The purpose of this paper is to describe a new version of the Spoken English Corpus which will be of interest to phoneticians and other speech scientists. The Spoken English Corpus is a well-known collection of spoken-language texts that was collected and transcribed in the 1980's in a joint project involving IBM UK and the University of Lancaster (Alderson and Knowles forthcoming, Knowles and Taylor 1988). One valuable aspect of it is that the recorded material on which it was based is fairly freely available and the recording quality is generally good. At the time when the recordings were made, the idea of storing all the recorded material in digital form suitable for computer processing was of limited practicality. Although storage on digital tape was certainly feasible, this did not provide rapid computer access. The arrival of optical disk technology, with the possibility of storing very large amounts of digital data on a compact disk at relatively low cost, has brought about a revolution in ideas on database construction and use. It seemed to us that the recordings of the Spoken English Corpus (hereafter SEC) should now be converted into a form which would enable the user to gain access to the acoustic signal without the laborious business of winding through large amounts of tape. Once this was done, we should be able not only to listen to the recordings in a very convenient way, but also to carry out many automatic analyses of the material by computer.

If we are to believe Panconcelli-Calzia (1941), the history of phonetics goes back three millenia, and probably as far back as the study of language in general. However, while the history of linguistics has in recent decades become a widely practised field of scholarly endeavour, with a specialist journal and several associated monograph series available since 1973, nothing comparable has occurred with regard to the history of phonetics. There is no indication that a concerted effort is under way to remedy the situation and to establish the history of phonetics as an integral part of the study of phonetics as has been done with regard to the history of linguistics for well over fifteen years. The present paper offers a critical survey of previous scholarship in the historiography of phonetics and presents a few ideas that may strengthen the interest in the historiography of (linguistic) phonetics and encourage someone to undertake a major, comprehensive work in this field.

The marking of stress in English phonetics has traditionally used a small vertical bar placed before the stressed syllable, though some dictionaries which provide an indication of pronunciation have used other conventions such as bold or italic typeface to denote the primary stressed syllable. In all the editions of the English Pronouncing Dictionary (e.g. Jones 1988), including the current one (hereafter referred to as EPD14), the vertical bar has been used, in superscript position for the primary stressed syllable and in subscript position for the secondary stressed syllable.

Dynamic electropalatography (EPG) (also known as dynamic palatography or palatometry) is a system for recording information about the tongue's contact with the hard palate over time. It is relatively inexpensive and technologically accessible. EPG is safe, provides spatial information on the shape of constriction contact, and allows the collection of reasonable acoustic data. Multiple sessions with a subject are possible and replicable. For these reasons, this method may be of interest to phoneticians. The purpose of this note is to serve as an introduction to interpreting palatograms. Much in the same way that phonetics students learn to read spectrograms, reading palatograms is a skill which can be honed by practice and experience. And just as looking at spectrograms of an unknown utterance can develop increased sensitivity to acoustic facts, reading palatograms can enhance awareness of details of articulation.

The following description of French is based on the speech of a young Parisian female speaker. Varieties of French have almost identical inventories; the main differences are to be found in the maintenance or loss of certain contrasts.

The following description of Hausa is based on the variety of the language spoken in Kano, Nigeria. The sample text is transcribed from a recording of a male native of Kano in his late 30's. This variety of Hausa is considered “standard”. Though Kano is a large urban center with some internal variation in speech, the sound inventory is relatively homogeneous within the city and surrounding area. Kano Hausa is the variety most commonly heard on national and regional radio and television broadcasts in Nigeria as well as most international broadcasting, such as the BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio Moscow, and Voice of America. Kano Hausa is therefore familiar throughout the Hausa speaking areas of Nigeria as well as Hausa speaking communities in Niger, Ghana, and other areas outside northern Nigeria. Hausa has a standard orthography, in use since the 1930's and also based on the Kano variety. It is familiar to all Hausa speakers literate in the Romanized orthography. (Many Hausas are also literate in Arabic orthography, a variety of which has been used to write Hausa, probably for several centuries. The Arabic orthography for Hausa is less standardized than the Roman orthography and has little formally published literature.)

The process of assigning computer codes to phonetic symbols began when the 1989 Kiel Convention of the International Phonetic Association was called to revise the Association's alphabet. The Workgroup on Computer Coding formed at that time had the task of determining how to represent the IPA alphabet numerically, and of developing a set of numbers referring to IPA symbols unambiguously. This involved assembling phoneticians who work with computer representations of phonetic symbols, and communicating with specialists in computer coding to gauge the fit between the phonetician's perspective on symbol usage and the non-phonetician's understanding of how to identify and use phonetic symbols. Prior to Kiel, a collection of practical approaches to coded representations was outlined in JIPA (Esling 1988), which dealt mainly with keyboard assignments of characters.

Following the 1989 Kiel Convention a number of proposals for revisions of the IPA appeared in the Journal. These proposals were submitted to the Council on 1 December 1992, and votes were received from 24 of the 30 Council members by 1 February 1993. These votes are listed in Table 1. The marity of the specific proposals on which the Council voted appeared in the Journal 20 (2): 22–32. In this report, the numbering of the proposals and the responses has been arranged so that it forms a continuous sequence for easy reference.

The Extensions to the IPA for the transcription of disordered speech and voice quality (extIPA) were approved at the 1989 IPA Congress in Kiel (see Duckworth et al. 1990, Ball 1991). A transcription system for disordered speech needs to provide sufficient diversity of symbols and diacritics to account for the majority of observed phonetic variants. Creation of standard new symbols and diacritics for every observed variant is ultimately counterproductive. We submit that the following phenomena have been observed frequently enough and have sufficient diagnostic and therapeutic implications to warrant consideration as new extensions to the IPA. We do not imply, however, that these are the only atypical speech production phenomena that may, in the long run, be worthy of inclusion in a revised extIPA, and we look forward to further suggestions from clinicians and phoneticians.

I read with interest the note by Leigh Lisker in JIPA 22 (pp 57–61) concerning the problem of marking force of articulation in phonetic transcription, and his regret that the 1989 revisions did not include diacritics for the fortis-lenis distinction. It is true that there exists no universally agreed definition of articulatory force, however, as Professor Lisker points out, phoneticians involved in transcription frequently encounter the need to differentiate sounds of different strength which appear to be the same in other phonetic dimensions.

I am grateful that the wish I expressed at Kiel for a means to indicate neutral lip position has been fulfilled in the form of a set of rules for extended application of over-rounding and under-rounding diacritics, stated officially in the Journal 20:2, p.23, item 8. Only, could I point out that there is a serious mistake in the final portion of this passage?

There were several errors in the illustration of Korean published in the Journal 23 (1). In the consonant chart there should be no labio-dental fricative [f]. Also in the chart and throughout the illustration the symbol [ɟ] might be preferred wherever [ʝ] has been used. In the examples used to illustrate stress, the Korean words for ‘disguise’ and ‘most’ should show a velar nasal [ŋ] rather than [n], and the transcription of the recorded passage should read [′iŋɟΛŋhaɟi] in the last line.