First, there doesn’t seem to be one unified system (for English pronunciation). I’m not talking about different pronunciations, I’m talking about different methods of indicating a single pronunciation.
For example, I looked up the word “signature” online in thefreedictionary.com, and they show three different methods of indicating pronunciation, that were originally published in three different dictionaries. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to copy and paste them accurately, so if you click the link to that page yourself you will see what I mean.
So, what’s up with that? Is there a widely preferred method, or are there three (or more than three) that are considered equally valid? These three have some similarities but I don’t know enough to tell if they are really different from each other.
Then, where do I go to learn all about these pronunciation guides? This is something that was not taught in my schools, and it is a gap I would like to fill in my advancing age. I’m hoping for a handy little reference like Elements of Style or something that would cover this topic.
The first example is more or less what is used in most American dictionaries, with some variations, possibly. The other two look like IPA, which is less common in American dictionaries, but don’t have the same pronunciations (although the first and third do).
But that second one is strange. . . The terminal “r” sound is silent? OK. . . .
Aside from that, the editors of each dictionary will determin what pronunciation guide they will use, and give examples. And that brings up example #2 again. The indicated pronuncation uses IPA, but the link to the pronunciation guide goes back to the “normal” American pronunciation guide–which doesn’t include all the symbols!
dictionary.com let’s you switch between phonetic and IPA even though they, too pull from multiple sources.
Collins is British, so that’s probably a non-rhotic pronunciation. Although they’re based in Glasgow, which is a less rhotic place in rhotic Scotland. Confused yet?
Read up on IPA on Wikipedia or something. I’ve found it useful, unless is a symbol for a non-English phoneme, in which case I have to wing it.
Ah, I see. However, when I do that, one of the characters in the pronunciation for the word is not in the key - it’s the sort of elongated S curvy character after the t. Now what’s up with that?
That’s the second half of the IPA combination for the sound that we often spell with the letters ch in English: /tʃ /. Alone that elongated S curvy character represents the sound that we often spell in English with the letters sh.
That’s the point I was trying to make earlier. The pronunciation guide in the link doesn’t match the IPA pronunciation guide being used in the example.
We don’t like to change. Also, the pronunciation guides between dictionaries show some variation, although they are more or less the same. It’s an editorial decision.
IPA is meant to cover the full range of possible sounds, many of which are not used in english and most monolingual english dictionaries are meant for the non-linguistically minded general public who neither need to know how to represent clicks nor care. So the dictionaries stick with (ideally) simpler notation systems that are easily understood by your average english speaker.
ʃ is the “sh” sound as in “shampoo.” Adding a t makes it “ch” as in “church.” This can be seen naturally in French, as “ch” is usually pronounced as in “champagne.” A “T” changes it, thus French people can talk about going to the country Tchad to sell caoutchouc.
No good reason. It’s harmless enough to use ‘y’ for [j], since English lacks a high front rounded vowel, and no one’s going to read ‘sh’ or ‘ch’ as an aspirated fricative or palatal stop. Vowels, on the other hand, seem to have a different notation in every dictionary that doesn’t use IPA. Combine that with the great vowel shift, and it makes pronunications unreadable without checking each individual dictionary’s key. It’s annoying; IPA was developed to solve this exact problem, yet it’s not being used because of inertia or some idea that symbols are scary. (Sure, the notation for clicks and other rare phonemes is cumbersome, but those sounds don’t appear in English, and it’s not like there’s a better alternative for those sounds.)
Merriam Webster, for reasons of their own, somewhere around 1970, suddenly decided to put the accent mark before, instead of after, the stressed syllable.
The problem is, they’re not - as soon as the reader has a different dialect that the one the writers were thinking of, those keys go down the drain; the dictionary itself usually contains the pronunciation key, but when people use that same key outside the book for which it was created, it doesn’t work. Using only those parts of IPA which are necessary would be helpful for anybody using the dictionary in question, and I say this as someone who’s used multiple dictionaries and found the IPA ones to work much better: when the dictionaries use IPA, two people with different dictionaries will have a common way of expressing the pronunciations; when they don’t… you’re still speaking alien to each other.
And using IPA doesn’t require you to use every symbol it has. My keyboard contains several symbols I’m not using in this post: I don’t expect that to make the keys jump up screaming at me.
Well, jtur88, it’s very kind of them to follow the “universal” convention rather than expecting each new reader to learn a new key.