos”, justified to the right to emphasize the endings of lines:

(My apologies to those using screenreaders for using a graphic to display text, but IPA fonts and text formatting just don’t work well on websites)

If you read the poem aloud, the rhyme is obvious. Just looking at the text, though, there’s really no hint of the rhyme excepting the final letter, and rhyme is more than just final letters. “Sound” and “Wound” (injury) don’t rhyme (in the simple sense), even though every letter but the first is identical. Bough and flow share only one letter, yet they rhyme wonderfully in English.

In the English language, our writing system isn’t remotely phonetic. In order to detect rhyme, we have to hear something read (either aloud or in our heads). However, in a phonetic writing system, something truly wonderful happens.

Here are the same twelve verses transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet:

Even if you can’t read the IPA, you can see the words rhyming. Because the IPA transcribes sounds, we can see when the lines end in the exact same sounds. If the final vowel and consonant(s) are the same in the IPA, then it rhymes. It’s that simple.

Literate English speakers have a great deal of training throughout their lives dedicated to making heads or tails of our bizarre writing system. We sometimes even forget how strange it is, and we stop looking for exact correspondences to sound and rhyme.

English readers seldom see that spelling’s chains won’t let us be. We speak aloud inside our heads, we forget our long past reading dreads. The spelling bees all left behind, phonics beaten through our minds. The system seems easy, perhaps, sublime, but alas, we’ve never seen a rhyme.

Today, I’d like to talk about a sound that most English speakers don’t notice even though we use it every day: The Glottal Stop

The Glottal Stop is a unique consonant present in many languages around the world. It’s often represented as a lone ‘ (as in “Hawai’i”) or as a question mark (?), but its official IPA symbol looks like this:

What do Mittens and Hawaii have in common?

Let’s look at the name of the state of Hawaii. The “proper” (native) pronunciation of the state’s name is “huh-WHY-ee”, rather than “huh-WHY” or “huh-WHYYY”.

Say the correct version slowly. The sort of “catch” in your throat between the “WHY” and the “ee” is our phonetic phriend, the glottal stop. In the IPA, Hawaii is written as (/həwaɪʔi:/), with the glottal stop showing up in all its glory.

Sometimes, you’ll see Hawaii written with an apostrophe in the place of the glottal stop (”Hawai’i”) to show that, but really, the glottal stop is unmarked 90% of the time in English.

Another place where the glottal stop makes an appearance in many dialects of English is in the words “mitten” or “button”. Say those words carefully, and you’ll notice that where we have a “tt”, there’s actually a glottal stop, not any sort of T sound. In the IPA, when I pronounce these words, they’re transcribed as /mɪʔn/ and /bʌʔn/ (with the n’s as their own syllables). Contrast this with “bitter” (which is actually an alveolar tap, not a t) or “mitts” (which has a true t), and you’ll see through the English writing system’s weave of deception.

You’ll also find this sound in expressions like “Uh-oh” and between many words (”new attack”). The glottal stop will also show up from time to time in English phrases replacing a t if you’re listening closely.

Whatcha gonna do with all those glottal stops, all those glottal stops inside your speech?

I’m mildly ashamed to use this as an example, but in the Black Eyed Peas song “My Humps”, the chorus is filled with glottal stops. I’ll transcribe (broadly) a bit of the chorus (from 00:13 in the above video on) below:

Look at that transcription and try to note the different glottal stops in the singers speech. They’re going to make make make you surprised, make you surprised at how many glottal stops are in our everyday speech.

What’s our throat catching, anyways?

Take a look at this picture of the human vocal folds (courtesy of Wikipedia):

Our glottis (the phonetic term for the vocal folds/vocal cords) is composed of two pieces of tissue that move together and apart during speech, and vibrate rapidly to create voicing. Those pieces of tissue can be moved a great deal, and even brought all the way together.

Hold your breath with your mouth and nose opened. You’ll feel a pressure build up below your throat, and you’ll probably be able to feel exactly where the air is stopped. That closure is the vocal folds, and what you’re doing now is holding a glottal stop. In order to make a glottal stop in speech, we just pull those two pieces of tissue all the way together until they make a seal, and then release it again. That’s it. No tongue, no voicing, no nasal worries. Just close the glottis. Easy, huh?

Glottal stops in other languages

Glottal stops are common in English, but they’re not really phonemic (meaning that they don’t generally contrast with other sounds). If I say “mitten” using a full on T, people will understand you, but just think you’re strange. They’re even more common in British English, and in some Cockney dialects, they’re really omnipresent (”then, la’er, my dau’er ‘it me”).

However, in other languages, they can carry a very distinct contrast. In Hawai’ian and Samoan, they’re phonemic, and can show up anywhere. /ʔika/ and /ika/ miɡht be entirely different words even though speakers of many languages can’t tell the difference. No matter how I’ve tried, I still can’t quite hear this difference. English speakers love our word-initial glottal stops (at the beginning of words), so I hear them most of the time, and have trouble starting a word without them.

Similarly, there are other languages where /kaʔ/ and /ka/ would be completely different. Once again, English speakers (and speakers of many other Indo-european languages) have lots of trouble with this contrast.

Reader, meet Glottal Stop

So, now that you know it’s out there, I suspect you’ll be hearing glottal stops in lots of places. Once you do, you and the glottal stop will certainly become phast phonetic phriends.

So, I’m somewhat obsessed with checking the statistics of who comes here, who gets referred from where, and what search terms they used to find me. Well, the other day, somebody came here from google searching for “IPA translation widget”. For those of you unfamiliar with the terms, a “widget” is a small program written for Apple’s Dashboard interface, and IPA refers to the International Phonetic Alphabet. What this person seems to be wanting was a widget that, like some existing translation widgets, could take a block of text and immediately turn it into IPA characters. For the first few moments, I thought “Wow! That’d be a great idea!”.

Now, as somebody who uses the IPA very, very frequently, such a thing would be wonderful if it worked well. However, I think it would be impossible to actually create a program that goes from English writing to IPA transcriptions without incredible advances in Artificial Intelligence and speech recognition. Here’s why…

Transcription, not translation

At the surface, this doesn’t seem so crazy. Apple includes a widget to do rough, automated translations with Dashboard, and although I never trust automated translations, it does alright for basic words and phrases. I suspect that our anonymous searcher saw that widget and thought “Wow, cool! I wonder if it can help me put something into the IPA”. However, the fundamental difference between translating a sentence into Spanish and putting that same sentence into the IPA is that the IPA isn’t really a language at all, but instead, it’s a method of writing sounds.

The International Phonetic Alphabet is really a set of symbols, each of which represents a sound, sound characteristic, or other element of spoken language. What the IPA allows a linguist (or speech pathologist, or teacher…) to do is to take spoken language and put it onto paper (’transcription’) with a great deal more precision than most other writing systems. The IPA isn’t a language in itself, it’s just an alternative, phonetic writing system for other languages. The beauty of this is that the IPA is designed to be able to be used not just for English, but for any language. The IPA symbols can be used to transcribe sounds not just from English, but from languages all over the world.

Broad vs. Narrow Transcription

The IPA can be used to transcribe sounds with two different degrees of precision.

If one takes advantage of all the symbols and diacritics, one can make a “narrow” or “phonetic” transcription. At this level, the linguist aims to capture all the detail possible about the word or phrase, including variations across word boundaries, sounds that occur in speech but are unnoticed or unrecognized by native speakers, and even features like intonation and pauses. From these transcriptions, a well-trained linguist could pronounce the words and phrases almost exactly as the speaker did, based simply on the transcriptions. The first, smallest line in the title graphic is a narrow transcription of me pronouncing the site’s title.

This degree of precision would be impossible for a modern computer widget to produce, simply because narrow transcriptions are based on actual words and phrases by a speaker, and really, one needs a fairly trained ear to make an accurate narrow transcription of a word or phrase. Sure, it could use a database of narrowly transcribed words from other speakers, but really, that’s not a narrow transcription. It’s not going to pick up on the variations that each speaker produces, like accents, vowel changes, unusual sound choices, or even tiny speech errors.

The alternative is called “broad” or “phonemic” transcription, expresses the basic sounds of a language or phrase, often more precisely than the native writing system, but at the same time, leaves out detail that’s not necessary to a native speaker. The middle line in the title graphic for this page is a phonemic transcription. Some dictionaries, including the built in OS X dictionary (if you enable IPA in Dictionary Preferences), can show you the standard american IPA Broad transcription form of a word.

Now, using a dictionary of words in a given language and their IPA equivalents, a computer could likely match things and give a passable broad transcription. However, there are variations that occur between people that show up even at a broad level, and are large enough to identify a speaker’s accent, dialect, or even idiolect. For some people (myself included), “caught” and “cot” have the same vowel, but for others, they’re two distinct vowels. So, even at a broad level, you’re not going to get any sort of reliable transcription of one’s actual speech from a computer widget, just a rough approximation.

Why are you transcribing anyways?

In the end, whether such a widget would be useful at all boils down to your reason for needing a transcription. Some people might be learning English and would want a better method of knowing how a given word is supposed to sound. For that, any good dictionary’s pronunciation key should do the trick.

Some people might be interested in the IPA, or want to know how a given word sounds. For that, they’d be better off getting a good phonetics textbook and learning a bit of the IPA themselves, along with some knowledge of phonetics.

However, our widget searcher might just be stuck in an introductory Linguistics course, having to transcribe their speech for an assignment. If so, I offer just one piece of advice: Don’t plagarize transcriptions off the web or from a dictionary. Your professor should have no trouble noticing if you’re not transcribing your own dialect, and everybody’s got a dialect.

Remember, if there’s one thing that phonetics professors are good at, it’s picking out a phone-y.