4. Types of phonetic transcription.
Phonemic
(or
broad)
and phonetic
transcription. The term phonemic
or
broad transcription
(or phonological)
is used to designate a transcription that uses a simple set of
phonemes representing one of the phonemes of the language without any
of the details of the pronunciation that are predictable by
phonological rule thus
giving a limited amount of phonetic information. In
phonemic transcription we use the slant brackets to indicate phonemic
symbols /
/.
A phonetic transcription
(or allophonic,
or narrow)
presents the full range of phonetic symbols if these are required;
which carry a lot of details about the precise phonetic quality of
sounds. The use of diacritics, small marks that can be added to a
symbol to modify its value, is a means of increasing precision, e.g.
a small circle [o]
placed under a symbol represents a voiceless sound like //
in the word play [];
diacritic mark [ ]
beneath a consonant stands for its dental allophone as in eight
[].
The
square brackets [ ] indicate phonetic (allophonic) symbols. A
transcription that shows all the rule-governed alternation of the
sounds is called a completely systematic
phonetic transcription.
