Phonetic Symbols

[Eizan]

I have looked up some medical terms in a dictionary but the phonetic symbols in this dictionary are quite strange so I don't know how to pronunce them.
For example:



Could you help me,please?
Thank you.

[BobK]

Originally Posted by Eizan

I have looked up some medical terms in a dictionary but the phonetic symbols in this dictionary are quite strange so I don't know how to pronunce them.
For example:



Could you help me,please?
Thank you.

The image is a bit unclear (and my eyes aren't great) but I think it's this:

• /æblɪ'færiə/
  
• /æ'blefərɒn/
  
• /æ'blefərəs/
  
• /'æblu:ənt/
  
• /æ'blu:mɪnəl/
  

That transcription was used 30 or 40 years ago in the UK, where the IPA was slow to catch on. The stress marks are the main area of confusion; they put the mark after the stressed syllable. The transcription doesn't distinguish the first vowels; in real life only the fourth would have the clear /æ/ phoneme. All the others would have some kind of unstressed reduction, approaching /ə/.

b

[Eizan]

Thank you so much, but when I look up these words in the stedman's online medical dictionary, the dictionary that my friends recommended, the phonetic symbols look a bit different:



I have googled it and found only this:



These phonetic symbols are so confused , I still don't know how to pronounce. I guess that //is pronounced as /æ/,// is pronounced as /ɪ/, ect.
Can you help me to change the old transcription into the IPA so I can understand a bit more?
And if anyone here also know any good medical English dictionary ( with the IPA phonetic symbols), could you please tell me? My friends recommended the stedman's medical dictionary but I can't stand its pronounciation

PS.: Hope that the images I got from the Internet are better

[orangutan]

Sorry, I can't help with medical dictionaries. But on the subject of phonetic symbols and IPA transcriptions of English (plural because there is more than one), members might like to read this page by John Wells which I and my students have found useful.

[BobK]

Originally Posted by Eizan

...
Can you help me to change the old transcription into the IPA so I can understand a bit more?...

Isn't that what I did (Of course, when you say "the IPA symbols" you could be referring to well over a hundred symbols, which - with diacritics - can specify a potentially infinite range of speech sounds. For clarity and simplicity, I used the 44 symbols given at Phonemic chart | Teaching English | British Council | BBC. Stedman simply uses more diacritics. 'IPA' transcriptions can differ widely, depending on the degree of detail specified. I just use a sort of 'IPA-lite' - a small subset of the full range of symbols (widely used in the ELT world by British-trained teachers); a bit like HTML being a tiny subset of SGML).(Hmm Not really. Bad example. Scrub that. )

b

[Eizan]

I've always thought that the IPA symbols are just about 40 or 50 symbols that I often see on some of mine dictionaries
I will have to learn more about this
Thank you so much.

[BobK]

Originally Posted by Eizan

I've always thought that the IPA symbols are just about 40 or 50 symbols that I often see on some of mine dictionaries
I will have to learn more about this
Thank you so much.

No - that would be too easy.

b