What is Morphology?, 3rd Edition

Remarks on Transcription

Modern linguistics has been struggling with the problem of phonetic and phonological transcription since its inception. The International Phonetics Association was founded in 1886 with the goal of providing for linguistics a worldwide standard system for naming sounds, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), akin to that universal standard language used in chemistry and physics since the mid-nineteenth century to name the elements and their compounds. But linguists have long resisted this standardization, especially for phonological transcription, much to the dismay of students over the generations. There are many reasons for this resistance. The phonological transcription of a language is often driven by the desire to develop a practical orthography, in which phonetic accuracy and consistency take a back seat to ease of use. Also, phonological theorists since the beginning of that field have enjoyed a love–hate relationship with phonetics, arguing over the true nature of the connection between a phoneme and its various phonetic realizations, leading them to downplay the importance of consistency for phonological transcription across languages, since each language has its own unique phonological system. Leonard Bloomfield, for example, one of the great linguists of the twentieth century, used the symbol U for schwa in his Menomini grammar, largely for typographical convenience.

In this book, we have made a compromise. Wherever possible or practicable, ...