IPA English vowel chart, oriented towards learners (not documentation)

So this is basically the IPA chart I used with Ali, just that it looks cleaner and there's less scribbling. (Click for larger version).


In my opinion (as in not backed by double blind clinical trials, rigourous empirical evidence or anything but simply my own intuition and experience with others), IPA charts are useful. They provide a "skeleton" in which to arrange the seemingly vast array of English vowel sounds.

I have not really been happy with the way the English vowel system is generally presented to learners, both native children and ESL learners. For one, the vowels are often presented in random lists, and learners aren't told how the vowels are related to each other. An IPA-based vowel chart is organised by two physical traits often used to classify vowels (among others): vowel height, and vowel backness.

Here, height and backness are relative. If you look up the IPA vowel chart on Wikipedia, you find distinctions like "mid-open", "mid-front", etc. but those are w/respect to "absolute" cardinal vowels defined by phoneticians -- and there is no single language that uses all of them. Most languages distinguish 2 or 3 heights, and distinguish 2 or 3 levels of backness. There are always exceptions -- but languages that distinguish 5 heights for example, may only have a handful of consonants, etc. It's a trend you find among the world's languages -- complexities in one area tend to be compensated by simplifications elsewhere.

The more "open" a vowel is, the higher its F1 formant frequency is (more close ==> lower F1 formant frequency). F2 formant frequencies are primarily influenced by vowel backness (more front ==> higher F2 formant frequency). Formant analysis in phonetics goes all the way to formants like F9 ... but their effects are more subtle. And of course formant frequencies have interfering effects on each other, but there are compensating functions to do that -- and I won't discuss any more phonetics because I really want to discuss literacy.

A brief vowel chart orientation (an initiation to IPA). In IPA, /j/ is used preferentially for the "yod" (as in yogurt), since /y/ is used for a vowel sound (that English doesn't use). English has (more or less) eight pure vowels:

æ -- "bad"
ɛ -- "bed"
ɪ -- "bid"
ʊ -- "good"
ɔ -- "law"; for people who make the cot-caught distinction. This pure vowel does not exist by itself in my dialect (New England rhotic)
ɑ -- "father"
ə -- "kernel"
ʌ -- "bud"

Now long vowels. Long vowels aren't actually pure vowels, though they used to be. They are actually diphthongs. A diphthong is a combination of vowel + semivowel (aka vowel-like consonant). Not all combinations of two vowel-like sounds are diphthongs. For example, if you pronounce "towel" with two syllables, there are three-vowel like sounds in there, but there is only one diphthong and there is no "triphthong". My rule of thumb:

1. A diphthong has to occupy the time length of one syllable. The semivowel component is generally shorter and more "clipped" than the vowel, thus the VV sequence is really behaving like VC. The preferred syllable structure in English (if not universally) is the structure CVC, which lasts for the length of one standard syllable. Deviations from this structure generally result in compensation.

For example: the word it. Kinda simple, but you never knew you implemented so many phonological corrections when you used this word! If you use it by itself (just say it to yourself), notice how, the /ɪ/ phoneme is stressed, and is slightly longer than say, the word in "sit". But put a consonant before it -- like in a sentence, and "it" will actually pull a consonant off your preceding syllable, and /ɪ/ will revert back to being an unstressed vowel of normal length. Thus, "make it so" can be analysed as: /mɛ^j.kɪt.sɔ ^w/; all three syllables have the structure CVC. This is part of what we usually regard as "fluency" -- our mind is so automatic and flexible, we unconsciously rearrange phonemes around based on sound laws we don't even think consciously about. These sound rules will also make consonants appear out of thin air:

by themselves: "you" "can" "see" "it" -- /jʊ^w/ | /kɛ~n/ | /sɪ^j/ | /ɪt/ [note stresses in bold]
in a sentence: "You can see it." /jʊ^w.kɛn.sɪ^j.jɪt/ (extra consonant suddenly duplicated from previous syllable: length compensation!) [stresses in bold, extra consonant italicised]

You can observe this as a rule in children. Young children and toddlers have incomplete length compensation -- the result is a sort of sing-song sentence structure we associate with two-year-olds. But analyse the sound structure of a six-year-old or an eight-year-old, and many elaborate sound rules suddenly appear.

Okay, that was a rather long aside. Second rule of thumb:

Diphthongs generally "obscure" their component sounds. Only by conscious analysis do you realise that the sound in "ay" (like stay) is made up of ɛ (like in bed) and the yod (the consonant of yogurt). Same goes for "how" (æ+w). I include rhotics in here too, because they have a tendency to change the vowel, but you can also make an argument for excluding them.

So here are the diphthongs of English:

æ^w -- "how"
æ^j -- "my"
ɛ^j -- "bake"
ɪ^j -- "bee"
ʊ^w -- "moose"
ɔ^w -- "bow"
ɔ^j -- "toy"
ɑ^w -- "sock"
ɑ^r -- "far"
ɑ^wr -- "war", "core" **
ə^r -- "wicker"
ʌ^r -- "kernel", "rehearse" **

** There's further discussion about these diphthongs but it would make this post too long.
There's also nasal vowels (like the vowel in sand) but I've decided to skip that for now.

IMO, this is better than the traditional short-long vowel system often presented, because that system really only allows for ten vowel phonemes and the rest of the vowels are randomly placed. Was always confused about the vowel system from day 1 when it was presented in first grade, until grade 10, which is when I learnt phonetics.

A pure vowel / diphthong contrast can be used to explain English spelling, whereas it's not apparent with a short-long system. So you have to explain why silent-e often generates diphthongs ("long vowels"). OK. Short answer: It's related to length compensation, like the syllable exercises we've been doing above. But why does double-o ("long o") not actually sound like a long "o" (like in stone)? Can you actually make sense of English spelling? Ah, that is for an upcoming post on the Great Vowel Shift.

an Iraqi, English spelling, and a bit of English historical linguistics

I had an Iraqi roommate this summer. Let's call him Ali. His cultural story is interesting and comes with all sorts of other-than-linguistic things to muse about; he's very humble and is a sous-chef for one of the eateries on Grounds here. He was going to enter engineering school in Germany when the war broke out. He speaks broken German, more fluent Turkish and some Kurdish -- and very impressive English for two years of immersion.

Ali, trying to go back to school and enter the American college system what with its SATs and all, entreated me for help on reading, writing and speaking. I do think his progress in two years is very laudable -- some other members of the refugee community have been here for a year or more, yet cannot speak more than a smattering of English.

"My biggest problem is reading," he once said, struggling to pronounce that "-ng" sound. "English is a hard language to learn, harder than Turkish, German or Arabic. In Arabic, you spell the words like they are pronounced. Like this..." He writes out an example for me, which I struggle to read.

"English is kinda written as it is pronounced," I try to reassure him, struggling to summarise the vast body of work linguists and philologists have done over the years. "It's just that the pronunciations have changed over the years, and many spellings have yet to be updated. You know Arabic dialects, right? Aren't they spoken much differently than Standard Arabic is? It's kinda like that." It's like speaking those dialects but writing them in the system of formal Standard Arabic.

But I already knew there were complications with this analogy. Often, the colloquial dialects -- if they are written at all -- are transcribed exactly the way the sound. This was the case with the Vulgar Latin's descendants -- the Romance dialects, that diverged into the Romance languages like (Old) French, Italian and Spanish. (Modern French writing is an interesting story and shares some parallels with English.) With the Chinese languages, many characters are in fact, composites of other characters, where some characters have been borrowed for sound rather than meaning. After that, the borrowed character and the word being represented diverge in sound in some dialects -- and incongruence develops à la English. Often some of the diverging dialects will simply adopt different characters -- but elsewhere other dialects will keep the original (but incongruent) analogy; and of course the most conservative dialects do not even see an incongruence at all.

An immediate concept that helped Ali, but wasn't taught very often in ESL classes, was the concept of stress. At first this didn't have anything to do with reading or writing -- simply the way he pronounced the words that made him hard to understand.

"Sometimes, you say the words correctly... correct vowel and everything, but you don't put the correct stress on the word, so it sounds as though the vowel isn't there. And sometimes you say the stress correctly, but you use the full vowel on unstressed syllables or the reduced vowel on stressed syllables."

This was new to him, because in the two years of ESL help he had received, "stress" was a concept that had appeared to escape ESL teachers' minds. A fundamental concept in English phonology, it's kind of hard to teach both fluency and reading/writing if you ignore it. Stress, you see, is a historical innovation in the history of the English language. Unlike many other languages, it's neither predictable (i.e. it's phonemic) but neither is it explicitly marked in writing (as is the case with Spanish).

But don't worry -- stress is something easy to memorise, because the stress of each word is usually memorable. Many grammatical function words like "the", "a", "of", or affixes "-ing", "-er" etc. have no stress at all. Ali, I discovered, had already internalised many stresses -- he just didn't know it was that important. If you randomly quizzed him on the stresses of "bigger", "party", "telephone", "ambulance" or "reduce," he would get it right, down to the primary and secondary stresses. This is because stress is something that is quite easy to memorise and he had already done it unconsciously, even as a non-native speaker.

There are complications of stress, like the fact that the relative strength of a word's stress compared to other word's stresses will change depending on where it is in a sentence (syntactical stress), but that was for a more advanced lesson. Some words' syllables can be stressed when emphasised, such that when you quiz them in isolation, they become stressed, e.g. the "re-" in "reduce" or "the" gets pronounced with an "-ee" (/i/) sound rather than a reduced vowel -- but are usually unstressed when you use them in a sentence. But I told Ali not to worry for now -- it's not a big error for a second language learner to sound extra emphatic.

Stress came in handy, I discovered, because Ali had a real trouble with the letter "e". It can be pronounced like the "e" in "me" (/i/), the "ei" (/e/) in "weigh", the "e" (/ɛ/) in "bed", the reduced vowels /ə/ and /ɪ/ (when unstressed, I treated them like the same phoneme for Ali's sake, but some English dialects -- including mine -- do not merge them). And oh yeah, if you want to be really finicky, there's the stressed rhotic /ɝ/ (like in "rehearse") as opposed to the unstressed rhotic /ər/, but I didn't go there.

And oh yeah. That silent-e issue, which Ali had learnt functionally but still had trouble with because his ESL teachers had taught him the rule imperfectly. But wait, stress can come to the rescue...

Long vowels, when pronounced long, are almost always pronounced stressed. That is, you rarely see unstressed long vowels. Plus, conjugations of verbs and their gerunds tend to preserve the stress of their parent verbs.

"Biking" preserves the stress of "bike" and is not pronounced "bick King"
"Corner" had the stress on the first syllable, so the e's in "cornered" cannot be stressed, and also cannot be pronounced "corneared".
"Cornea" in contrast has two stresses (primary and secondary). It's a good example of a word with syntax-dependent stress, because it is pronounced with three syllables when the second syllable is stressed (during emphasis, like if a med school lecturer distinguishing the cornea versus the sclera), but the secondary stress can be dropped to form a two-syllable word.

This got us into diphthongs and glides (when vowels get compounded together and one of the vowels get reduced). When not emphasised, the /i/ in "cornea" is reduced to a glide (/j/; it behaves like a consonant), and consonants cannot be stressed in English.

There are also "exceptions" that really aren't. For example, I gave this stress-based rule: Stressed terminal -y is pronounced like the vowel in "tie" -- e.g. fly, fry, why, rely, retie, deny
Unstressed terminal -y is pronounced like the vowel in "free" -- e.g. belly, patty, hearty

The reason why terminal -y is pronounced /i/ even in unstressed positions (like "party") has a historical reason behind it, because terminal -y doesn't come from historical "e" but historical "i", which historically split into /ɪ/ (bit) and /aɪ/ (bite) during the Great Vowel Shift.

For various reasons, historical "i" in this unstressed terminal position didn't become /ɪ/ and remained /i/, while stressed "i" followed the sound change to "/aɪ/". It sounds like a mouthful to explain, but makes intuitive sense to children who already have an implicit knowledge of English phonotactics. Some vowels (vowel sounds) are never found by themselves at the end of words, or heck, open syllables (syllables that do not end in a consonant). English simply forbids them to exist (or more accurately, the historical pressure for their existence never ... existed). This includes vowels like /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /æ/ and /ʌ/. Try it for yourselves: the vowels in "bit", "bed", "bad" and "but" never end words by themselves.

The reason even comes down to universal trends seen in all languages: if there is length distinction involved, long vowels prefer to be in open situations (syllables that end in vowel), and short vowels prefer to be in "closed" situations (syllables that in a consonant). It's sort of a length compensation. After the historical Great Reorganisation of the English sound system, consonant length is no longer as noticeable, but can be noticed in the following examples:

The /t/ in the word "fitting" is likely to be pronounced longer than the /t/ in "fighting"

i.e. a transcription making note of this might note "fitting" as "fɪt.tɪŋ" (CVC.CVC) but "fighting" as "faɪ.tɪŋ" (CVV.CVC).

The /f/ in "riffle" is likely to be pronounced longer than the /f/ in "rifle", hence
/rɪf.fl/ and /raɪ.fl/

This gives us a historical basis for why double consonants (in terms of consonants found in writing) tend to convert long vowels in verbs to their short counterparts, hence the distinction between "writing" and "written". If you say "rifle" like "rife-fel" as opposed to "rye-fel", you won't technically be wrong, but you will sound slightly strange. These subtle details can be confirmed by taking spectrograms of native speakers' utterances.

At some point -- to distinguish letters from sounds -- I had to introduce Ali to IPA and the linguists' English vowel chart, for both our sakes. I'm surprised that it isn't used in schools -- because there are some overarching rules that follow from it that was a big "OH! it makes so much sense now" moment for Ali.


** At this point I should also mention various important laws of logic in analysing sound systems. Like causality. Situation X may imply sound type A, e.g. there is a correlation, but that doesn't mean sound type A implies situation X. Similarly, sound type B may imply situation Y, but the causality may or may not be bidirectional.