Spell "Apple" Phonetically without IPA
November 29, 2011 9:43 PM Subscribe
Sounding out English on the Internet: /æ/
Using text to communicate causes issues with words that aren't commonly known between cultures or regions, particularly when making puns and the like. [Un]fortunately, most denizens of the net are not practiced with IPA, and they use a variety of informal systems to try to illustrate English language sounds as precisely as possible.
My question: Is there an unambiguous way to express using only English letters the sound /æ/, such as in the word "apple" (and if you don't pronounce "apple" with /æ/, I can only pray for your mortal soul).
I don't think it can be done. Any way you would think of would probably be easily mistaken for the short /a/ sound. Prove me wrong!
Using text to communicate causes issues with words that aren't commonly known between cultures or regions, particularly when making puns and the like. [Un]fortunately, most denizens of the net are not practiced with IPA, and they use a variety of informal systems to try to illustrate English language sounds as precisely as possible.
My question: Is there an unambiguous way to express using only English letters the sound /æ/, such as in the word "apple" (and if you don't pronounce "apple" with /æ/, I can only pray for your mortal soul).
I don't think it can be done. Any way you would think of would probably be easily mistaken for the short /a/ sound. Prove me wrong!
Sorry, I think I have got the wrong end of your question. Do you mean instead some way to describe the sound universally, not represent it?
posted by Jehan at 9:46 PM on November 29, 2011
posted by Jehan at 9:46 PM on November 29, 2011
You're asking about pronunciation respelling. Dictionaries solve this problem with a pronunciation key, by specifying that "a" is the sound in "apple," "cat," etc. Newspapers solve this problem with non-phonemic respelling, but that would make it hard to specify the pronunciation of /æ/ in a syllable on its own.
posted by grouse at 9:56 PM on November 29, 2011
posted by grouse at 9:56 PM on November 29, 2011
Is there an unambiguous way to express using only English letters the sound /æ/
I can't think of more than a couple of ways to spell /æ/ and all of them could be mistaken for something else. Without the extra context of the newspaper key in grouse's example or by rhyming it with familiar words this is not going to be something you can do with English spelling.
posted by villanelles at dawn at 10:03 PM on November 29, 2011
I can't think of more than a couple of ways to spell /æ/ and all of them could be mistaken for something else. Without the extra context of the newspaper key in grouse's example or by rhyming it with familiar words this is not going to be something you can do with English spelling.
posted by villanelles at dawn at 10:03 PM on November 29, 2011
There are any number of ways to describe this vowel.
--IPA, though only an approximation.
--respelling, as is often used by dictionaries that don't use IPA.
--describing the mouth positioning: upper low, front unrounded.
--plotting the formants F1 and F2.
--by showing an actual picture or cutaway side view of the positioning of the tongue and lips
--with language- or dialect-specific (or dialect-neutral) rhymes.
This page on vowels at UCLA is a good start. The Wikipedia page on vowels will get you started as well.
posted by Mo Nickels at 10:06 PM on November 29, 2011
--IPA, though only an approximation.
--respelling, as is often used by dictionaries that don't use IPA.
--describing the mouth positioning: upper low, front unrounded.
--plotting the formants F1 and F2.
--by showing an actual picture or cutaway side view of the positioning of the tongue and lips
--with language- or dialect-specific (or dialect-neutral) rhymes.
This page on vowels at UCLA is a good start. The Wikipedia page on vowels will get you started as well.
posted by Mo Nickels at 10:06 PM on November 29, 2011
I should add: you must certainly have guessed that linguists realized long ago they had to describe all the phonemes they could imagine in an unambiguous way for communicating with their peers and students, right? Even across languages?
posted by Mo Nickels at 10:09 PM on November 29, 2011
posted by Mo Nickels at 10:09 PM on November 29, 2011
Best answer: An English vowel followed by a double-consonant is nearly always "short". So I'd do it as APP-pull.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:25 PM on November 29, 2011
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:25 PM on November 29, 2011
Chocolate Pickle, that works for apple, but what about allot and arrears? I think what's needed is a way to describe the vowel sound itself independent of the consonants around it, and I'm pretty doubtful that can be done with spelling alone.
posted by villanelles at dawn at 10:38 PM on November 29, 2011
posted by villanelles at dawn at 10:38 PM on November 29, 2011
I pronounce "arrears" as "uh-rears". The first sound is a schwa. "Allot" isn't a word in my vocabulary; I don't know what it means nor do I know how to pronounce it.
One difficulty with this whole question is that there is no single "English pronunciation". There isn't even a single "American pronunciation". For a while I dated a lady from North Carolina, and one time her brother told me a joke which depended on the fact that the words "fire" and "far" were pronunced the same. Well, for me they aren't, but for him they were.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:02 PM on November 29, 2011
One difficulty with this whole question is that there is no single "English pronunciation". There isn't even a single "American pronunciation". For a while I dated a lady from North Carolina, and one time her brother told me a joke which depended on the fact that the words "fire" and "far" were pronunced the same. Well, for me they aren't, but for him they were.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:02 PM on November 29, 2011
OK, I'm slow tonight. What you meant was that "allot" and "arrears" don't start with a short a.
But the doubled consonants are liquids, and the rules are different for liquids than for plosives.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:05 PM on November 29, 2011
But the doubled consonants are liquids, and the rules are different for liquids than for plosives.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:05 PM on November 29, 2011
My question: Is there an unambiguous way to express using only English letters the sound /æ/, such as in the word "apple" (and if you don't pronounce "apple" with /æ/, I can only pray for your mortal soul).
In New Zealand, a nipple a day keeps the doctor away.
And that's the problem, really. There are many, many flavours of English, and their greatest variable is vowel pronunciation. If you stick to the Latin alphabet, no matter how you spell apple, the reader will impose their own accent onto it. Of course, they'll be pronouncing it correctly in their accent, but that pronunciation might not include /æ/.
FWIW, probably due to my terrible Canadianness, I cannot for the life of me discern any difference whatsoever between /æ/ and /a/ and /ä/ and /ɒ/. There may well be no meaningful distinction between them in English at all, but I'll bet a Swede could tell the difference.
posted by Sys Rq at 11:06 PM on November 29, 2011
In New Zealand, a nipple a day keeps the doctor away.
And that's the problem, really. There are many, many flavours of English, and their greatest variable is vowel pronunciation. If you stick to the Latin alphabet, no matter how you spell apple, the reader will impose their own accent onto it. Of course, they'll be pronouncing it correctly in their accent, but that pronunciation might not include /æ/.
FWIW, probably due to my terrible Canadianness, I cannot for the life of me discern any difference whatsoever between /æ/ and /a/ and /ä/ and /ɒ/. There may well be no meaningful distinction between them in English at all, but I'll bet a Swede could tell the difference.
posted by Sys Rq at 11:06 PM on November 29, 2011
But the doubled consonants are liquids, and the rules are different for liquids than for plosives.
I've never heard anyone pronounce attrition or addition with the same initial vowel as ammunition; not to say that there aren't more fine-grained rules governing this sort of thing, but once you're requiring your reader to decide whether that was a dental plosive or a bilabial one you've gotten pretty far from the original desire to use spelling to dictate pronunciation across linguistic barriers.
posted by villanelles at dawn at 11:25 PM on November 29, 2011
I've never heard anyone pronounce attrition or addition with the same initial vowel as ammunition; not to say that there aren't more fine-grained rules governing this sort of thing, but once you're requiring your reader to decide whether that was a dental plosive or a bilabial one you've gotten pretty far from the original desire to use spelling to dictate pronunciation across linguistic barriers.
posted by villanelles at dawn at 11:25 PM on November 29, 2011
Well, according to John Wells' lexical sets, you are referring to the TRAP vowel (or the BATH-TRAP split/merger).
posted by iamkimiam at 3:09 AM on November 30, 2011
posted by iamkimiam at 3:09 AM on November 30, 2011
Response by poster: Thanks, chocolate pickle!
to everyone suggesting the use of arcane or esoteric systems (from a layman perspective, not from a linguistic perspective), please remember that this is not for practiced linguists. If I could expect any given person on a forum or in a chat to understand these systems, I would use them. but I can't, so they're irrelevant to this question.
posted by rubah at 12:10 PM on November 30, 2011
to everyone suggesting the use of arcane or esoteric systems (from a layman perspective, not from a linguistic perspective), please remember that this is not for practiced linguists. If I could expect any given person on a forum or in a chat to understand these systems, I would use them. but I can't, so they're irrelevant to this question.
posted by rubah at 12:10 PM on November 30, 2011
Chocolate Pickle, that works for apple, but what about allot and arrears?
But the doubled consonants are liquids, and the rules are different for liquids than for plosives.
Actually it's not about the consonants, it's that the first syllable of apple is stressed, and the first syllable in arrears is not. And the first syllable of ammunition gets secondary stress. Vowels in (especially American) English unstressed syllables tend towards schwa, which usually gets represented as 'uh' in non-IPA phonetic spelling.
I think the best you can do is give a grouping of words that contain the vowel you're talking about and note any regional variants.
posted by tractorfeed at 5:58 AM on December 1, 2011
But the doubled consonants are liquids, and the rules are different for liquids than for plosives.
Actually it's not about the consonants, it's that the first syllable of apple is stressed, and the first syllable in arrears is not. And the first syllable of ammunition gets secondary stress. Vowels in (especially American) English unstressed syllables tend towards schwa, which usually gets represented as 'uh' in non-IPA phonetic spelling.
I think the best you can do is give a grouping of words that contain the vowel you're talking about and note any regional variants.
posted by tractorfeed at 5:58 AM on December 1, 2011
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posted by Jehan at 9:45 PM on November 29, 2011 [1 favorite]