I get a lot of comments on the videos on my YouTube channel. The difference between spelling an IPA Transcription is something that comes up again and again.
Comments on IPA transcription
Jap says: [quote]What’s the difference in pronunciation between “or” and “of”? According to phonetics it is written with different symbols but the vowel sound is the same in both. I’m confused please help.[/quote]
Manor says: [quote]Oh, I get it. It is simple, the letter /j/ represents “y” sound like Yet, Yesterday and YouTube and the /ʤ/ represents the j sound like Jug and Gin. Am I right?[/quote]
Darth Says: [quote]English Language Club.Is /ə/ an English letter? because it isn’t in the English alphabet.[/quote]
Seoundu Kim says: [quote]But let me ask you, how am I supposed to know the /əʊ/ sound when I try to pronounce go? Is there any hint of when to pronounce /əʊ/?[/quote]
My replies
Ok, so. In all these comments I can see that people are getting confused between how we spell words in normal English writing and IPA transcription, which is how we can put pronunciation into writing.
To Jap
Jap, yes both the words ‘or’ and ‘of’ have the letter o but we pronounce the letter o, as with all vowels, in several different ways, that is one of the hardest things about English, it is not phonetic.
But, the phonetic alphabet and IPA transcription is there to help with that, but don’t get it confused with normal writing.
In the word ‘or’ the ‘o’ with the r makes an /ɔː/ sound represented by this symbol in phonetics. In the word ‘of’ the o makes the /ɒ/ sound represented by this symbol. Does that make more sense?
To Manoor
Manoor, yes you are right! It is even more confusing in this case because a lot of the same letters can be used in both normal writing and IPA transcription. Most of the time this is not a problem because the letters make more or less the sound that you would expect like /t/, /d/, /e/ and many others. But the /j/ sound is particularly confusing because it looks like the letter j, in fact we use the letter j. However, the letter j normally makes a /ʤ/ sound. Remember in phonetics this is not the letter j it just looks like the letter j. It’s actually the /j/ phoneme or the /j/ sound. Which in writing is often spelt with a y like in yet, yesterday or YouTube.
To Darth
So Darth in answer to your question is no, the /ə/ is not an English letter but it is part of the International phonetic alphabet and it represents a sound that is very common in English. Especially British English. It’s the sound /ə/ as in at the end of the words mother, father and brother.
To Seondu
Great question Seondu. Unfortunately I don’t have good answer for you. If we look at how to spell English words, it is hard to know how to pronounce them. This is the hardest thing about learning English. The phonetic symbols help us to break down words and analyse and practice the individual sounds but it doesn’t help us to know went use each sound. For that you just need to keep practicing until you remember.
So I hope this clarifies the difference between normal spelling as in normal writing and phonetic transcription, which is using the phonemes and why we use different symbols in phonetics. As we have done in a lot of the videos that I have made in the past. For more on this you should have a look at my video introduction to phonetics because that should be helpful.
In conclusion
Well I hope this was helpful in knowing the difference between normal spelling and phonetic transcription.
At this point I would like to add that you don’t really need to know phonetics, to speak English. It’s really just to help when you have problems with pronunciation. Then you can look up the little part of the subject of phonetics that you can use to help with that problem. You never need to know the whole subject. You never need to learn all the sounds or all the symbols. It is best to just use the as reference if you are just learning English.
What words do you have difficulty pronouncing? Why don’t you share with us in the comments below.
I hope you have found this useful, If you did you should check out some of my other videos and subscribe to my YouTube channel and mailing list via the website, to keep up to date with new videos and features from The English Language Club.
Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next time.
