IPA Vs Roman Alphabet

Lagapa, Fatima Q.
MAED 2 English
English 103 ( 8:00-10:00/ Fri.-Sat.)
Advance Speech and Public Speaking
Lesson No.3-A
The International Phonetic Alphabet vs. The Roman Alphabet
Origin
The IPA was first published in 1888 by the Association Phontique Internationale
(International Phonetic Association), a group of French language teachers founded by Paul Passy. The
aim of the organisation was to devise a system for transcribing the sounds of speech which was
independent of any particular language and applicable to all languages.
A phonetic script for English created in 1847 by Isaac Pitman and Henry Ellis was used as a model for
the IPA.
Uses
The IPA is used in dictionaries to indicate the pronunciation of words.
The IPA has often been used as a basis for creating new writing systems for previously
unwritten languages.
The IPA is used in some foreign language text books and phrase books to transcribe the sounds
of languages which are written with non-latin alphabets. It is also used by non-native speakers
of English when learning to speak English.
Where symbols appear in pairs, the one on the right represents a voiced consonant, while the one on
the left is unvoiced. Shaded areas denote articulations judged to be impossible.
Lagapa, Fatima Q. MAED 2 English

English 103 ( 8:00-10:00/ Fri.-Sat.)
Advance Speech and Public Speaking
Lesson No.3-B
The Roman Alphabet
Origin
The Latin (or, as it is also called, Roman) alphabet appeared in the 7th century BC as an
adaptation of the Etruscan alphabet to the Latin language. The Etruscans themselves borrowed their
alphabet from the Greek colonists in Italy; the origin of the Greek alphabet is traced through
Phoenician scripts to the North Semitic alphabet, which was already in use in Syria and Palestine
during the 12th c. BC.
There was a common spread opinion, shared even by some contemporary scholars, that the Latin
characters were derived directly from the Greek ones. This hypothesis rested on the evident
correspondence between the Latin alphabet and the Chalcidian variety of the western group of Greek
scripts used at Cumae in Campania, southern Italy. It seems, anyway, inconsistent, because the name
of the letters are clearly of Etruscan and not of Greek origin (a, be, ce, de etc. and notalpha, betha,
gamma, delta etc.) and because of the specific representation in the most ancient documents of the [f]
sound by the combination FH, which was peculiar to the Etruscan writing system.
The earliest inscription in Latin characters, dating from the 7th century BC, was made on golden
brooch known as Praeneste Fibula (preserved now in the Museo Preistorico Etnografico Luigi
Pigorini in Rome). It is written from right to left and reads:
MANIOS:MED:FHEFHAKED:NUMASIOI
(in Classical Latin: Manius me fecit Numerio)
Manius made me for Numerius.
Another inscription, dating from the end of the 7th or the beginning of the 6th century BC, was
engraved on a small pillar (cippus) found in the Roman Forum. It is written vertically on the four
faces of the pillar in bustrophedon style. Another inscription, probably of the 6th century BC, was
discovered near the Quirinal Hill in Rome. It is known as the Duenos Vase and like the Praeneste
Fibula is also written from right to left. These inscriptions are generally considered to be the oldest
extant examples of the Latin alphabet.
Originally the Latin alphabet consisted of the following 21 letters:
ABCDEFZHIKLMNOPQRSTVX
About 250 BC the letter Z was dropped because in the Latin of this period there was not a specific
sound that would require its usage. On the other hand, a new letter, G, made by adding a bar to the
lower end of C, was placed in the position of Z. After the 1st century BC, when the Greek-speaking
world was incorporated into theorbis Romanum, a large number of Greek words penetrated the Latin
language. At the time of Cicero and Caesar the symbols Y and Z were introduced from the
contemporary Greek alphabet and were placed at the end of the alphabet. Their usage was initially
restricted to transliterate Greek words only, as the popular Latin name for Y i graeca suggests
(this name is preserved in modern French i grecque and modern Spanish i griega, for instance), and
thay do not appear in ordinary Latin inscriptions. Thus, at the beginning of the Christian era the Latin
script had 23 letters:
ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVXYZ
Three new letters were permanently added to the alphabet during the Middle Ages. The semivocal
pronunciation of I and V before vowels like [j] and [w] became clearly consonantic [dJ] and [v]
respectively and this change was reflected in the writing. For long time there was a practice among
the scribes to write I and V with some modifications like J and U, though they used them
interchangeably for either the vowel or the consonant sound. At last this practice was
conventionalized, so that U and I were written for the vowels and V and J for the consonants. Before
the establishing of this conventionalization Spanish and French introduced an unpronounceable h at
the beginning of words whose first letter v, followed by a vowel, was to be read [u], and in this manner
there was formed a syllable and the reading of [u] and not of [v] assured; this usage is still preserved
in the modern orthography, cf. Sp. huevo < L. ovum or F. huite < L. octo. W was invented by
Norman scribes to represent the Anglo-Saxon sound [w] (a semivowel) and to differentiate it from the
[v] sound. At the end of the 15th c. the alphabet was finally fixed as consisting of 26 letters:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
During the Middle Ages, with the Christianization of Central and Northern Europe by the Roman
Catholic Church, the Latin alphabet was adopted with some modifications to many Germanic, Slavic
and Ugro-Finnic language. The late Romance languages on their part developed many new sounds as
compared with the classical Latin and had also to make innovations in the writing system. The most
common way of representing sounds that were missing in the classical Latin was to add diacritical
marks like the diaeresis above the German vowels , , , the Portuguese and French cedilla in ,
the tilde on Spanish and Portuguese and etc.
Difference between International Phonetic Alphabet and The Roman Alphabet
In the IPA each and every sign (or combination of signs) represents exactly a specific sound, whereas
the Roman Alphabet doesn't work in the same way (most of the time not even within a single
language). For example: the words "some" and "sum" are pronounced in the same way (IPA /sm/),
but spelled in two different ways. "flood" contains also the same sound (IPA /fld/). With the IPA it is
possible to make an accurate transcription of the pronunciation of a word, no matter which language
it comes from. The Roman Alphabet is too limited for that.

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Lagapa, Fatima Q.

The IPA is used in dictionaries to indicate the pronunciation of words.

Lagapa, Fatima Q. MAED 2 English

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