German Linguistics Lectures

11.4 International Phonetic Alphabet

• The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) can transcribe any of the world’s languages.
• Thus the same sound at the beginning of Vater and Father is represented in the IPA by one phonetic symbol: /f/
• But the initial sounds in Sand and Sand are represented by two different symbols: /z/ and /s/ respectively.

11.5 Phonemes

• The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is made up of phonemes.
• A phoneme is defined as “the minimal sound unit of a language” - or in lay person’s terms as “a distinctive sound”.
• IPA phonetic symbols that represent phonemes are usually written in slanted brackets – e.g. /f/, /z/ and /s/

11.6 The benefits of the IPA

• Being able to read the IPA is enormously helpful to anyone learning a language.
• Any good German-English dictionary gives not only translation and grammatical info about a word, but also its pronunciation.
• Hence Vɛnti’la:to:ɐ shows the different way in which the word Ventilator is pronounced in German compared to English!