Phonetic Transcription: History

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were based on acoustic resonances. The consonant symbols occupy one or more of three vertically aligned areas and are made up of two basic parts, one showing place of articulation and the other manner of articulation. A further part is particularly interesting in its attempt to indicate states of the glottis other than ‘vibrating’ – open, narrowed, closed, creaky, and what Brücke called ‘hard resonance’ and ‘soft resonance.’ The vowels occupy only the middle of the three areas, so that they stand out clearly. Diacritics are provided to indicate accent, duration, and types of juncture. Carl Merkel (1812–1876) also devised a non-Roman alphabet (Anatomie und Physiologie des menschlichen Stimm-und Sprachorgans, 1857; revised edition, 1866), but, like Brücke’s alphabet, it is extremely difficult to read, and neither system attained any success. Both Brücke and Merkel were familiar with only a small range of languages and were concerned primarily to show the total capacities of the human vocal organs in the production of sounds. Moritz Thausing (1838–1884), in Das natiirliche Lautsystem der menschlichen Sprache (1863), based his system on a Naturlaut ‘natural sound’ represented by the vowel , and 21 other sounds, which diverged from in three different directions (seven on each path), like a three-sided pyramid. His notation used a musical staff of four lines and three spaces, thus accommodating the seven grades of sounds as notes on the staff. Each of the three sets of seven had a special note shape to distinguish it. Intermediate sounds were shown by modifiers. Thausing believed this was preferable to Brücke’s scheme in that the symbols were not iconic, and so could be used for sounds for which formation was not fully understood. Felix Du Bois Reymond (1782–1865) was stimulated by the schemes put forward by Brücke and Lepsius to complete a scheme of his own (Kadmus, 1862), which he had sketched out earlier. It was Roman based, but, unusually, attempted to combine this with an iconic approach. So, for instance, all the voiceless consonants had symbols that extend below the ‘middle area’ (mittlere Bahn), unlike the voiced ones: and already conform to this principle, and to continue it, Reymond proposed, for example, that the symbol should replace as the voiceless equivalent of . Like Brücke, he confined the vowel symbols to the ‘middle area.’ In spite of a good phonetic basis outlined in his book, the scheme failed to become established. Bell’s Visible Speech Alexander Melville Bell was the son of an elocution teacher, and in due course became his father’s Phonetic Transcription: History 405 principal assistant. Between the years 1843 and 1870, he lectured in the universities of Edinburgh and London, after which he emigrated to Canada and continued his teaching there. In 1864, he gave public demonstrations of his new scheme for recording speech in writing, and in 1867 the system was published under the title Visible speech, the science of universal alphabetics. It was not (at least avowedly) intended to be a new spelling system, but rather to assist children in learning to read, and to provide ‘‘a sound bridge from language to language.’’ Bell was unsuccessful in attempts to persuade the British government to give him funds to support the system, but continued to use it for his own purpose in teaching, and claimed that it was ‘‘perfect for all its purposes.’’ The symbols he used were iconic, intended to signify the vocal organs involved in the production of the sound concerned. For instance, the open vocal cords are shown by , which represents [h]. The consonant symbols are based on a sagittal diagram of the head facing right. The shape < > represents a continuant (shown by the fact that there is a gap to the right) with a constriction at the back (i.e., [x]), whereas < > represents a constriction at the front of the vocal tract, namely [y¨]. The same symbol with the gap facing upward represents dental [y], and with the gap facing downward, palatal [ç]. The remaining consonant symbols have similar iconic relationships, with modifiers to show complete closure (a bar across the gap), nasality (a different bar), voicing, etc. The vowel symbols are based on a vertical line, with hooks at the top (close vowels), bottom (open vowels), or both (mid vowels), facing left for back vowels, right for front vowels, and in both directions for the so-called ‘mixed’ or central vowels. Rounding is shown by a horizontal bar through the middle. Ellis, writing just before the full publication of Visible speech, admitted that his Palaeotype was ‘‘far less complete’’ than Bell’s scheme. ‘‘However, that alphabet,’’ he said, ‘‘requires new types, which is always an inconvenience, though I believe that an entirely new system of letters, such as that of Mr. Bell, is indispensable for a complete solution of the problem.’’ He pointed out also that many potential users ‘‘are ill-qualified, without special training, to use a very refined instrument.’’ Iconic notations are certainly subject to the criticism that they may not be able to accommodate new sounds or new descriptive frameworks, and can never convey the exact nature of the sound symbolized. Bell’s symbols were much better in design than most alphabets of this kind are, but he faced the immense task of persuading people to adopt a system that looked very different from what they were used to seeing. The alphabet failed to find supporters outside the circle of his pupils.
406 Phonetic Transcription: History Sweet’s Romic and Organic Alphabets Henry Sweet (see Sweet, Henry (1845–1912)), perhaps the greatest of 19th-century phoneticians, studied under Bell, and his Handbook of phonetics (1877) was intended to be an exposition and development of Bell’s work, but in this book he used a Roman-based notation (influenced by Ellis’s Palaeotype), which he called ‘romic,’ distinguishing two varieties of it. ‘Broad romic,’ his ‘practical’ notation, intended to record only ‘fundamental distinctions,’ corresponding to distinctions of meaning (i.e., phonemes, in modern terms), was confined to symbols with their original Roman values supplemented by digraphs and turned letters. ‘Narrow romic’ was to be a ‘scientific’ notation and provided extra symbols, notably for the vowels, for which Sweet used italics, diacritic , and, further, turned letters. However, in 1880, he took over Bell’s notation, which he regarded as ‘‘an improvement on any possible modification of the Roman alphabet’’ for scientific purposes. He modified it and added some symbols, to form an ‘organic alphabet,’ which he used in his Primer of phonetics (1890) and in some other works (see Figure 2). At this stage, Sweet felt that, even for more practical purposes, the necessity to supplement the Roman alphabet with other devices (in particular, diacritics and new letters, which he strongly opposed) made it cumbersome and inefficient. Toward the end of his life, however, he emphasized that uniformity in notation was not necessarily a desirable thing ‘‘while the foundations of phonetics are still under discussion,’’ and accepted that the unfamiliarity of organic types might be too formidable an obstacle to overcome. He continued to use his romic alphabet as an alternative to the organic one, and broad romic formed the basis for the new alphabet of the International Phonetic Association (see later). Sweet’s organic alphabet did not enjoy a long life, nor indeed did the idea of iconic alphabets, even though Daniel Jones and Paul Passy (see Passy, Paul Edouard (1859–1940)) thought it worthwhile to propose another such scheme in Le maître phonétique (1907). Analphabetic Schemes ‘Analphabetic’ notations use symbols that represent the subcomponents of a segment, rather like chemical formulas. One early example of such a scheme was proposed by the Dutch writer Lambert ten Kate (see Kate Hermansz, Lambert ten (1674–1731)) in 1723, and another by Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, in 1803. Thomas Wright Hill (1763– 1851), a schoolmaster in Birmingham who had a keen ear, though his knowledge of sounds was self-taught, devised a notation in which each place of articulation was allotted a number. The interaction of active and passive articulators was expressed in terms of numerator (passive) and denominator (active); for example, a bilabial articulation is 1 (upper lip) over 1 (lower lip), a labiodental is 2 (upper teeth) over 1, a dental is 2 over 3 (tongue tip), and so on. The degree of stricture and state of the glottis were shown by the shape of the line between the numbers, and vowels were indicated by the use of double lines instead of a single one. It is easier, however, to typeset symbols that are in horizontal sequence. Otto Jespersen (see Jespersen, Otto (1860–1943)) included his analphabetic (later called antalphabetic) alphabet in The articulations of speech sounds (1889). It used a combination of Roman letters, Greek letters, numerals, italics, heavy type, and subscript and superscript letters. The Greek letters represented the active articulators involved – lower lip (a), tongue tip (b), tongue body (g), velum and uvula (d), vocal cords (E), and respiratory organs (z). The numerals following the Greek letter showed the relative stricture taken up by the articulators and the Roman letters referred to the passive articulators. For example, the combination b1 fe d0E3 would represent one kind of [s] (b ¼ tongue tip, 1 ¼ close stricture, fe ¼ in the area of alveolar ridge/hard palate, d0 ¼ velic closure, E3 ¼ open vocal cords). It was not intended for use in a continuous transcription (though Jespersen showed how this is possible in a matrix form), but served as a descriptive label for the segment concerned (cf. modern feature notations). Friedrich Techmer had proposed an analphabetic scheme in his Phonetik (1880). It employed five horizontal lines that, together with the spaces in between them, showed the major places of articulation. Musical-type notes were then inserted to show the manners of articulation. It was designed essentially as a scientific notation for Techmer’s own use and never achieved widespread adoption. His Romanbased alternative, published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (in 1884 and in 1888), was a highly detailed and systematic scheme, making use of a basic italic typeface, both uppercase and lowercase, with various diacritics either directly beneath or to the right of the main symbol. Johan Storm (see Storm, Johan (1836– 1920)) judged it to be the best of the German systems of notation, and it was the basis for Setälä’s 1901 transcription for Finno-Ugric languages (see Laziczius, 1966). Kenneth Pike (see Pike, Kenneth Lee (1912–2000)), in his classic book Phonetics (1943), outlined an even more detailed analphabetic notation, called ‘functional analphabetic symbolism.’ It was composed of roman and italic letters in uppercase and lowercase, and was intended to illustrate the complexity of sound formation and to expose the many assumptions
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