phonetic transcription

Anne Rubin   Friday, February 25, 2005, 21:27 GMT
I need to learn the phonetic transcription. I have been trying for 3 weeks. Does anyone have any advice?
Also how do I write my name Anne in phonetic transcription?
Thank you
Travis   Friday, February 25, 2005, 22:04 GMT
Well, it depends on the particular scheme you're using. The "standard" one is IPA, but that is very hard to write on computers often, so hence a number of different replacements, based purely on ASCII text, have been devised for it. The three primary ones are SAMPA, Kirshenbaum, and X-SAMPA. X-SAMPA is devised as a direct ASCII text analog of IPA, whereas SAMPA and Kirshenbaum don't exactly parallel IPA overall.

Phonemically, I'd prolly write your name as /}n/ in SAMPA and /&n/ in Kirshenbaum. I'm gonna skip X-SAMPA here, simply due to lack of experience with using it. Phonetically, such would vary depending on the exact dialect, but it would probably be [}~n] in SAMPA and [&~n] in Kirshenbaum. Note that I'm right now assuming some specific dialect within northern inland american english overall, by the way.
Brennus   Friday, February 25, 2005, 22:42 GMT
Re: Pronunciation of Anne: In the IPA Ann would be designated as /æn/. Since the æ symbol is hard to come by , you could write just AE or ae too.
Mxsmanic   Saturday, February 26, 2005, 06:09 GMT
Phonetic transcription is very straightforward. There is one symbol for each identifiable sound you hear. You just write the symbol for each sound as you transcribe.

You can use narrow transcription, in which case you try to transcribe every single identifiable noise you hear, or you can use broad transcription, in which case you only transcribe sounds that are important to meaning. For example, the sound of 'p' at the beginning of a word in English will be transcribed as 'p' with a superscript 'h' after it in narrow transcription, because the 'p' is aspirate; but in broad transcription, a simple 'p' alone will do, because the aspiration of the consonant at the beginning of the word in English is not important to meaning (not aspirating the 'p' wouldn't change anything). Sounds that are important to distinguishing meaning are called phonemes, so a broad transcription is often called a phonemic transcription.
Anne Rubin   Sunday, February 27, 2005, 20:03 GMT
Thank you all for your help. Some really helpful advice. It is the IPA which I am trying to learn.
Jim   Sunday, February 27, 2005, 23:50 GMT
It's by no means straight forward if you don't know which symbol corresponds to which sound.

Here are some sites that might help you figure that out.

http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/fullchart.html
http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/english/frameset.html
http://www.ling.mq.edu.au/units/ling210-901/phonetics/ausenglish/auseng_vowels.html

Here's a site made by Tom to help typing IPA symbols (though it doesn't include the whole IPA, it's got enough for RP & midwestern US English).

http://ipa.typeit.org/

Here's the X-SAMPA chart.

http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/studerende/thorinn/xsamchart.gif
Anne   Wednesday, March 02, 2005, 21:51 GMT
jim thank you so much for giving me some sites. This is so helpful. I have an exam on the 16 March and will study as much as I can to know the symbols.

Thank you
Anne