In my last article on linguistics I reviewed the American Heritage Dictionary’s phonetic notation system. It was bad to say the least (the American Heritage Dictionary, I mean—not my article, hopefully).
But there are other alternatives one might choose instead of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). I’m going to examine one of those today from the perspective of someone looking to transcribe human language and invent fictional languages (called “conlangs”).
The subject of today’s article is another American system, because the Americans are about as keen on the IPA as they are on the metric system.
It’s a very old system called Americanist Phonetic Notation, and luckily it doesn’t have much in common with the AHD. But can it compare with the IPA?
Well, the short answer is that overall it can’t, but it might have some applications in areas where transcription doesn’t need to be standardized.
History
I’ve found quite a bit more information on this system than I did when researching the American Heritage Dictionary. Americanist Phonetic Notation (APN), also known as the North American Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA), has a long history.
A lot of American linguists made their own adjustments to it without much oversight, and the result isn’t particularly standardized. Indeed, I’ve thus far been unable to find any definitive chart of its symbols. Every chart I look at is vastly different from the others, and I can only conclude that every American linguist must use a slightly different system.
What I have been able to gather is that the American system was conceived with different priorities than the IPA. Where the IPA has a different letter for each sound and uses diacritics as modifiers, the NAPA uses diacritics for pretty much everything.
General usage changes drastically from decade to decade, and each new chart looks increasingly like the IPA. It makes one wonder why Americans don’t just switch to what most of us are using. There might be an answer to that, but we’ll get there.
Diacritical Notation
Let’s start with the most obvious difference between IPA and Americanist Phonetic Notation: diacritics. Like the AHD, the NAPA uses diacritics to distinguish between completely different sounds.
It does this because the philosophy of Americanist Phonetic Notation was originally intended to allow linguists to easily print their transcriptions using old-fashioned typefaces.
Instead of writing the voiceless palatal-through-uvular fricatives [ç], [x], and [χ] as the IPA does, NAPA writes them all as variants of ⟨x⟩: [x̯], [x], and [x̣].
I’m sure this was all very convenient when working with old printers that used moveable type, but these days that’s not an issue. In my experience, letters in the North American Phonetic Alphabet tend to all look a lot more similar to each other than they do in the IPA.
The Good Things
One aspect of Americanist Phonetic Notation that I find interesting is how some of its devotees distinguish voiceless vowels.
They simply capitalize the vowel to make it voiceless. Therefore IPA [ɯ] and [ɯ̥] would be NAPA [ï] and [Ï], respectively.
In one article I read, an American linguist argues that the NAPA is better for field work, particularly when working with languages that distinguish between a plosive-fricative cluster (such as IPA [tʃ]) and a true affricate (like IPA [t͡ʃ]).
You see, as I hinted at in my article on the AHD, NAPA gives most affricates their own symbols. IPA’s [tʃ] and [t͡ʃ] become [č] and [ǰ] in NAPA. Some people find that this lets them write things down clearer and faster in the field.
Reading Transcriptions
Unfortunately Americanist Phonetic Notation’s focus on diacritics can make it hard to read. Just look at the same phrase in both alphabets. I’ll go with “Josh ran to the hospital,” as it has some phonemes whose symbols I want to demonstrate. Let’s start with NAPA’s:
[ǰɒš răn tū? z̯ə hɒspɨtəl]
North-American Phonetic Alphabet
I feel the diacritics here end up being a bit distracting, and they’re hard to see if you’re not looking closely. And again, there are any number of other ways an American linguist might transcribe the same sentence. Some may find NAPA easier to write by hand, but it’s certainly not as easy to read as the IPA:
[d͡ʒɒʃ ɹæn tuː ðə ˈhɒspɪt(ə)l]
International Phonetic Alphabet
Maybe it’s just that I was taught the IPA first, but I find that a lot easier to read at a glance.
No Standardized System
Everyone who uses the NAPA appears to use a different set of symbols. The sound represented in IPA by [m̥] has been written as [m̥], [ᴍ], and [M] in different versions of Americanist Phonetic Notation.
One American linguist might transcribe IPA [d͡ð] in the Americanist Phonetic Notation system as [dϑ] and another as [ʒ]. “But that affricate’s not in English!,” you may protest.
But it actually is used in New York City English, which the American system should be able to transcribe reliably—without ambiguity. And even were it not in any variety of English, this system should be able to do this with any language.
Virtually every sound I’ve mentioned can be written in a multitude of ways depending on which American linguist you ask. The sounds that Americanist Phonetic Notation might render as [ʔ], [dj], and [ϑ] may also be written as [ᵋ], [ǯ], and [δ].
Where the AHD’s notation system failed by trying too hard to be intuitive for native Anglophones, I think the NAPA fails by lacking any form of standardization whatsoever. Even reliable documentation is almost impossible to find.
Making Conlangs
For the creation of fictional languages, I think you’d be better off learning the IPA. The IPA may be somewhat harder to learn than many less useful systems, but with its near-indistinguishable symbols Americanist Phonetic Notation is considerably harder to learn.
This is especially true for fiction writers, as we don’t need to transcribe speech in the field; we’re just sitting at our computers and typing away at our Scrivener projects. Speaking as someone who’s done a lot of it, it’s a lot easier to type IPA transcriptions than it is to type NAPA transcriptions. It’s possible that the opposite is true of handwriting, but few fiction writers engage in much of that these days.
Inconsistent
Americanist Phonetic Notation doesn’t exist in the same way as the International Phonetic Alphabet does. Rather, it’s an assortment of conventions common to many American linguists. There’s no standard chart; it’s just whatever works for each linguist who uses a version of it.
There don’t appear to be any diacritics whose function is consistent. The fact that one can adjust it as needed for their own work might make it ideal for writing things down quickly and accurately in the field. However, I maintain that such transcriptions should be converted to IPA before they’re published.
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