ARPABET (also spelled ARPAbet) is a set of phonetic transcription codes developed by Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a part of their Speech Understanding Research project in the 1970s. It represents phonemes and allophones of General American English with distinct sequences of ASCII characters. Two systems, one representing each segment with one character (alternating upper- and lower-case letters) and the other with one or two (case-insensitive), were devised, the latter being far more widely adopted. [1]
ARPABET has been used in several speech synthesizers, including Computalker for the S-100 system, SAM for the Commodore 64, SAY for the Amiga, TextAssist for the PC and Speakeasy from Intelligent Artefacts which used the Votrax SC-01 speech synthesiser IC. It is also used in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. A revised version of ARPABET is used in the TIMIT corpus. [1]
Stress is indicated by a digit immediately following a vowel. Auxiliary symbols are identical in 1- and 2-letter codes. In 2-letter notation, segments are separated by a space.
ARPABET | IPA | Example(s) | |
---|---|---|---|
1-letter | 2-letter | ||
a | AA | ɑ ~ ɒ | balm, bot (with father–bother merger) |
@ | AE | æ | bat |
A | AH | ʌ | butt |
c | AO | ɔ | caught, story |
W | AW | aʊ | bout |
x | AX | ə | comma |
— | AXR [3] | ɚ | letter, forward |
Y | AY | aɪ | bite |
E | EH | ɛ | bet |
R | ER | ɝ | bird, foreword |
e | EY | eɪ | bait |
I | IH | ɪ | bit |
X | IX | ɨ | roses, rabbit |
i | IY | i | beat |
o | OW | oʊ | boat |
O | OY | ɔɪ | boy |
U | UH | ʊ | book |
u | UW | u | boot |
— | UX [3] | ʉ | dude |
ARPABET | IPA | Example | |
---|---|---|---|
1-letter | 2-letter | ||
b | B | b | buy |
C | CH | tʃ | China |
d | D | d | die |
D | DH | ð | thy |
F | DX | ɾ | butter |
L | EL | l̩ | bottle |
M | EM | m̩ | rhythm |
N | EN | n̩ | button |
f | F | f | fight |
g | G | ɡ | guy |
h | HH or H [3] | h | high |
J | JH | dʒ | jive |
k | K | k | kite |
l | L | l | lie |
m | M | m | my |
n | N | n | nigh |
G | NX or NG [3] | ŋ | sing |
— | NX [3] | ɾ̃ | winter |
p | P | p | pie |
Q | Q | ʔ | uh-oh |
r | R | ɹ | rye |
s | S | s | sigh |
S | SH | ʃ | shy |
t | T | t | tie |
T | TH | θ | thigh |
v | V | v | vie |
w | W | w | wise |
H | WH | ʍ | why (without wine–whine merger) |
y | Y | j | yacht |
z | Z | z | zoo |
Z | ZH | ʒ | pleasure |
AB | Description |
---|---|
0 | No stress |
1 | Primary stress |
2 | Secondary stress |
3... | Tertiary and further stress |
- | Silence |
! | Non-speech segment |
+ | Morpheme boundary |
/ | Word boundary |
# | Utterance boundary |
: | Tone group boundary |
:1 or . | Falling or declining juncture |
:2 or ? | Rising or internal juncture |
:3 or . | Fall-rise or non-terminal juncture |
In TIMIT, the following symbols are used in addition to the ones listed above: [4]
Symbol | IPA | Example | Description |
---|---|---|---|
AX-H | ə̥ | suspect | Devoiced /ə/ |
BCL | b̚ | obtain | [b] closure |
DCL | d̚ | width | [d] closure |
ENG | ŋ̍ | Washington | Syllabic [ŋ] |
GCL | ɡ̚ | dogtooth | [ɡ] closure |
HV | ɦ | ahead | Voiced /h/ |
KCL | k̚ | doctor | [k] closure |
PCL | p̚ | accept | [p] closure |
TCL | t̚ | catnip | [t] closure |
PAU | — | — | Pause |
EPI | — | — | Epenthetic silence |
H# | — | — | Begin/end marker |
D, or d, is the fourth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is dee, plural dees.
E, or e, is the fifth letter and the second vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is e ; plural es, Es, or E's.
G, or g, is the seventh letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages, and others worldwide. Its name in English is gee, plural gees.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation for the sounds of speech. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.
M, or m, is the thirteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of several western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is em, plural ems.
N, or n, is the fourteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages, and others worldwide. Its name in English is en, plural ens.
O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is o, plural oes.
The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printable ASCII characters, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It was originally developed in the late 1980s for six European languages by the EEC ESPRIT information technology research and development program. As many symbols as possible have been taken over from the IPA; where this is not possible, other signs that are available are used, e.g. [@
] for schwa, [2
] for the vowel sound found in French deux 'two', and [9
] for the vowel sound found in French neuf 'nine'.
T, or t, is the twentieth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is tee, plural tees.
The following show the typical symbols for consonants and vowels used in SAMPA, an ASCII-based system based on the International Phonetic Alphabet. SAMPA is not a universal system as it varies from language to language.
Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Kirshenbaum, sometimes called ASCII-IPA or erkIPA, is a system used to represent the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in ASCII. This way it allows typewriting IPA-symbols by regular keyboard. It was developed for Usenet, notably the newsgroups sci.lang and alt.usage.english. It is named after Evan Kirshenbaum, who led the collaboration that created it. The eSpeak open source software speech synthesizer uses the Kirshenbaum scheme.
The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at University College London. It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the 1993 version of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The result is a SAMPA-inspired remapping of the IPA into 7-bit ASCII.
A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which do not have a phonemic orthography.
L, or l, is the twelfth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is el, plural els.
The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary is an open-source pronouncing dictionary originally created by the Speech Group at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) for use in speech recognition research.
IPA Extensions is a block (U+0250–U+02AF) of the Unicode standard that contains full size letters used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Both modern and historical characters are included, as well as former and proposed IPA signs and non-IPA phonetic letters. Additional characters employed for phonetics, like the palatalization sign, are encoded in the blocks Phonetic Extensions (1D00–1D7F) and Phonetic Extensions Supplement (1D80–1DBF). Diacritics are found in the Spacing Modifier Letters (02B0–02FF) and Combining Diacritical Marks (0300–036F) blocks. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Standard Phonetic.
The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and used widely in international communication. They are the same letters that comprise the current English alphabet. Since medieval times, they are also the same letters of the modern Latin alphabet. The order is also important for sorting words into alphabetical order.
B, or b, is the second letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is bee, plural bees.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) consists of more than 100 letters and diacritics. Before Unicode became widely available, several ASCII-based encoding systems of the IPA were proposed. The alphabet went through a large revision at the Kiel Convention of 1989, and the vowel symbols again in 1993. Systems devised before these revisions inevitably lack support for the additions they introduced.