Further to my last post, the following, from [FONT="]
International Phonetic Alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [/FONT]
may be of interest:[FONT="][/FONT]
[FONT="] [/FONT]
[FONT="] Although the IPA offers over a hundred and sixty symbols for transcribing speech, only a relatively small subset of these will be used to transcribe any one language. It is possible to transcribe speech with various levels of precision. A precise phonetic transcription, in which sounds are described in a great deal of detail, is known as a
narrow transcription. A coarser transcription which ignores some of this detail is called a
broad transcription. Both are relative terms, and both are generally enclosed in square brackets.
[1] Broad phonetic transcriptions may restrict themselves to easily heard details, or only to details that are relevant to the discussion at hand, and may differ little if at all from phonemic transcriptions, but they make no theoretical claim that all the distinctions transcribed are necessarily meaningful in the language. […[/FONT]
[FONT="]For example, the English word
little may be transcribed broadly using the IPA as [ˈlɪtəl], and this broad (imprecise) transcription is an accurate (approximately correct) description of many pronunciations. A more narrow transcription may focus on individual or dialectical details: [ˈɫɪɾɫ] in
General American, [ˈlɪʔo] in
Cockney, or [ˈɫɪːɫ] in Southern US English.[/FONT]
[FONT="]It is customary to use simpler letters, without many diacritics, in phonemic transcriptions. The choice of IPA letters may reflect the theoretical claims of the author, or merely be a convenience for typesetting. For instance, in English, either the vowel of
pick or the vowel of
peak may be transcribed as /i/ (for the pairs /pik, piːk/ or /pɪk, pik/), and neither is identical to the vowel of the French word
pique which is also generally transcribed /i/. That is, letters between slashes do not have absolute values, something true of broader phonetic approximations as well. A narrow transcription may, however, be used to distinguish them: [pʰɪk], [pʰiːk], [pik].[/FONT]