Phonetic Transcription: History

Roman-Based Alphabetic Systems
(pre-19th Century)
The reform of traditional orthographies (notably
those of French and English, which presented particular
problems for learners) led to innovations
in notation. In France, Loys Meigret’s La Tretté de
la grammere françoeze (1550; see Meigret, Louis
(?1500-1558)) included a phonetically based alphabet
for French. In England, Sir Thomas Smith, in his
De recta et emendata linguae anglicanae scriptura
(On the proper and corrected writing of the English
language) (Paris, 1568), employed several of the
devices mentioned previously. For example, diacritics
([ H]) were used to distinguish the long vowels in
‘cheap’ and ‘hate,’ symbolized and , respectively;
non-Roman alphabets (Greek ) were used
for French and Scottish u (i.e., [y]); and the Irish form
of capital was used to represent the first consonant
in ‘judge.’ A reversed replaced the of
‘ship,’ and for the dental fricatives, Smith used Old
English ‘thorn’ and (see Figure 1).
John Hart (see Hart, John (?1501-1574)) was familiar
with Meigret’s system. His book, An orthographie
(London, 1569), included special symbols for the
consonant sounds [y ð S tS dZ], beautifully integrated
into the text. He was a keen observer of speech and
recorded the occurrence of syllabic consonants such
as the final in ‘fable,’ which he transcribed as
. Subsequently, William Bullokar (see Bullokar,
William (c. 1531–1609)), in his Book at large for the
amendment of orthographie for English speech (London,
1580), provided 40 symbols for transcribing
English. By using a font he opened up
extra possibilities of rarely used printing sorts. He
illustrated his phonetic alphabet by using it in a number
of literary texts, including Aesop’s fables.
In Logonomia Anglica (first edition published
in London in 1619), Alexander Gill (1564–1635)
introduced a number of extra letters. Like Smith, he
used for the first sound in ‘this,’ and in the
second edition (1621) of his work he introduced
for the velar nasal, thus maintaining the connection
with nasal . He transcribed the word ‘high’
as , using for the vowel and for the
final consonant. This illustrates the use of a diacritic
incorporated in a letter. Charles Butler, in his English
Figure 1 Symbols devised in 1568 by Sir Thomas Smith, to
represent the final sound made when pronouncing the words
pith, bathe, and dish.
Phonetic Transcription: History 399
grammar (Oxford, 1633), also used a horizontal
stroke through certain letters to avoid digraphs,
replacing the letter , so that instead of he had , respectively, with
a stroke through each letter. He also introduced
inverted to represent the in ‘thin.’
John Wilkins (see Wilkins, John (1614–1672)), in
his Essay towards a real character (1668), devised
three separate systems of notation (see Figure 2).
One of these is Roman based and uses digraphs to
supply extra consonant symbols. The letter has
a dual role: it is used both to indicate fricatives, as in
(for [x X y ð S Z]), and to
indicate voiceless forms of nasals and liquids, so that
voiced are paralleled by [voiceless
. For some of the vowels,
Wilkins employed rather poorly designed Greek symbols,
though this contradicted one of his stated principles
for choosing symbols:
1. They should be the most simple and facil, and yet
elegant and comely as to the shape of them.
2. They must be sufficiently distinguished from one
another.
3. There should be some kind of suitableness, or correspondency
of the figure to the nature and kind of the
letters which they express.
Wilkins’s third condition refers to a nonarbitrary, or
iconic, type of notation (for his other notations, see
later, Iconic Alphabets, pre-19th Century).
Figure 2 Three non-Roman transcriptions. (A) Iconic representations
of the sounds [l] and [m] (John Wilkins, 1668). (B) Syllabic
transcription of ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ (John Wilkins,
1868). (C) Organic alphabet. Transcription of ‘I remember. I
remember, the roses red and white’ (Henry Sweet, 1906).