car, not the vowels in cat, cake, or care. Those have their
own symbols.
Other phonemic symbols, like /ə/, /θ/, and /ŋ/, are not
found in ordinary English spelling. They’ve been added to
represent sounds that didn’t have satisfactory spellings in the
regular alphabet. Box 2.2 shows phonemic symbols for all the
sounds of English. Touch the symbols in the chart to hear the
sounds they represent.
There are actually several di"erent versions of the phonemic
alphabet that are used to represent the sounds of English.
They’re all variations of the International Phonetic Alphabet,
or IPA, a system of symbols developed in the late 1800s to
try to represent all the sounds that are used in human
languages. Variations of IPA are used in many textbooks and
dictionaries to represent pronunciation. Although these
alphabets are often referred to as “IPA,” most of them are not
exactly like “real” IPA. They’ve been changed a little to make
them !t the needs of language learners and teachers better.232.2: The Phonemes of American EnglishTouch a phonemic symbol to hear the sound it represents.Typing Phonetic/Phonemic Symbols
Some “regular” fonts, like Times New Roman and Arial, actually
include many of the IPA symbols, like æ, ŋ, and θ. It’s just not
easy to find them or know how to type them.
You can download free IPA fonts for Windows and Mac at the
website of SIL International (formerly called Summer Institute of
Linguistics): http://scripts.sil.org/FontDownloadsIPA Their
Charis SIL is used in this book.
Type It (http://ipa.typeit.org/) is a website that lets you type IPA
symbols or letters from languages that don’t use the Latin
alphabet, then copy and paste them into a document.
Both Mac and Windows computers have utilities that let you
see what keys to press to type unusual characters. I also
recommend an inexpensive program for Mac called PopChar,
available from Ergonis Software: http://www.ergonis.com/
products/popcharx/. If you often type IPA symbols or any other
unusual font characters, it is absolutely worth the €19.99 price.