Transcribing English Words is an elementary course designed to introduce native and non-native speakers of English alike to basic information about the pronunciation system of English words and basic instruction in transcribing them. Although it is elementary, it is also comprehensive, so that a person should be able to transcribe any word in the English language. It is also very thorough, providing many examples and exercises – so many, that a skilful person could actually skip some of them, but enough to provide a less confident person with plenty of practice material.

The accent of the recordings is mainly Southern British Standard Pronunciation, or Received Pronunciation, as it used to be known. However, other accents are referred to – and to some extent practised – in order to make certain pieces of information clear.

The course is available in two formats:

on the web at http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/staff/tench/tswords.html

with an audio cassette, on which most of the text is recorded – sections in bold, like this section, are not recorded, you have to read them yourself.

A Key is provided only for the main tests, not for each example and exercise, because you can’t go wrong!

The course starts off very gently, with plenty of exercise material with the short vowels of English, in order to build up your confidence; but by the end of the course, you should be able to transcribe a word like homogeneous without any difficulty!

Grateful thanks to Robert Thomas, Dean Burnett and Nathan Heslop for all technical work, and to Jill Knight for most of the typing.

It is an unfortunate feature of the English language, that the way its words are spelt does not always match the way its words are pronounced, in the simple and systematic way of other languages. For instance, in most accents of English, the letter <a> is not pronounced the same in the two words gather and father; and although the two words father (‘the male parent’) and farther (‘the more distant’) are pronounced the same, at least in most accents in England and Wales, they are spelt differently. There are, in fact, two sides to this mismatching of spelling and pronunciation: a single vowel letter of the alphabet can represent at least two vowel sounds; and a single vowel sound can be represented by at least two different spellings. Another example is the double <o> in brood and brook – two different vowel sounds, but the same spelling; and brood (what birds do) and brewed (past tense of the verb brew) – two different spellings, but the same vowel sound. In fact, it is not too difficult to think of ten ways of pronouncing the use of the letter <a> in spelling, and ten ways of pronouncing each of the other vowel letters. Equally, it is not too difficult to think of 10 ways of spelling most of the vowel sounds. This represents an enormous task for a child learning to read and write in English as their mother tongue, and similarly, a tricky task for those who learn English as an additional language.

This mismatching is found amongst consonants too. The letter <t> in rat and ration represent very different consonant sounds; double <s> occurs in both pass and passion, but whereas passion and ration rhyme, their identical ‘sh’ sound is spelt differently. Have you noticed that the first double <s> in the word possess is pronounced differently from its second <s>, and that the second double <s> of the word possession is different again. The variation amongst consonant letters and consonant sounds is not as great and as mystifying as it is amongst vowel letters and sounds, but it certainly adds to the impression of an unhelpful, perhaps even an unnecessary, complication in the matching up of spelling and pronunciation of words in English. You know, too, that often consonant letters represent nothing in pronunciation, like the <b> in debt, the <c> in muscle, the <d> in handkerchief, etc. But there is also the case of a consonant sound not being spelt at all: if you compare the pronunciation of the beginning of the two words youthful and useful, you will notice that the ‘y’ sound is spelt with the letter <y> in the first word, but is not spelt at all in the second; compare view and few too, where the ‘y’ sound is spelt with the letter <i> in view, but not in few.

Thus it is no wonder that learners have problems with English spelling and with deducing the pronunciation of words from their written form. These problems persist into later life and even well educated professional people make many mistakes. So it is also no wonder that professionals in education have sought to remedy the situation by various means, including proposals for spelling reform on the one hand, and special reading schemes like phonics and the phonographic method on the other. But what is needed is an understanding of the very pronunciation system of English itself which the spelling system obscures. This need is met in the application of linguistics, or, more precisely, in those parts of linguistics known as phonology and phonetics. Phonology refers to pronunciation as a system in itself – how many vowels there are in the spoken form of the language (not the five vowel letters), and how many consonants there are, where the sounds can occur in words, what combination of sounds are allowed, etc. Phonetics refers to the pronunciation of the sounds themselves – how they are made, how they differ, how they sound in different positions of a word and how they sound in different combinations, etc. And for the study of the pronunciation of words in English, an extra set of symbols is needed to extend the use of the letters of the alphabet. The use of such phonetic symbols, as they are usually called, to represent pronunciation is not necessary for most languages because the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation is pretty straightforward, but in the case of a few languages like English and French, it is necessary.

What this course offers is not a full scale description of English phonetics and phonology, but a practical introduction to the use of the phonetic symbols and to good practice in the transcription of words.

It is primarily an audio course, but you will need something to write with.