Proceedings Fonetik 2009 - Institutionen för lingvistik

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Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm Universitymodel, published from 1973 on and now supersededby Lexikon 2000. The only Swedish encyclopediawhere solely IPA transcriptions inbrackets are used appears to be Respons (1997—8), a minor work of c. 30,000 entries, whichis an adaptation of the Finnish Studia, aimed atyoung people. Its pronunciation system is, however,conceived in Sweden.It ought to be mentioned that SAOB (SvenskaAkademiens ordbok), the vast dictionary ofthe Swedish language, which began to be publishedin 1898 (sic!) and is still under edition,uses a system of its own. The above exampleswould be represented as follows: nåbäl 3 ,maŋ 4 kel, ram 3 lø 2 sa, ʃama4n. The digits 1—4represent different degrees of stress and areplaced in the same way as the stress marks insystem (c) above, their position thus denotingquantity, from which the quality of the a’scould, in turn, be derived. The digits also expressaccent 1 (in Mankell) and accent 2 (inRamlösa). Being complex, this system has notbeen used in any encyclopedia.Notation of segmentsFor showing the pronunciation of segments,there was a strong bias, 80%, in favour of theIPA, possibly with some modifications, whereasthe remaining 20% only wanted letters of theSwedish alphabet to be used. Two questionsconcerned the narrowness of transcriptions.Half of the subjects wanted transcriptions to beas narrow as in a textbook of the language inquestion, 31% narrow enough for a word to beidentified by a native speaker if pronounced inaccordance with the transcription. The remaining19% meant that narrowness should beallowed to vary from language to language.Those who were of this opinion had thefollowing motives for making a more narrowtranscription for a certain language: the languageis widely studied in Swedish schools(e.g., English, French, German, Spanish), 47%;the language is culturally and geographicallyclose to Sweden, e.g., Danish, Finnish), 29%;the pronunciation of the language is judged tobe easy for speakers of Swedish without knowledgeof the language in question, (e.g., Italian,Spanish, Greek), 24%. More than one optionhad often been marked.What pronunciation to present?One section dealt with the kinds of pronunciationto present. An important dimension isswedicized—foreign, another one standard—local. Like loanwords, many foreign geographicalnames, e.g., Hamburg, London, Paris,Barcelona, have obtained a standard, swedicizedpronunciation, whereas other ones, sometimes—butnot always—less well-known, e.g.,Bordeaux, Newcastle, Katowice, have not. Thepanel was asked how to treat the two types ofnames. A majority, 69% wanted a swedicizedpronunciation, if established, to be given, otherwisethe original pronunciation. However, theremaining 31% would even permit the editorsthemselves to invent a pronunciation consideredeasier for speakers of Swedish in‘difficult’ cases where no established swedificationsexist, like Łódź and Poznań. Threesubjects commented that they wanted both theoriginal and swedicized pronunciation to begiven for Paris, Hamburg, etc.In most of Sweden /r/ + dentals areamalgamated into retroflex sounds, [ ʂ], [ ʈ ], [ɖ]etc. In Finland, however, and in southernSweden, where /r/ is always realized as [ ʁ ] or[ ʀ ], the /r/ and the dentals are pronouncedseparately. One question put to the panel waswhether etc. should be transcribed asretroflex sounds—as in the recently publishedNorstedts svenska uttalsordbok (a Swedishpronunciation dictionary)—or as sequences of[r] and dentals—as in most encyclopedias. Thescores were 44% and 50% respectively, with anadditional 6% answering by an option of theirown: the local pronunciation of a geographicalname should decide. No one in the panel wasfrom Finland, but 71% of those members withSwedish as their first language were speakers ofdialects lacking retroflex sounds.Particularly for geographical names, twodifferent pronunciations often exist side byside: one used by the local population, andanother, a so-called reading pronunciation, usedby people from outside, and sometimes by theinhabitants when speaking to strangers. Thelatter could be described as the result ofsomebody—who has never heard the namepronounced—reading it and making a guess atits pronunciation. Often the reading pronunciationhas become some sort of nationalstandard. A Swedish example is the ancienttown of Vadstena, on site being pronounced[ˈvasˌsteːna], elsewhere mostly [ˈvɑːdˌsteːna].The reading pronunciation was preferred by62% of the subjects, the local one by 22%. Theremainder also opted for local pronunciation,provided it did not contain any phoneticfeatures alien to speakers of standard Swedish.216
Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm UniversityFor English, Spanish and Portuguese,different standards exist in Europe, the Americasand other parts of the world. The panelwas asked whether words in these languagesshould be transcribed in one standard varietyfor each language (e.g., Received Pronunciation,Madrid Spanish and Lisbon Portuguese),one European and one American pronunciationfor each language, or if the local standardpronunciation (e.g., Australian English) shouldas far as possible be provided. The scoresobtained were 27%, 52% and 21% respectively.Obviously, the panel felt a need to distinguishbetween European and American pronunciations,which is done in Nationalencyklopedin. Itcould be objected that native speakers of thelanguages in question use their own variety,irrespective of topic. On the other hand, it maybe controversial to transcribe a living person’sname in a way alien to him-/herself. Forexample, the name Berger is pronounced[ˈbɜːdʒə] in Britain but [ˈbɜ˞ːgər] in the U.S.Audio pronunciationsThere were five questions about audio pronunciations,i.e. clickable recordings. The first onewas whether such recordings should be read bynative speakers in the standard variety of thelanguage in question (as done in the digitalversions of Nationalencyklopedin) or by oneand the same speaker with a swedicizedpronunciation. Two thirds chose the firstoption.The next question dealt with speaker sex.More than 87% wanted both male and femalespeakers, evenly distributed, while 4%preferred female and 8% male speakers. One ofthe subjects opting for male speakers commentedthat men, or women with voices in thelower frequency range, were preferable sincethey were easier to perceive for many personswith a hearing loss.Then subjects were asked if they would liketo use a digital encyclopedia where pronunciationwas presented by means of syntheticspeech recordings. 68% were clearly against,and of the remaining 32%, some expressedreservations like ‘Only if extremely natural’, ‘IfI have to’ and ‘I prefer natural speech’.In the following question, the panel wasasked how it would most frequently act whenseeking pronunciation information in a digitalencyclopedia with both easily accessible audiopronunciations and phonetic transcriptions. Noless than 71% declared that they would useboth possibilites—which seems to be a wisestrategy—, 19% would just listen, wheras theremaining 10% would stick to the transcriptions.This section concluded with a questionabout the preferred way to describe the speechsounds represented by the signs. Should it bemade by means of articulation descriptions like‘voiced bilabial fricative’ or example wordsfrom languages where the sound appears, as‘[β] Spanish saber, jabón’ or by clickablerecordings? Or by a combination of these? Thescores were approximately 18%, 52% and 31%respectively. Several subjects preferred combinations.In such cases, each subject’s score wasevenly distributed over the options marked.Familiarity with IPA alphabetIn order to provide an idea of how familiar thepanel members were with the IPA alphabet,they were finally presented with a chart of 36frequently used IPA signs and asked to markthose they felt sure of how to pronounce. Theaverage number of signs marked turned out tobe 17. Of the 54 panel members, 6 did not markany sign at all. The top scores were [æ]: 44, [ ʃ ]and [o]: both 41, [u]: 40, [ə]: 39, [a]: 37 and [ʒ]:35. Somewhat surprising, [ ʔ ] obtained no lessthan 17 marks.DiscussionApparently, Sweden and Germany are the twocountries where pronunciation in encyclopediasare best satisfied. Many important works in othercountries either do not supply pronunciationat all (Encyclopædia Britannica), or do so onlysparingly (Grand Larousse universel and DenStore Danske Encyklopædi), instead referringtheir users to specialized pronunciation dictionaries.This solution is unsatisfactory because(i) such works are not readily available (ii) theyare difficult for a layman to use (iii) you haveto consult several works with different notations(iv) you will be unable to find the pronunciationof many words, proper names in particular.An issue that pronunciation editors have toconsider, but that was not taken up in the surveyis how formal—casual the presented pronunciationshould be. It is a rather theoreticalproblem, complicated to explain to panel membersif they are not able to listen to any recordings.Normally, citation forms are given, but itcan be of importance to have set rules for how217
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