Reading the Chart

You now know the ingredients: voicing, place, manner, airstream, and the three vowel dimensions. This chapter shows how they are laid out on the real chart, and introduces the marks that go on and between the letters: diacritics, length, stress, breaks and tone.

The Layout

Wikipedia's article on the IPA says the letters fall into three categories, and the counts of letters and marks are 107 letters, 31 diacritics and 17 additional signs.

Rules for reading the cells

• Where letters appear in pairs, the letter on the right is voiced and the one on the left is voiceless. (Wikipedia notes the breathy-voiced [ɦ] as an exception.)
• Where a cell holds a single letter, that letter represents a voiced consonant.
• Shaded cells are articulations judged impossible or not distinctive.
• In the vowel trapezoid, unrounded vowels sit to the left of rounded ones in each pair (Chapter 5).

The open vowels (the gap left in Chapter 5)

From the vowel chart on Wikipedia's vowel article: open front is [a] (unrounded) and [ɶ] (rounded), and open back is [ɑ] (unrounded) and [ɒ] (rounded). Cardinal vowels 4 and 5 are [a] and [ɑ]. I did not manage to confirm the open central cell ([ä]) from the source text, so it is left out.

Diacritics

A diacritic modifies a letter. The table follows Wikipedia's list (the ◌ shows where the base letter goes).

Two of these finish business from earlier chapters. Aspiration is the [pʰ] of English pin from Chapter 1. Breathy and creaky voice are the extra phonation types promised in Chapter 2. On Wikipedia's page on voice, breathy voice ("murmur") and creaky voice sit on a scale of phonation types between breath and the restricted end; "voiced aspirate" consonants normally have breathy voice, as in Juǀʼhoansi and Taa. That page gives no IPA diacritics for them; the diacritics above come from the IPA article.

Length, Stress and Breaks

Chapter 1 told you that in Esperanto the stress falls on the second-to-last vowel. In IPA the stress mark goes before the stressed syllable, so Esperanto lingvo "language" would be written [ˈliŋɡvo] (my own transcription, not from the source). Length marks matter in languages such as Hungarian, where Chapter 5 noted that long vowels contrast.

Tone

Tone is written either with pitch diacritics over the vowel or with Chao tone letters. Wikipedia lists:

Upstep and downstep are [ꜛ] and [ꜜ] (ꜛke, ꜜke). The tone material is in the article's final sections, which I read, but I did not read the last 25,875 characters of the page.

Try It Yourself