Phonetic Transcription: History

396 Phonetic Transcription and Analysis 

Brink L, Lund J, Heger S & Jørgensen J (1991). Den store 

Danske udtaleordbog. Copenhagen: Munksgaard. 

Gimson A C (1962). An introduction to the pronunciation 

of English. London: Arnold. 

Jespersen O (1890). ‘Danias lydskrift.’ In Dania I. 33–79. 

Jones D (1917). English pronouncing dictionary. London: 

Dent. 

Jones D (1949). The principles of the International Phonetic 

Association: being a description of the International 

Phonetic Alphabet and the manner of using it, illustrated 

by texts in 51 languages. London: International Phonetic 

Association. 

Jones D (1956). An outline of English phonetics (8th edn.). 

Cambridge: Heffer. [Appendix A, Types of phonetic transcription.]. 

Kenyon J & Knott T (1944). A pronouncing dictionary of 

American English. Springfield, MA: Merriam. 

Mangold M (1990). Duden Aussprachewörterbuch. Wörterbuch 

der deutschen Standardaussprache (3rd edn.). 

Mannheim: Dudenverlag. 

Nolan F, Esling J et al. (eds.) (1999). Handbook of the 

International Phonetic Association: a guide to the use 

of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press. 

Ohala M (1999). ‘Hindi.’ In Nolan, Esling et al. (eds.). 

Okada H (1999). ‘Japanese.’ In Nolan, Esling et al. (eds.). 

Passy P (1958). Conversations françaises en transcription 

phonétique (2nd edn.). Coustenoble H (ed.). London: 

University of London Press. 

Shimaoka T (2004). Nihongo kara super-native no Eigo e. 

Tokyo: Kaitakusha. 

Smirnitsky A (1975). Essentials of Russian grammar. 

Moscow: Vysshaya Shkola. 

Phonetic Transcription: History 

A Kemp, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK 

� 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 

Transcription, in its linguistic sense, has been defined 

as the process of recording the phonological and/or 

morphological elements of a language in terms of a 

specific writing system, as distinct from transliteration, 

which is the process of recording the graphic 

symbols of one writing system in terms of the corresponding 

graphic symbols of a second writing system. 

Transcription, in other words, is writing down a language 

in a way that does not depend on the prior 

existence of a writing system, whereas transliteration 

does. 

Systems of transcription have existed from the 

earliest times. Traditional writing systems of most 

languages may originally have been transcriptions 

of speech, but in the course of time have lost much 

Thelwall R & Sa’adeddin M (1999). ‘Arabic.’ In Nolan, 

Esling et al. (eds.). 

Trager G & Smith H (1951). An outline of English structure. 

Norman, OK: Battenburg. [2nd edn. (1957). Washington, 

D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies.] 

Ward D (1966). Russian pronunciation illustrated. 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Wells J (1976). ‘The Association’s alphabet.’ Journal of the 

International Phonetic Association 6(1), 2–3. 

Wells J (1990). Longman pronunciation dictionary. 

Harlow: Longman. [2nd edn. (2000). Harlow: Pearson 

Education.] 

Wells J (1997). ‘SAMPA computer readable phonetic alphabet.’ 

In Gibbon D, Moore R & Winski R (eds.) Handbook 

of standards and resources for spoken language 

systems. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 

(Part IV, section B). 

Wells J (2003). ‘Phonetic symbols in word processing and 

on the web.’ In Proceedings of the 15th International 

Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona, 3–9 August, 

2003. 

Relevant Websites 

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk – University College London, 

Department of Phonetics and Linguistics website. 

Resources include information on the Speech Assessment 

Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA), a machinereadable 

phonetic alphabet. 

http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk – University of Glasgow, Faculty 

of Arts website; links to the International Phonetic Association’s 

phonetic alphabet chart. 

of this connection (see ). Spelling reformers have often 

sought to restore the connection. Journalists, missionaries, 

colonial administrators, teachers, traders, travelers, 

and scholars have all at one time or another 

required a precise way of writing down previously 

unwritten languages for various purposes: to improve 

communication, to make available translations of the 

Bible and of noteworthy literary works, to provide 

education, to record folk literature, and so on. For 

phoneticians above all, it is essential to have a notation 

system that allows sounds to be referred to unambiguously. 

The Segmentation of Speech 

Speech in its physical form is a continuum, but transcription 

requires it to be split up into segments, 

on the basis of some kind of linguistic analysis. 

Writing systems of the world fall into different groups

according to what types of segments they are based 

on – words, syllables, or consonants and vowels. 

Certain features of speech are associated with longer 

segments than others; for example, stress and intonation, 

which in many writing systems are not marked, 

are associated with stretches of speech such as the 

syllable, word, or sentence. 

Types of Transcription 

A transcription can never capture all the nuances 

of speech. The amount of detail it attempts to 

include in its text will vary according to its purpose. 

A system intended for the specialist linguist investigating 

a language never previously studied would 

often need to allow the recording of as many as 

possible of the various nuances of sounds, pitch variations, 

voice quality changes, and so on. Such a 

transcription may be called ‘impressionistic,’ and 

is unlikely to be helpful to anyone other than a 

specialist. 

Proceeding from this initial transcription, the linguist 

can deduce the way in which the sound system 

of the language is structured, and can replace the 

impressionistic transcription with a ‘systematic’ one, 

which records in its text only the elements that are 

crucial for conveying the meanings of the language. 

This type of transcription may well form the basis 

for a regular writing system for that language, and is 

called a ‘phonemic,’ or ‘broad,’ transcription. For use 

in teaching the spoken language, however, it may be 

helpful to transcribe some of the subphonemic sound 

differences likely to present problems to the learner. 

This kind of transcription may be called ‘allophonic,’ 

or ‘narrow.’ If detailed comparisons are to be made 

between this language or dialect and another one, 

showing the more subtle sound distinctions, the transcription 

may begin to resemble the impressionistic 

one, but as it is the result of a prior analysis, it will 

still be systematic. Conventions may be supplied to 

show the way in which the broad transcription is 

realized phonetically in certain environments. For 

special purposes, such as recording the speech of 

the deaf, very complex transcription systems may be 

necessary, to cope with sound variations that rarely 

occur in the speech of those without such a disability 

(see later, discussion of the International Phonetic 

Association). 

Notation 

Transcription systems need to employ a notation that 

allows them to refer to a sound unambiguously. The 

following approaches utilize some of the principles 

followed in effective systems of notation: 

Phonetic Transcription: History 397 

1. To avoid ambiguity, each symbol used in the notation, 

in its particular environment, should be restricted 

to one particular sound or sound class 

(or, in some cases, groups of sounds, such as the 

syllable), and each sound, etc. should be represented 

by only one symbol. So, for instance, the 

symbol , which has different values in German 

and English orthography, would need to be confined 

to only one of those values. Conversely, 

the sound [s], which in English may be conveyed 

either by as in ‘supersede’ or as in ‘cede,’ 

must be limited to only one symbol. 

2. The symbols used should ideally be simple, but 

distinctive in shape, easily legible, easy to write 

or print, aesthetically pleasing, and familiar to 

the intended users. If printing types are not 

readily available, the system will be limited in its 

accessibility and expensive to reproduce. 

3. If the transcription is to be pronounceable (not all 

kinds are required to be), the sound values of the 

symbols must be made clear, through a description 

of the ways in which the sounds are formed, 

or through recorded examples, or by ‘key words’ 

taken from a language, provided that the accent 

referred to is specified. Some transcription systems 

include pieces of continuous text to illustrate the 

application to particular languages (e.g., those 

of Carl Lepsius and the International Phonetic 

Association (IPA); see later). 

4. The symbol system should be expandable, 

particularly if it is intended to be used to cover 

all languages. As new languages are encountered, 

new varieties of sounds will have to be defined. 

Alphabetic Notations: Roman and Non-Roman 

Alphabetic notations (e.g., the Roman alphabet) are 

based on the principle of having one simple symbol 

to represent each segment. However, many transcription 

systems are not based on the Roman alphabet, 

because of the ambiguous values of some of its symbols, 

or because it has been found preferable to use 

‘iconic’ symbols, intended to convey by their shapes 

the phonetic nature of the sound concerned, and/or 

to link related groups of sounds. One variety of iconic 

notation has been called ‘organic,’ because the shapes 

of its symbols are meant to suggest the organs of 

speech used to produce them. Shorthand systems 

characteristically are non-Roman and iconic, but 

not necessarily organic. Iconic systems have a number 

of drawbacks. Apart from the difficulties of reading 

and printing them, they cannot be easily expanded 

to incorporate sounds newly encountered. It is also 

less easy to adapt them as and when phonetic theory 

undergoes changes.

398 Phonetic Transcription: History 

Analphabetic Systems 

Analphabetic systems are not based on alphabetictype 

segments; instead, the symbols are composed 

of several elements, some of which resemble chemical 

formulas, each element representing one ingredient 

of the sound concerned (see later). 

Supplementing the Roman Alphabet 

The number of Roman symbols is far too limited 

to convey the sound distinctions needed. There are 

various ways of supplementing the basic alphabet (see 

Abercrombie, 1981): 

1. Using ‘compound letters’ such as and 

(equivalent to [k(w)] and [ks], respectively, 

in English orthography) to stand for other sounds. 

Thus may be used to represent the Scottish 

sound represented by the in ‘loch.’ 

2. Inverting and/or reversing the letters and giving 

them other values, e.g., [O e J M r V] are all phonetic 

symbols formed by inverting , respectively. 

3. Adding diacritical marks to basic symbols, as in 

. These diacritics may be attached to the 

letter or placed somewhere adjacent to it. They are 

an economical way of enlarging the repertoire, 

because one mark can be used to change the 

value of a number of symbols; for example, [�] 

represents nasality and may be added above any 

vowel symbol. Conversely, being small, diacritics 

may be inadvertently omitted or obscured, they 

tend to reduce the legibility of texts, and they can 

be expensive to reproduce (though less so since the 

advent of computers). 

4. Adapting symbols borrowed from other alphabets; 

examples of symbols taken from Greek by the 

International Phonetic Alphabet, with modification 

to blend with the roman font, are [y w b X] 

(see International Phonetic Association). Symbols 

may also be borrowed from another use, such as 

@), £, $, %, etc. 

5. Using digraphs to represent simple sounds, as 

English orthography does in ‘thing,’ wherein 

and may represent the simple sounds [y], 

and [N], respectively. The symbols are easily accessible, 

but problems arise when these sequences are 

needed to convey actual sound sequences, such as 

the aspirated stop [th]. 

6. Using different typefaces, such as UPPERCASE, 

italic, or bold (or even ). However, 

these are less satisfactory for use in handwriting, 

they may cause confusion with other conventional 

uses, such as emphasis, and they do not blend well 

with other fonts, unless specially adapted. 

7. Less commonly, using spatial relationships. With 

respect to a median line, symbols may be placed on 

the line, above it, or below it. Braille makes use of 

this in certain of its symbols. For normal printing 

and writing this is not very satisfactory, as it interferes 

with legibility and can easily lead to errors. 

8. Inventing entirely new symbols. Unless new symbols 

are relatively straightforward adaptations of 

Roman letters, e.g., inversions or addition of diacritics, 

they rarely survive. One that has survived is 

the IPA symbol for the velar nasal, [N], probably 

first used in 1619 by Alexander Gill. 

Nonsegmental Aspects of Speech 

In any language, English, for example, the position of 

the stress in the word may need to be indicated. This 

can be done by placing a raised mark before the 

stressed syllable, for instance, , 

or by highlighting the syllable in some way. Extra 

length can be shown by doubling the segmental symbol, 

as in Italian freddo ‘cold’, or by adding a diacritical 

mark, as in [a:]. Pitch is an essential feature of the 

words of ‘tone languages,’ such as Chinese, Thai, and 

Yoruba, and may be marked by accents over the 

vowel (e.g., [á] ¼ high, [à] ¼ low), or by numerals 

(e.g., the Mandarin Chinese segmental structure 

[ma] can have four different tones, distinguishing 

different words: [ma 1 ], [ma 2 ], [ma 3 ], [ma 4 ]). The intonation 

pattern of English may be indicated by 

marking the pitch of certain prominent syllables. 

The first person to try to provide a detailed system 

of notation for these features in English was Joshua 

Steele (see Steele, Joshua (1700–1791)). Other features 

are also sometimes treated as nonsegmental, 

notably nasality and ‘secondary articulations’ such 

as palatalization, velarization, and labialization, because 

they frequently overlap segmental boundaries. 

Traditional transcriptions have allocated these features 

to segments, adding diacritical marks to the 

vowel or consonant symbols, but some phonological 

analyses of speech have associated them with longer 

stretches by setting up an extra tier for them. The 

‘prosodic analysis’ of J. R. Firth allocated ‘prosodies’ 

such as nasality and velarity to longer domains, 

including syllable part, syllable, word, and sentence 

(see Firthian Phonology). A similar idea lies behind 

the ‘autosegmental’ model of phonology. 

Historical Survey of 

Transcription Systems 

Examples of some of the different types of transcription 

systems can be found in the alphabets from 

early times.

Roman-Based Alphabetic Systems 

(pre-19th Century) 

The reform of traditional orthographies (notably 

those of French and English, which presented particular 

problems for learners) led to innovations 

in notation. In France, Loys Meigret’s La Tretté de 

la grammere françoeze (1550; see Meigret, Louis 

(?1500-1558)) included a phonetically based alphabet 

for French. In England, Sir Thomas Smith, in his 

De recta et emendata linguae anglicanae scriptura 

(On the proper and corrected writing of the English 

language) (Paris, 1568), employed several of the 

devices mentioned previously. For example, diacritics 

([ H]) were used to distinguish the long vowels in 

‘cheap’ and ‘hate,’ symbolized and , respectively; 

non-Roman alphabets (Greek ) were used 

for French and Scottish u (i.e., [y]); and the Irish form 

of capital was used to represent the first consonant 

in ‘judge.’ A reversed replaced the of 

‘ship,’ and for the dental fricatives, Smith used Old 

English ‘thorn’ and (see Figure 1). 

John Hart (see Hart, John (?1501-1574)) was familiar 

with Meigret’s system. His book, An orthographie 

(London, 1569), included special symbols for the 

consonant sounds [y ð S tS dZ], beautifully integrated 

into the text. He was a keen observer of speech and 

recorded the occurrence of syllabic consonants such 

as the final in ‘fable,’ which he transcribed as 

. Subsequently, William Bullokar (see Bullokar, 

William (c. 1531–1609)), in his Book at large for the 

amendment of orthographie for English speech (London, 

1580), provided 40 symbols for transcribing 

English. By using a font he opened up 

extra possibilities of rarely used printing sorts. He 

illustrated his phonetic alphabet by using it in a number 

of literary texts, including Aesop’s fables. 

In Logonomia Anglica (first edition published 

in London in 1619), Alexander Gill (1564–1635) 

introduced a number of extra letters. Like Smith, he 

used for the first sound in ‘this,’ and in the 

second edition (1621) of his work he introduced 

for the velar nasal, thus maintaining the connection 

with nasal . He transcribed the word ‘high’ 

as , using for the vowel and for the 

final consonant. This illustrates the use of a diacritic 

incorporated in a letter. Charles Butler, in his English 

Figure 1 Symbols devised in 1568 by Sir Thomas Smith, to 

represent the final sound made when pronouncing the words 

pith, bathe, and dish. 


grammar (Oxford, 1633), also used a horizontal 

stroke through certain letters to avoid digraphs, 

replacing the letter , so that instead of he had , respectively, with 

a stroke through each letter. He also introduced 

inverted to represent the in ‘thin.’ 

John Wilkins (see Wilkins, John (1614–1672)), in 

his Essay towards a real character (1668), devised 

three separate systems of notation (see Figure 2). 

One of these is Roman based and uses digraphs to 

supply extra consonant symbols. The letter has 

a dual role: it is used both to indicate fricatives, as in 

(for [x X y ð S Z]), and to 

indicate voiceless forms of nasals and liquids, so that 

voiced are paralleled by [voiceless 

. For some of the vowels, 

Wilkins employed rather poorly designed Greek symbols, 

though this contradicted one of his stated principles 

for choosing symbols: 

1. They should be the most simple and facil, and yet 

elegant and comely as to the shape of them. 

2. They must be sufficiently distinguished from one 

another. 

3. There should be some kind of suitableness, or correspondency 

of the figure to the nature and kind of the 

letters which they express. 

Wilkins’s third condition refers to a nonarbitrary, or 

iconic, type of notation (for his other notations, see 

later, Iconic Alphabets, pre-19th Century). 

Figure 2 Three non-Roman transcriptions. (A) Iconic representations 

of the sounds [l] and [m] (John Wilkins, 1668). (B) Syllabic 

transcription of ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ (John Wilkins, 

1868). (C) Organic alphabet. Transcription of ‘I remember. I 

remember, the roses red and white’ (Henry Sweet, 1906).


Figure 3 Excerpt illustrating the extended alphabet devised by Benjamin Franklin in 1768 (published in Franklin’s collected works 

in 1779). 

In the 18th century, social reformers aiming to reduce 

class barriers tried to establish a standard form of 

pronunciation; to facilitate the spread of literacy, 

reformed spelling systems were suggested. Thomas 

Sheridan (see Sheridan, Thomas (1719–1788)) was 

one of the first to publish a pronouncing dictionary 

of English (1780), which gave a respelling to every 

word, and a similar dictionary was published in 

1791 by John Walker (see Walker, John (1732– 

1807)). In America, spelling reform led the famous 

American statesman, scientist, and philosopher, Benjamin 

Franklin, to put forward a new alphabet in 

1768. It was limited to 26 symbols, of which six 

were newly invented to take the place of the ‘ambiguous’ 

letters . Some of these new symbols 

were rather too similar to each other in form to be 

satisfactory, but the printed font was attractively 

designed; it was published as part of Franklin’s collected 

works (London, 1779) (see Figure 3). 

William Thornton (1759–1828), a Scottish 

American who traveled and lived in many places but 

who spent most of his life in the American capital, 

Washington, also attempted to reform English 

spelling, and in the longer term to make possible the 

transcription of unwritten languages. His treatise, 

entitled Cadmus, or a treatise on the elements of 

written language (1793), won the Magellanic gold 

medal of the American Philosophical Society. The 

notation he used was Roman based and introduced 

some well-designed additional letters, including 

to replace , to represent the first consonant 

in ‘ship,’ and a circle with a dot in the center (8, 

a Gothic symbol) to represent in ‘when.’ He 

aimed to economize by using inverted basic symbols 

where possible, e.g., , , . Some 

years later, Thornton used his alphabet to transcribe 

288 words in the Miami Indian language. Among 

admirers of his system were Thomas Jefferson, 

Alexander von Humboldt, and Count Volney (see 

later, Volney and the Volney Prize). 

The increasing involvement of Europeans with the 

languages of Asia, Africa, and America, whether as 

traders, missionaries, travelers, or colonial administrators, 

emphasized the need for a standard, universal 

alphabet. One of the first to try to provide a transliteration 

for Asian languages was the brilliant English 

oriental scholar and linguist Sir William Jones 

(see Jones, William, Sir (1746–1794)). He was a highly 

skilled phonetician, and during his time as a high 

court judge in India (1783–1794) saw the need for a 

consistent way of transcribing languages. His system 

was presented in Dissertation on the orthography of 

Asiatick words in Roman letters (1788). He thought 

it unnecessary to provide any detailed account of the 

speech organs, but gave a short description of the 

articulations. An ideal solution, he believed, would 

be to have ‘‘a natural character for all articulate 

sounds . . . by delineating the several organs of speech 

in the act of articulation’’ (i.e., an ‘organic’ alphabet), 

but for oriental languages he preferred a transliteration. 

This was partly because of the difficulty of 

conveying the precise nature of sounds to the nonspecialist, 

but also because he wished to preserve the 

orthographical structure, so that the ‘grammatical 

analogy’ would not be lost, and there would be no 

danger of representing ‘‘a provincial and inelegant 

pronunciation.’’ The system was not intended as a 

universal alphabet; his notation was confined to the 

letters of the Roman alphabet, supplemented by 

digraphs and a few diacritics. He chose the vowel 

symbols on the basis of the values they have in the 

Italian language, rather than those of English, unlike 

some other schemes used in India at the time. His 

alphabet had an influence on nearly all subsequent 

ideas for the transliteration of oriental languages, at 

least for the following century. The romanization of 

these languages became a major concern of missionaries, 

administrators, educationists, and travelers, 

though some scholars, and literate members of the 

communities concerned, were less enthusiastic, believing 

that something culturally vital would be lost 

if the native scripts were changed into a different form. 

Iconic Alphabets (pre-19th Century) 

Two of John Wilkins’s systems of notation were iconic. 

The more elaborate one, which was not intended 

to be used to transcribe connected speech, consisted 

of small diagrams of the head and neck, cut away to 

show the articulatory formation of each sound. Next 

to each diagram was a simplified symbol relating to 

the way the sound was formed (see Figure 2A). The 

second notation assigned each consonant a symbol, 

which took various forms: straight line, T shape, 

L shape, or various curve shapes. To this basic shape

Wilkins added a small circle or hook, at the top, 

middle, or base, to represent one of six vowels. Thus 

the composite symbol represented a syllable, either 

vowel þ consonant or consonant þ vowel. Each category 

of sound, such as oral stop consonant, fricative, 

or nasal, had a characteristic shape, as did voiceless 

and voiced sounds at the same place of articulation. 

The system was ingenious, but the symbols could 

easily be confused, and it is unlikely that anyone 

other than Wilkins actually used it (see Figure 2B). 

Wilkins’s contemporary, Francis Lodwick (see 

Lodwick, Francis (1619–1694)), published a similar 

system in 1686 under the title An essay towards an 

universal alphabet. He stated in his text the important 

principle that ‘‘no one character should have more 

than one sound, nor any one sound be expressed by 

more than one character.’’ The notation was a syllabary, 

using shapes designed to show similarities between 

the sounds symbolized, which are set out in a 

table with six places of articulation: bilabial, dental, 

palatal, velar, labiodental, and alveolar. The top symbol 

in each column is the voiced stop, and the lower 

ones are formed by progressive modifications of it. As 

with Wilkins’s system, the vowels are added to the 

consonant symbols as diacritics. 

Another iconic alphabet is to be found in chapter 5 

of the Traité de la formation méchanique des langues, 

published in 1765 by the French scholar and magistrate, 

Charles de Brosses (see Brosses, Charles de 

(1709–1777)). The work was intended for scholars 

researching into languages, rather than for everyday 

use. Brosses called it ‘organic and universal.’ It is 

based on a somewhat idiosyncratic analysis of speech 

production, which, among other things, assumed that 

the vowels were sounded at different points on a 

corde, or string, equivalent to the vocal tract tube. 

Brosses’s understanding of speech production is suspect 

in a number of ways; for example, he classes 

as a nasal consonant. His first attempt at notation 

was complex, using symbols that pictured the 

outline of the different vocal organs (lips, teeth, palate, 

nose, etc.), but he simplified this subsequently, 

using symbols made up of curves and straight lines 

at different angles. The vowel symbols were attached 

to the consonants to give a syllabic sign, and the 

notation included composite symbols to represent 

consonant clusters. 

Nineteenth-Century Transcription 

Systems 

Volney and the Volney Prize 

The French orientalist, statesman, and reformer, 

Count Constantin François Volney (see Volney, 


Constantin-Francois Chasseboeuf, Comte de 

(1757–1820)), had been concerned for many years 

about the difficulties experienced by Europeans in 

learning oriental languages, and the poor standard 

of the teaching of these languages. His book, Simplification 

des langues orientales (Paris, 1795), put forward 

a system for transliterating Arabic, Persian, and 

Turkish into Roman script, supplemented by a few 

Greek letters and some newly invented symbols. During 

a visit to America from 1795 to 1798, he stayed 

with William Thornton, and while there became 

acquainted with Sir William Jones’s alphabet. He 

conceived the idea of a universal alphabet, not for 

scholarly purposes, but to act as a practical tool for 

travelers, traders, etc. His 1795 system was used with 

modifications for geographical names on the map of 

Egypt compiled in 1803 by the French government, 

but his later L’Alphabet européen appliqué aux langues 

asiatiques (Paris, 1819) provided a fuller system 

of 60 symbols, mostly Roman, replacing some of his 

previous, newly invented, symbols with more familiar 

letters modified by diacritics. However, Volney realized 

that further research was needed, and his final 

gesture was to leave 24 000 francs in his will, for a 

prize to be awarded by the Institut de France to 

anyone who could devise a suitable ‘harmonic alphabet’ 

(to bring harmony out the existing confusion of 

practices) in Roman script (see Kemp, 1999). 

The Volney Prize for the first year (1822) was to be 

for an essay setting out the necessary conditions for 

such an alphabet. The prizewinners were both German 

librarians: Josef Scherer (d. 1829) argued that 

what was needed was a transcription reflecting pronunciation, 

rather than a transliteration, whereas 

A. A. E. Schleiermacher (1787–1858), the co-winner, 

favored a transliteration, for very much the same 

reasons as those given by Sir William Jones. Scherer 

and Schleiermacher submitted detailed transcription 

systems for the 1823 prize, which was won by 

Scherer; Schleiermacher’s essay was submitted later 

in a revised form and was published in 1835. He 

continued to work on his system, and his completed 

scheme, Das harmonische oder allgemeine Alphabet 

zur Transcription fremder Schriftsysteme in lateinische 

Schrift (The harmonic or general alphabet for 

the transcription of foreign writing systems into Latin 

script), was eventually published in Darmstadt, after 

his death (1864). Together with his new alphabet, this 

work contained examples of the non-Roman scripts 

of 10 languages. In all, 275 new characters had to be 

cast. His notation excluded digraphs and letters from 

other alphabets, which he felt would be typographically 

unsuitable, so his main resource was diacritics, 

both above and below the basic symbols. Some 

of these were used systematically (e.g., to indicate


Figure 4 Consonant symbols devised by A. A. E. Schleiermacher, as part of his transcription system, originally submitted in 1823 for 

the Volney Prize; the revised form was published in 1835. 

nasality, aspiration, or palatalization), but he admitted 

that problems of legibility and combinability had 

often made total consistency impossible. The alphabet 

was never adopted for wider use (see Figure 4). 

Further essays on transcription were submitted for 

the Volney Prize over the next 20 years, but the commission 

set up to administer the prize deemed none of 

the essays to have the ‘final answer’ to the problem. 

Shorthand and Spelling Reform 

In the 19th century, the most prominent spelling reformer 

was Sir Isaac Pitman (see Pitman, Isaac, Sir 

(1813–1897)). Pitman was of comparatively humble 

origin, and determined from his early years to further 

social reform and improve the educational system by 

developing new alphabets to make spelling easier. His 

first contribution was to develop a system of shorthand 

(now world famous), which he published in 

1837 as Phonography; this work explored the ways 

in which notation systems can be made to act efficiently 

in conveying language. Unlike earlier systems, 

it was based not on English spelling but on the English 

sound system. 

By 1842, Pitman had devised several possible phonetic 

alphabets, but they still contained elements of 

his shorthand. In the following year, he came down 

firmly in favor of using the letters of the Roman 

alphabet as a basis, and the same year saw the beginning 

of his connection and cooperation with Alexander 

J. Ellis (see Ellis, Alexander John (né Sharpe) (1814– 

1890)). Ellis and Pitman were from very different backgrounds; 

Ellis had a first in mathematics from Cambridge 

and a private fortune. He had developed an 

interest in phonetic notation partly through his 

attempts to write down dialects he encountered in 

his travels abroad, but it was only after exposure to 

Pitman’s work that Ellis began to study phonetics 

seriously. Over the next few years, Pitman’s untiring 

enthusiasm in publicizing the new ideas, and Ellis’s 

knowledge of languages and assiduous research into 

the background of phonetics and notation systems, 

resulted in the English phonotypic alphabet of 1847 

(see Kelly, 1981). Many of the symbols used were later 

to form the basis of the alphabet of the International 

Phonetic Association. The proposed reform of English 

spelling never materialized, but Ellis’s subsequent 

work on phonetic notation undoubtedly owed much 

to these early years of collaboration with Pitman. 

In America also, proposals for spelling reform 

continued to appear. In 1858, the president of the 

Phonetic Society of Great Britain, Sir Walter Trevelyan, 

proposed a prize for an essay on a reform in the 

spelling of the English language, which should contain 

an analysis of sounds and an alphabetic notation containing 

as few new types as possible. The prizewinning 

essay, entitled Analytic orthography (Philadelphia, 

1860), was by Samuel Haldeman (1812–1880), 

professor of Zoology and Natural History at the University 

of Pennsylvania, and later professor of Comparative 

Philology at the same university. Haldeman 

had a strong linguistic background, notably in Native 

American languages, and was a good phonetic observer, 

fully familiar with the work of Sir William Jones 

and with his contemporaries Lepsius (see Lepsius, 

Carl Richard (1810–1884)), Ellis, Pitman, Melville 

Bell (see Bell, Alexander Melville (1819–1905)), and 

Max Müller (see Müller, Friedrich Max (1823– 

1900)). Haldeman’s notation was based on the Roman 

alphabet, and the letters used were restricted to the 

values they had in Latin. He used some diacritics and a 

few new letters, including some ‘broken’ letters – that 

is, Roman forms with part of their strokes missing, not

a satisfactory device. He also attempted to symbolize 

durational differences by introducing characters of 

different widths. However, his system had no better 

success than did others of the time. 

Languages of America and Africa 

In the early 19th century, most of the languages 

of Africa and the indigenous languages of America 

had no writing systems. Pierre Duponceau (see 

Duponceau, Pierre Etienne (1760–1844)), a French 

émigré to the United States, won the Volney Prize in 

1838 with his Mémoire sur le système grammatical 

des langues de quelques nations indiennes de l’Amérique 

du Nord, and had shown in an earlier article 

(‘English phonology,’ 1817) a thorough understanding 

of the principles of a universal alphabet, though 

he never produced one himself. Under his influence, 

John Pickering (1777–1846), like Duponceau a lawyer 

by training, was led to publish his Essay on a 

uniform orthography for the Indian languages of 

North America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1818). 

Pickering, like Sir William Jones, whose work he 

admired, used a Roman alphabet supplemented by 

digraphs and some diacritics, preferring small superscript 

letters or subscript numerals to dots or hooks, 

which he felt might accidentally be omitted. This 

system was designed specifically for Native American 

languages, not as a universal alphabet. 

Many of the missionary societies were concerned 

at this time to establish a standard transcription system. 

The Church Missionary Society produced a 

pamphlet in 1848 entitled Rules for reducing unwritten 

languages to alphabetical writing in Roman characters: 

with reference especially to the languages 

spoken in Africa. The rules allowed some flexibility 

in deciding how detailed the transcription should be, 

according to its intended use. The notation suggested 

was Roman based, with a few diacritics and some 

digraphs. Lewis Grout produced a Roman-based system 

for Zulu in 1853, on behalf of the American 

Mission in Port Natal, using the symbols 

for the clicks. 

Carl Richard Lepsius (1810–1884) 

In 1852, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) invited 

the distinguished German Egyptologist Lepsius to 

adapt an alphabet that he had devised earlier, to suit 

the needs of the Society. Lepsius had been interested 

in writing systems for many years. In 1853, he won 

the agreement of the Royal Academy of Berlin to fund 

the cutting and casting of type letters for a new alphabet, 

to be used as a basis for recording languages with 

no writing system. In the following year, an Alphabetical 

Conference was convened in London, on the 

initiative of the Prussian ambassador in London, Carl 


Bunsen, who, as a scholar with an interest in philology, 

wished to explore the possibility of an agreed 

system for representing all languages in writing. The 

conference was attended by representatives from the 

CMS, the Baptist Missionary Society, the Wesleyan 

Missionary Society, and the Asiatic and Ethnological 

Societies, and a number of distinguished scholars, 

including Lepsius and Friedrich Max Müller. In spite 

of their well-known involvement in the transcription 

problem, neither Isaac Pitman nor A. J. Ellis was 

among those included. Four resolutions were passed: 

(1) the new alphabet must have a physiological basis, 

(2) it must be limited to the ‘typical’ sounds employed 

in human speech, (3) the notation must be rational 

and consistent and suited to reading and printing and 

also it should be Roman based, supplemented by 

various additions, and (4) the resulting alphabet 

must form a standard ‘‘to which any other alphabet is 

to be referred and from which the distance of each 

is to be measured.’’ 

Lepsius and Max Müller both submitted alphabets 

for consideration; Müller’s Missionary alphabet, 

which used italic type mixed with roman type, was 

not favored, and Lepsius’s extensive use of diacritics 

had obvious disadvantages for legibility and the availability 

of types. The conference put off a decision, 

but later in 1854, the CMS gave its full support to 

Lepsius’s alphabet. A German version of the alphabet 

appeared in 1854 (Das allgemeine linguistische Alphabet), 

followed in 1855 by the first English edition, 

entitled Standard alphabet for reducing unwritten 

languages and foreign graphic systems to a uniform 

orthography in European letters. The Lepsius 

alphabet had some success in the first few years, but 

Lepsius was pressed by the CMS to produce a new 

enlarged edition, which appeared in English in 1863 

(printed in Germany, like the first edition, because 

the types were only available there; see Figure 5). 

The most obvious difference from the first edition 

was that the collection of alphabets, illustrating the 

application of Lepsius’s standard alphabet to different 

languages, had been expanded from 19 pages and 

Figure 5 Symbols of the standard alphabet devised by Lepsius 

in 1863.


54 languages to 222 pages and 117 languages (see 

Lepsius, 1863). 

There was as yet no phoneme theory, but Lepsius 

was well aware that no alphabet could or should try 

to convey all of the subtle nuances of speech. His 

practical aim was to make an intelligible and usable 

system available to nonspecialists, hence the expansion 

of the collection of alphabets and the avoidance 

of a technical description of the physiology of speech. 

However, Lepsius relied almost entirely on the use of 

diacritics to supplement the basic Roman symbols. 

They were used in a consistent way for the most 

part, and Lepsius foresaw situations in which it 

would not be necessary to use all of the distinctions 

provided for, namely, when, in modern terms, a 

‘broad’ transcription would be sufficient. Nevertheless, 

the profusion of diacritics meant that the printing 

types were less accessible, and the symbols were 

less legible and more subject to errors in reproduction. 

Ellis calculated that on the basis of 31 diacritical 

marks (17 superscripts and 14 subscripts), Lepsius’s 

alphabet had at least 286 characters, of which at least 

200 would have to be cut for every font used. 

The alphabet attained a limited success in Africa; 

the distinguished Africanist Carl Meinhof (see 

Meinhof, Carl Friedrich Michael (1857–1944)) and 

his missionary friend Karl Endemann (1836–1919) 

gave it their support by using it, with some modifications, 

in their works on African languages (see Heepe, 

1983), and the missionary P. Wilhelm Schmidt adopted 

it as a basis for his ‘Anthropos alphabet’ (see later). 

However, in spite of Lepsius’s high international reputation, 

the support of the Berlin Academy, and the 

resources of the CMS, the alphabet failed to find an 

established place. 

A. J. Ellis’s Later Alphabets 

Ellis’s Universal writing and printing with ordinary 

letters (Edinburgh, 1856) contained his ‘Digraphic’ 

and ‘Latinic’ alphabets, with examples, hints on practical 

use, and comparisons with the systems of 

Lepsius and Max Müller, together with suggestions 

for a future ‘Panethnic’ alphabet. The digraphic alphabet, 

as its name suggests, supplemented the 

Roman alphabet with digraphs or trigraphs, such as 

for [x], for [N], and for [ J], with 

the idea of making its notation accessible to as wide a 

group of people as possible. It was intended for use in 

any language, and Ellis supplied an abbreviated form 

of it for use when detailed precision of description 

was not necessary. The Latinic alphabet was intended 

for those wishing ‘‘to avoid the cumbersomeness of 

the Digraphic alphabet,’’ which it did, by employing 

small capitals and turned letters; for example, [x] is 

rendered by and [N] is rendered by . 

Probably Ellis’s most well-known alphabet is 

Palaeotype (so-called because it used the ‘old types,’ 

without diacritics or non-Roman symbols, and with 

relatively few turned letters). Palaeotype was for scientific, 

not popular, use, and Ellis employed it in 

his monumental work On early English pronunciation 

(EEP) (1869–1889). There were about 250 separate 

symbols, the greatest number being digraphs or 

trigraphs, but with some italics, small capitals, and 

(very few) turned letters. Certain letters were used as 

diacritical signs – for instance is used to indicate 

palatality, as in for [L]. There were also nonalphabetic 

signs for features such as ingressive airstreams, 

tones, and stress. Ellis provided a reduced 

form of his alphabet, known as ‘Approximative 

Palaeotype,’ which contained about 46 separate symbols. 

The full alphabet was, he believed, ‘‘in all probability 

the most complete scheme which has yet been 

published,’’ but he foresaw the need to supplement 

it to accommodate sounds from languages not yet 

phonetically studied. 

In the third volume of EEP (1871), Ellis published 

the ‘Glossic’ alphabet, a simplified form of transcription 

for English, based on symbols used in normal 

English orthography. He intended it as a new system 

of spelling, to be used concurrently with the existing 

English orthography. In answer to objections that it 

would be too sweeping a change, Ellis produced a 

revised form in 1880 called ‘Dimid-iun,’ but this 

received even less support. None of these alphabets 

was destined to have any lasting success, but in the 

process of devising them Ellis laid a foundation for the 

development of phonetics as a discipline in Britain, 

and more particularly for the study and recording of 

English dialects. 

Germany: Physiology and New Alphabets 

In Germany, several schemes for a new alphabet were 

proposed by scholars who approached phonetics 

from a physiological rather than a linguistic angle. 

Karl Rapp (1803–1883), in Versuch einer Physiologie 

der Sprache (1836), used a Roman alphabet, supplemented 

by some letters taken from the Old English 

and Greek alphabets and a few diacritics. Ellis, 

writing in the 1840s, frequently paid tribute to Rapp’s 

work. Ernst Brücke (see Brücke, Ernst (1819–1891)), 

in his Grundzüge der Physiologie (1856), also put 

forward a Roman-based alphabet, supplemented by 

some Greek letters and by superscript numerals used 

as diacritics. For example, represented alveolar 

[t], represented retroflex [

were based on acoustic resonances. The consonant 

symbols occupy one or more of three vertically 

aligned areas and are made up of two basic parts, 

one showing place of articulation and the other manner 

of articulation. A further part is particularly interesting 

in its attempt to indicate states of the glottis 

other than ‘vibrating’ – open, narrowed, closed, 

creaky, and what Brücke called ‘hard resonance’ and 

‘soft resonance.’ The vowels occupy only the middle 

of the three areas, so that they stand out clearly. 

Diacritics are provided to indicate accent, duration, 

and types of juncture. Carl Merkel (1812–1876) 

also devised a non-Roman alphabet (Anatomie und 

Physiologie des menschlichen Stimm-und Sprachorgans, 

1857; revised edition, 1866), but, like Brücke’s 

alphabet, it is extremely difficult to read, and neither 

system attained any success. Both Brücke and Merkel 

were familiar with only a small range of languages 

and were concerned primarily to show the total capacities 

of the human vocal organs in the production of 

sounds. 

Moritz Thausing (1838–1884), in Das natiirliche 

Lautsystem der menschlichen Sprache (1863), based 

his system on a Naturlaut ‘natural sound’ represented 

by the vowel , and 21 other sounds, which diverged 

from in three different directions (seven 

on each path), like a three-sided pyramid. His notation 

used a musical staff of four lines and three 

spaces, thus accommodating the seven grades of 

sounds as notes on the staff. Each of the three sets 

of seven had a special note shape to distinguish it. 

Intermediate sounds were shown by modifiers. 

Thausing believed this was preferable to Brücke’s 

scheme in that the symbols were not iconic, and so 

could be used for sounds for which formation was not 

fully understood. 

Felix Du Bois Reymond (1782–1865) was stimulated 

by the schemes put forward by Brücke and 

Lepsius to complete a scheme of his own (Kadmus, 

1862), which he had sketched out earlier. It was 

Roman based, but, unusually, attempted to combine 

this with an iconic approach. So, for instance, all the 

voiceless consonants had symbols that extend below 

the ‘middle area’ (mittlere Bahn), unlike the voiced 

ones: and already conform to this principle, 

and to continue it, Reymond proposed, for example, 

that the symbol should replace as the 

voiceless equivalent of . Like Brücke, he confined 

the vowel symbols to the ‘middle area.’ In spite of a 

good phonetic basis outlined in his book, the scheme 

failed to become established. 

Bell’s Visible Speech 

Alexander Melville Bell was the son of an elocution 

teacher, and in due course became his father’s 


principal assistant. Between the years 1843 and 

1870, he lectured in the universities of Edinburgh 

and London, after which he emigrated to Canada 

and continued his teaching there. In 1864, he gave 

public demonstrations of his new scheme for recording 

speech in writing, and in 1867 the system was 

published under the title Visible speech, the science of 

universal alphabetics. It was not (at least avowedly) 

intended to be a new spelling system, but rather to 

assist children in learning to read, and to provide ‘‘a 

sound bridge from language to language.’’ Bell was 

unsuccessful in attempts to persuade the British government 

to give him funds to support the system, but 

continued to use it for his own purpose in teaching, 

and claimed that it was ‘‘perfect for all its purposes.’’ 

The symbols he used were iconic, intended to signify 

the vocal organs involved in the production of the 

sound concerned. For instance, the open vocal cords 

are shown by , which represents [h]. The consonant 

symbols are based on a sagittal diagram of the 

head facing right. The shape < > represents a continuant 

(shown by the fact that there is a gap to the 

right) with a constriction at the back (i.e., [x]), whereas 

< > represents a constriction at the front of the 

vocal tract, namely [y¨]. The same symbol with the gap 

facing upward represents dental [y], and with the 

gap facing downward, palatal [ç]. The remaining 

consonant symbols have similar iconic relationships, 

with modifiers to show complete closure (a bar across 

the gap), nasality (a different bar), voicing, etc. The 

vowel symbols are based on a vertical line, with 

hooks at the top (close vowels), bottom (open 

vowels), or both (mid vowels), facing left for back 

vowels, right for front vowels, and in both directions 

for the so-called ‘mixed’ or central vowels. Rounding 

is shown by a horizontal bar through the middle. 

Ellis, writing just before the full publication of 

Visible speech, admitted that his Palaeotype was 

‘‘far less complete’’ than Bell’s scheme. ‘‘However, 

that alphabet,’’ he said, ‘‘requires new types, which 

is always an inconvenience, though I believe that an 

entirely new system of letters, such as that of Mr. Bell, 

is indispensable for a complete solution of the problem.’’ 

He pointed out also that many potential users 

‘‘are ill-qualified, without special training, to use a 

very refined instrument.’’ Iconic notations are certainly 

subject to the criticism that they may not be able to 

accommodate new sounds or new descriptive frameworks, 

and can never convey the exact nature of the 

sound symbolized. Bell’s symbols were much better 

in design than most alphabets of this kind are, but 

he faced the immense task of persuading people to 

adopt a system that looked very different from what 

they were used to seeing. The alphabet failed to find 

supporters outside the circle of his pupils.


Sweet’s Romic and Organic Alphabets 

Henry Sweet (see Sweet, Henry (1845–1912)), perhaps 

the greatest of 19th-century phoneticians, studied 

under Bell, and his Handbook of phonetics (1877) 

was intended to be an exposition and development of 

Bell’s work, but in this book he used a Roman-based 

notation (influenced by Ellis’s Palaeotype), which he 

called ‘romic,’ distinguishing two varieties of it. ‘Broad 

romic,’ his ‘practical’ notation, intended to record only 

‘fundamental distinctions,’ corresponding to distinctions 

of meaning (i.e., phonemes, in modern terms), 

was confined to symbols with their original Roman 

values supplemented by digraphs and turned letters. 

‘Narrow romic’ was to be a ‘scientific’ notation and 

provided extra symbols, notably for the vowels, for 

which Sweet used italics, diacritic , and, further, 

turned letters. However, in 1880, he took over Bell’s 

notation, which he regarded as ‘‘an improvement on 

any possible modification of the Roman alphabet’’ for 

scientific purposes. He modified it and added some 

symbols, to form an ‘organic alphabet,’ which he used 

in his Primer of phonetics (1890) and in some other 

works (see Figure 2). At this stage, Sweet felt that, even 

for more practical purposes, the necessity to supplement 

the Roman alphabet with other devices (in particular, 

diacritics and new letters, which he strongly 

opposed) made it cumbersome and inefficient. Toward 

the end of his life, however, he emphasized that uniformity 

in notation was not necessarily a desirable thing 

‘‘while the foundations of phonetics are still under 

discussion,’’ and accepted that the unfamiliarity of organic 

types might be too formidable an obstacle to 

overcome. He continued to use his romic alphabet as 

an alternative to the organic one, and broad romic 

formed the basis for the new alphabet of the International 

Phonetic Association (see later). Sweet’s organic 

alphabet did not enjoy a long life, nor indeed did the 

idea of iconic alphabets, even though Daniel Jones and 

Paul Passy (see Passy, Paul Edouard (1859–1940)) 

thought it worthwhile to propose another such scheme 

in Le maître phonétique (1907). 

Analphabetic Schemes 

‘Analphabetic’ notations use symbols that represent 

the subcomponents of a segment, rather like chemical 

formulas. One early example of such a scheme was 

proposed by the Dutch writer Lambert ten Kate (see 

Kate Hermansz, Lambert ten (1674–1731)) in 1723, 

and another by Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus 

Darwin, in 1803. Thomas Wright Hill (1763– 

1851), a schoolmaster in Birmingham who had a keen 

ear, though his knowledge of sounds was self-taught, 

devised a notation in which each place of articulation 

was allotted a number. The interaction of active and 

passive articulators was expressed in terms of numerator 

(passive) and denominator (active); for example, 

a bilabial articulation is 1 (upper lip) over 1 (lower 

lip), a labiodental is 2 (upper teeth) over 1, a dental is 

2 over 3 (tongue tip), and so on. The degree of stricture 

and state of the glottis were shown by the shape 

of the line between the numbers, and vowels were 

indicated by the use of double lines instead of a single 

one. It is easier, however, to typeset symbols that are in 

horizontal sequence. Otto Jespersen (see Jespersen, 

Otto (1860–1943)) included his analphabetic (later 

called antalphabetic) alphabet in The articulations of 

speech sounds (1889). It used a combination of 

Roman letters, Greek letters, numerals, italics, heavy 

type, and subscript and superscript letters. The Greek 

letters represented the active articulators involved – 

lower lip (a), tongue tip (b), tongue body (g), velum 

and uvula (d), vocal cords (E), and respiratory organs 

(z). The numerals following the Greek letter showed 

the relative stricture taken up by the articulators and 

the Roman letters referred to the passive articulators. 

For example, the combination b1 fe d0E3 would represent 

one kind of [s] (b ¼ tongue tip, 1 ¼ close stricture, 

fe ¼ in the area of alveolar ridge/hard palate, 

d0 ¼ velic closure, E3 ¼ open vocal cords). It was not 

intended for use in a continuous transcription (though 

Jespersen showed how this is possible in a matrix 

form), but served as a descriptive label for the segment 

concerned (cf. modern feature notations). 

Friedrich Techmer had proposed an analphabetic 

scheme in his Phonetik (1880). It employed five horizontal 

lines that, together with the spaces in between 

them, showed the major places of articulation. 

Musical-type notes were then inserted to show the 

manners of articulation. It was designed essentially 

as a scientific notation for Techmer’s own use and 

never achieved widespread adoption. His Romanbased 

alternative, published in the Internationale 

Zeitschrift für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (in 

1884 and in 1888), was a highly detailed and systematic 

scheme, making use of a basic italic typeface, 

both uppercase and lowercase, with various diacritics 

either directly beneath or to the right of the main 

symbol. Johan Storm (see Storm, Johan (1836– 

1920)) judged it to be the best of the German systems 

of notation, and it was the basis for Setälä’s 1901 

transcription for Finno-Ugric languages (see Laziczius, 

1966). 

Kenneth Pike (see Pike, Kenneth Lee (1912–2000)), 

in his classic book Phonetics (1943), outlined an even 

more detailed analphabetic notation, called ‘functional 

analphabetic symbolism.’ It was composed of 

roman and italic letters in uppercase and lowercase, 

and was intended to illustrate the complexity of 

sound formation and to expose the many assumptions

that lie behind the customary short labels used to 

refer to sounds. The segment [t] is represented by 

the notation MaIlDeCVveIcAPpaat dtltnransfsSiFSs; 

the italic symbols give the broad headings of the 

mechanisms involved and the roman letters give subclassifications. 

Even this degree of complexity, Pike 

says, is ‘‘suggestive but by no means exhaustive.’’ 

Dialect Alphabets 

Various special alphabets have been created for 

the transcription of particular dialects (see further 

in Heepe (1983)). J. A. Lundell was commissioned 

while a student at Uppsala to produce an alphabet for 

Swedish. The resulting Swedish dialect alphabet was 

first published in 1879 and has been widely used since 

then, not only for Swedish. The basic font is italic, 

which Lundell thought most suitable for cursive 

writing as well as for printing, and he supplemented 

the letters of the Roman alphabet almost entirely 

by employing new letter shapes, mostly formed by 

adding loops or hooks to the basic symbols. They 

retain some iconic character through a consistent 

use of a particular hook, etc. for one place of articulation. 

Lundell rejected the use of different fonts 

and of capital letters to make distinctions, and also 

avoided unattached diacritics, except those for suprasegmental 

features. Sweet was critical of Lundell’s 

scheme, mainly on the grounds of the complex letter 

shapes and the consequent expense of casting the 

many new types required, but Storm, in correspondence 

with Sweet, expressed a much higher opinion 

of it, particularly the systematic character of the letter 

shapes used for consonants. Some of the vowel symbols 

are easily confused and would require extreme 

care in handwritten texts. 

Jespersen produced a dialect alphabet for Danish, 

first published in the periodical Dania in 1890, and 

later used in the Danish pronouncing dictionary. It 

follows the ‘broad’ principle, employing phonetic 

symbols without diacritics to represent the Danish 

sounds. Its reversal of the values assigned to 

and in the IPA alphabet is a source of possible 

confusion. 

The Alphabet of the International Phonetic 

Association 

L’Association Phonétique Internationale, founded in 

1897, grew out of two previous organizations: The 

Phonetic Teachers’ Association, founded in Paris in 

1886, and L’Association Phonétique des Professeurs 

de Langues Vivantes, which replaced it in 1889. The 

first version of the IPA alphabet, based on Pitman’s 

alphabet of 1847 (as revised in 1876) and on Sweet’s 

broad romic, appeared in 1888. From the beginning, 

the emphasis was on practical use for language 


teaching. Consequently, the symbols were chosen 

with a view to clarity, familiarity, and economy. The 

published IPA principles stipulated that ‘‘there should 

be a separate sign for each distinctive sound; that is 

for each sound which, being used instead of another 

in the language, can change the meaning of a word’’ 

(i.e., for each phoneme). The symbols were to be 

letters of the Roman alphabet as far as possible, 

with values determined by international usage, and 

when ‘‘very similar shades of sound’’ were to be found 

in several languages, the same sign was to be used. 

The use of diacritics was to be avoided, except for 

representing ‘‘shades of varieties of the typical 

sounds,’’ because of the problem they presented for 

reading and writing. It was also stipulated that, when 

possible, the shape of new symbols should ‘‘be suggestive 

of the sound they represent, by their resemblance 

to the old ones.’’ For example, the basic 

shape was retained for the palatal, retroflex, velar, 

and uvular nasals [ J, 0, N, N]. 

Over the years, the alphabet has been modified for 

use as a general phonetic resource, to make detailed 

phonetic transcriptions and comparisons of language 

sounds. Diacritics have been accepted as admissible 

for certain limited purposes. A thorough reappraisal 

of it has been made (much of it reflected in articles in 

the Journal of the International Phonetic Association 

(1986–1989)). Since the Kiel Convention in 1989, 

additions and amendments have been made to the 

symbols and to their presentation in chart form (see 

Figure 6). 

The IPA principles have been amended in certain 

respects, notably to make it clear that IPA symbols 

should not be seen simply as representations of 

sounds, but as ‘‘shorthand ways of designating certain 

intersections of . . . a set of phonetic categories which 

describe how each sound is made.’’ However, it is still 

stated that ‘‘the sounds that are represented by the 

symbols are primarily those that serve to distinguish 

one word from another in a language.’’ Two important 

developments, as a result of working groups set 

up following the Kiel Convention, are a complete 

computer coding of IPA symbols and an extension 

of the IPA alphabet to include disordered speech 

and voice quality (see MacMahon, 1986; Albright, 

1958; International Phonetic Association, 1999: 

Appendices 2 and 3). 

Twentieth-Century and Later 

Developments 

The ‘Anthropos Alphabet’ of P. W. Schmidt 

The alphabet of P. W. Schmidt was first published 

in the periodical Anthropos in 1907, and was revised

408 Phonetic Transcription: History

in 1924. Schmidt kept most of Lepsius’s symbols, 

adding some diacritics to distinguish sounds left 

undifferentiated by Lepsius, but introduced the IPA 

symbols , (and turned versions of them) 

and , mostly to replace symbols with diacritics. 

For the consonants, to give some examples, < > and 

are used for the dental fricatives instead of 

Lepsius’s and , and in Schmidt’s revised 

edition the inverted forms of , , and 

replaced Lepsius’s click symbols , , and . 

Interestingly, the 1989 revision of the IPA alphabet 

adopted Lepsius’s click symbols (slightly modified). 

Native American Languages 

In 1916, the Smithsonian Institution published a 

pamphlet entitled Phonetic transcription of Indian 

languages, embodying the report of the committee 

of the American Anthropological Association, consisting 

of Franz Boas (see Boas, Franz (1858–1942)), 

P. E. Goddard, Edward Sapir (see Sapir, Edward 

(1884–1939)), and A. L. Kroeber (see Kroeber, Alfred 

Louis (1876–1960)). The report took as a basis the 

alphabet used by J. W. Powell in Contributions to 

North American ethnology (vol. 3, 1877). In 15 

pages, the pamphlet sets out general principles of 

transcription and rules for both a simpler and a 

more complete system. The principles closely resemble 

those of the IPA, concerning the use of the same 

symbol when the same sound occurs, the restrictions 

on the use of diacritics, the harmonizing of fonts, and 

the use of symbols for sound values like those that 

they customarily stand for. The simpler system is 

suggested for ‘‘ordinary purposes of recording and 

printing texts,’’ and the complete system is for the 

recording and discussing of complex and varied phonetic 

phenomena by specialists in phonetics. The full 

system of vowels is based on Sweet’s 36-vowel system 

(excluding the ‘shifted’ vowels of his final system). 

Sweet’s ‘wide’ vowels are normally shown by Greek 

letters, and ‘narrow’ ones by Roman letters. The consonant 

symbols and prosodic marks are not very different 

from those of the IPA; some exceptions are that 

small capitals are used for voiceless liquids and 

nasals, and also for stops and fricatives said to be 

‘intermediate’ between surd (voiceless) and sonant 

(voiced). These include unaspirated voiceless stops. 

The total system is a sophisticated one, providing 

both a high degree of precision in transcribing the 

detailed features of Native American languages and 

a satisfactory, simple form for nonspecialists. 

Jörgen Forchhammer’s Weltlautschrift 

(World Sound Notation) 

Forchhammer’s ‘World sound notation’ was published 

in Die Grundlage der Phonetik (Heidelberg, 

1924). It comprises a basic set of 44 Lautgruppen 

(sound groups, made up of 13 vowels and 31 consonants), 

each comprising a set of sounds that can be 

represented by the same letter. The nuances within 

each group can be shown by the wide range of diacritics, 

which include subscript numerals to indicate 

successive points of tongue contact along the palate. 

Of the 44 basic symbols, 36 are identical with IPA 

symbols, but the diacritics are mostly different (see 

also Heepe, 1983). 

The Copenhagen Conference 


In April, 1925, a conference was held in Copenhagen, 

convened by Otto Jespersen and attended by an international 

group of 12 specialists in different language 

groups, to try to establish a norm for a universal 

phonetic script. Their proposals, published in 1926 

in Phonetic transcription and transliteration, were 

reprinted in 1983 (Heepe, 1983). The Copenhagen 

group firmly rejected the possibility of further iconic 

alphabets and approved the notion of ‘broad’ transcriptions 

based on the phoneme. Their detailed proposals 

for symbols were given a somewhat cool 

reception by the Council of the IPA (as reported in 

Le Maître Phonétique in 1927), but the following 

protocols were accepted: 

1. [j b] for the bilabial fricatives (instead of [F V]) 

2. [o] for labialization 

3. [

Lundell) 

4. a raised period [ � ] to show length 

5. vertical stress marks ["] and [%] instead of the 

oblique [B]. 

Other proposals (rejected or previously adopted by 

the IPA) included a reversed comma below the letter 

for nasalization; a new diacritic for palatals; [d] for 

the voiced dental fricative; [x X] for velar fricatives; 

[K G N R L] for uvular stops, nasal, trill, and lateral and 

[X G] for uvular fricatives; [ O ] for glottal stop; and [ D ] 

as a diacritic for clicks. Among the suggestions for the 

vowels were abandoning the use of [a] and [A] to 

signify different vowels, use of superscript [ . ] for central 

vowels, and umlaut for front rounded vowels, 

e.g., [ü ö]. 

Figure 6 The most current symbol chart of the International Phonetic Association. Reprinted from the International Phonetic 

Association (1999) (the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 

Thessaloniki, Greece), with permission.


Machine-Readable Transcriptions 

One major consideration in recent years has been the 

choice of symbols to represent speech in computer 

systems. The need to have symbols that are available 

on normal keyboards has led to various systems of 

machine-readable phonetic alphabets. The most easily 

available method of supplementing a lowercase 

Roman alphabet is the use of uppercase, and there is 

a fair amount of agreement among different schemes 

in allocating uppercase symbols to IPA symbols. Another 

area of common ground is the use of for a 

central schwa-type vowel, and numerals that resemble 

phonetic symbols, such as standing for [k]. 

The machine-readable Speech Assessment Methods 

Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA), developed in 1987 and 

1989 by an international group of phoneticians, is 

capable of dealing with the transcription of a wide 

range of languages (see further in Wells (1997); see 

also Phonetic Transcription: Analysis). 

See also: International Phonetic Association; Bell, Alexander 

Melville (1819–1905); Boas, Franz (1858–1942); 

Brosses, Charles de (1709–1777); Bru¨ cke, Ernst (1819– 

1891); Bullokar, William (c. 1531–1609); Duponceau, 

Pierre Etienne (1760–1844); Ellis, Alexander John (ne´ 

Sharpe) (1814–1890); Firthian Phonology; Hart, John 

(?1501-1574); Jespersen, Otto (1860–1943); Jones, William, 

Sir (1746–1794); Kate Hermansz, Lambert ten 

(1674–1731); Kroeber, Alfred Louis (1876–1960); Lepsius, 

Carl Richard (1810–1884); Lodwick, Francis (1619–1694); 

Meigret, Louis (?1500-1558); Meinhof, Carl Friedrich Michael 

(1857–1944); Mu¨ ller, Friedrich Max (1823–1900); 

Passy, Paul Edouard (1859–1940); Phonetic Transcription: 

Analysis; Pike, Kenneth Lee (1912–2000); Pitman, Isaac, 

Sir (1813–1897); Sanctius, Franciscus (1523–1600); Sapir, 

Edward (1884–1939); Steele, Joshua (1700–1791); Storm, 

Johan (1836–1920); Sweet, Henry (1845–1912); Volney, 

Constantin-Francois Chasseboeuf, Comte de (1757– 

1820); Walker, John (1732–1807); Wilkins, John (1614– 

1672). 

Bibliography 

Abercrombie D (1967). Elements of general phonetics. 

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

Abercrombie D (1981). ‘Extending the Roman alphabet: 

some orthographic experiments of the past four centuries.’ 

In Asher R E & Henderson E J A (eds.) Towards a 

history of phonetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University 

Press. 

Albright R W (1958). ‘The International Phonetic Alphabet: 

its background and development.’ International Journal 

of American Linguistics 24(1B), part III. [Publication 

seven of the Indiana Research Center in Anthropology, 

Folklore, and Linguistics.] 

Copenhagen Conference (1925). Phonetic transcription 

and transliteration: proposals of the Copenhagen Conference 

April 1925. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 

Heepe M (ed.) (1983). Lautzeichen und ihre Anwendung 

in verschiedenen Sprachen. Hamburg: Helmut Buske 

Verlag. 

International Phonetic Association (IPA) (1999). Handbook 

of the IPA; a guide to the use of the International 

Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press. 

Kelly J (1981). ‘The 1847 alphabet: an episode of phonotypy.’ 

In Asher R E & Henderson E J A (eds.) Towards a 

history of phonetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University 

Press. 

Kemp J A (1999). ‘Transcription, transliteration and 

the idea of a universal alphabet.’ In Leopold J (ed.) 

Prix Volney essay series, vol. I:2. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 

476–571. 

Laziczius G (1966). ‘Schrift und Lautbezeichnung.’ In 

Sebeok T A (ed.) Selected writings of Gyula Laziczius. 

The Hague: Mouton. 

Lepsius C R (1863). Standard alphabet for reducing unwritten 

languages and foreign graphic systems to a uniform 

orthography in European letters. [2nd rev. edn. (1981), 

with an introduction by Kemp J A. Amsterdam: John 

Benjamins]. 

MacMahon M K C (1986). ‘The International Phonetic 

Association: the first 100 years.’ Journal of the International 

Phonetic Association 16, 33–38. 

Pullum G K & Ladusaw W A (1996). Phonetic symbol 

guide (2nd edn.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Sweet H (1880). ‘Sound notation.’ Transactions of the Philological 

Society, 177–235. 

Wellisch H H (1978). The conversion of scripts – its nature, 

history and utilization. New York: Wiley. 

Wells J C (1997). ‘SAMPA computer readable phonetic 

alphabet.’ In Gibbon D, Moore R & Winski R (eds.) 

Handbook of standards and resources for spoken language 

systems. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 

Part IV, sect. B.

Phonetic Transcription: History

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