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• The symbols used to represent the phonemics of RP are those of the International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA): 44 different symbols (24 consonants and 20 vowels)
• Vowels
• The short of transcription of vowels used here is called comparative phonemic
because it allows comparison with vowels of other languages (it seeks to be
phonetically explicit for the purpose of comparing English with other language
(Crutteden, p.97). It uses vowel symbols which are to some extent indicative of the
usual qualities of those vowels. Thus the short vowels are given different symbols
from the long vowels in order to reflect the fact that quality and length are assumed to
be equally important in maintaining the contrast between vowels.
• Consonants
• Two principles:
• Using the phonetic symbols of the most frequent allophones
• Replacing non-Roman symbols arising from a) by roman symbols where these are
not already in use, e.g. the most common allophone of the phoneme at the beginning
of red is /ɺ/ but the phonemic transcription replaces /ɺ/ by /r/ (Roman symbol).
• It is used phonemes wit two symbols, like /ʧ/ or /ʤ/.