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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 128
symbols. While grammars aimed at native speakers of any language will
typically be based on the orthographic system used in the language, even
these grammars will often explain the orthographic system in terms of
IPA categories and symbols, and linguists presenting material for other
linguists will frequently translate the orthography into some IPA-based
transcription.
Although the original idea of the alphabet was to provide symbols for
phonemes but not for allophones (hence, for example, the lack of a symbol for
a labio-dental plosive in the alphabet), and to avoid diacritics for phonemic
symbols as much as possible, continuing discoveries about languages which
were unknown to the founders of Dhi Fonètik Ticerz’ Asóciécon have now
blurred that distinction, and we find that we need diacritics to show the
phonemes of some languages and also that we can mark some allophones
without using diacritics (for example, the labio-dental nasal in English or
Italian). This is just a side-effect of the alphabet having become far more
inclusive over the years. The last major overhaul of the alphabet was in 1989,
with minor modifications last having been made in 1996 and 2005.
Discussions about possible changes to the alphabet continue in the pages
of the Association’s journal, the Journal of the International Phonetic
Association.
Some scholars find the phonetic theory on which the alphabet is based to be
flawed or at least overly simplistic. For example, the Association defines [p] as
a voiceless bilabial plosive, with no attention being paid to what the tongue
might be doing during the articulation of that plosive, to the precise detail of
what the vocal folds are doing (or when they do it), to the lip position during
that plosive, to the fact that the plosive may be lacking a shutting phase or an
opening phase, and so on. The vowel charts that are used by the Association do
not appear to correlate closely with either an articulatory description of what
happens in the production of a vowel or the description of the acoustic structure
of the sound wave produced during the articulation of the vowel.
Phonological theory has also advanced so much that talk of ‘phonemes’ and
‘allophones’ is in itself suspect. Despite these shortcomings, the alphabet has
had, and continues to have, a huge practical value; provided that it is recalled
that the alphabet was first created as a way of producing writing systems (rather
than, say, a way of producing full phonetic descriptions of articulation), gaps
in the description can be filled in on the basis of an initial analysis in terms of
the IPA categories.
The theory underlying the IPA chart, examples of the various sounds and
the ways in which the IPA system may be used for the transcription of individual
languages are not dealt with here (see IPA 1999). But the IPA chart is
provided as figure 20.1 as a reference tool.