I notice some specials pronunciations of the same ascii symbol .
eg " au " in *ow* words as : town ,browse ,clown , powder ...
and in *ow words as : how , pow , cow , now ...
In *ow* words , the phonetic transcription is OK ,but in *ow words
" au " is pronounced as the diphthong " ao " ,the sound "o" is in the beginning
of "Ou " (go , home) and " oi " (boy ,join )
An other example is the " tr " and "dr " spelling which is pronounced " tSr " and " dZr " instead of " tr " and "dr" .
What do you think about ?
I don't think so.
As far as I know, the same symbol always represents the same sound.
And I don't think that "tr" and "dr" are pronouced /tSr/ and /dZr/, respectively. The sound /tr/ and /tSr/ may sound similar but they are not the same. So do the sound /dr/ and /dZr/.
It's possible to pronounce [tr] and [dr] so that they sound a little like [tSr] and [dZr].
[au] can also be pronounced in the way you described, but I think this is also possible in *ow words.
It is not true that "the same symbol always represents the same sound".
The [t] in "better" is different from the [t] in "tea".
The [t] in "better" is different from the [t] in "tea".
*** I think this is true only in American pronunciation. I usually use American dictionary to learn phonetic transcription of words. In my American dictionary, the phonetic symbol for the "t" in "better" is different from the "t" in "tea".
Umm... I may be wrong in stating that "the same symbol always represents the same sound". In fact, The /t/ in "tea" and the /t/ in "star" sound different.
Another example is that the /k/ in skin sounds different from the /k/ in car.
Tee,
It's interesting what you wrote about your American dictionary. In all the dictionaries that I've seen, "better" and "tea" have the same [t] symbol. Nevertheless, you are of course right -- when talking about the difference, I was referring to American English.
There are many ways to pronounce a given IPA sound. Each [p] in "paper" is pronounced differently. This is not reflected in dictionary transcriptions, because dictionaries give what is called "phonemic transcription". To reflect all the shades of all sounds would require REAL phonetic transciption (the kind that linguists use) which has many more symbols than the standard set of symbols that you can find in dictionaries.
