User talk:Johnn Francis

Welcome

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In answer to the question in your edit summary: "/ /" is for a phonemic transcription, allowing for the patterns of sounds in the language, while "[ ]" is for a phonetic transcription, the exact sounds as heard, not adjusting for the rule-based sound changes.

For instance, most native English speakers hear the "p" in syllable-initial "sp" as the same sound as syllable-initial "p", but it's phonetically the same sound as syllable-initial "b". Many US English speakers pronounce spy, pie and buy as /spaɪ/, /paɪ/ and /baɪ/, but something like [spaɪ], [pʰaɪ] and [paɪ]. If you listen to audio of "spy" starting after the "s" sound, it sounds exactly like "buy".

Of course, there are a lot of degrees of exactness, so in practice "[ ]" transcriptions may smooth out minor differences from sentence to sentence and speaker to speaker when they all have the same accent, but you get the idea. Chuck Entz (talk) 18:53, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

Well I sure have learned something new today, which will probably be useful to me in the future. Thanks a lot for this detailed explanation, and for the welcome as well! Johnn Francis (talk) 03:02, 15 January 2023 (UTC)