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Tran scription vs. trans literation.

In order to deal with the sounds of language, it is convenient to have, in addition to linguistic descriptions of sounds (e.g. a high back unrounded vowel) a short-hand set of symbols to represent these sounds. For this we use a modified version of the roman alphabet, known as the (International) phonetic alphabet, an agreed-upon set of symbols for the values of various sounds. For short this is called the IPA, but there is also an American version of this used for some languages, whereas IPA is more often used for European languages, and those where Europeans pioneered in the study of.





Harold Schiffman
Fri Jan 17 09:48:04 EST 1997