8. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

   Up till now, most of you in Taiwan having been using the Kenyon & Knott (K.K.) phonetic symbols to show how to pronounce an English word. This is mostly an advantage, since this system is a subset of the IPA, the International Phonetic Association/Alphabet 國際音標 system.

 You will, however, need to pay special attention to the IPA symbols for sounds that are transcribed differently than in K.K. The most important differences are:

(1) the K.K.  is written in IPA; this clearly shows that the sound is a diphthong, i.e. composed of two vowels and not just one;

(2) similarly, the K.K. is written in IPA; this is a diphthong that Taiwan speakers of English are notorious for pronouncing wrong, often as a monophthong, either a short or ;

(3) the K.K.  is written in IPA;

(4) the American tap, as in 'water' is written with a 'fishhook' symbol , and not .

We will learn about other differences as we go along. Note that we will be learning one style of IPA transcription; the symbols chosen can and do in fact vary from language to language and textbook to textbook.

Information on IPA fonts on the next page:
IPA fonts, Ethnologue, and more

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