Why are there 4 ambiguous phonetic symbols in IPA representations of English?

Solution 1:

Actually, it's "worse" than that. Nearly all the vowels of English have more than one possible representation in IPA. For example:

• The vowel sound of the word "kit" can be written as [ɪ] or [i]
• The vowel sound in "lot" in British English can be written as [ɒ] or [ɔ]
• The vowel sound in "fleece" can be written as [i], [iː], [ij] or [ɪj]

• The vowel sound in "goose" can be written as [u], [uː], [uw], [ʉ], [ʉː], [ʉw] or [ɵw]

• The vowel sound in "choice" can be written as [ɔɪ], [oɪ], [ɔj] or [oj]

• The vowel sound in "face" can be written as [eɪ], [e], [ɛɪ], [ej] or [ɛj]

It's not really a matter of something special about the four cases that you mention. Quite simply, the IPA is not precise enough, and the phonetic positions of English vowels are not specific enough (variation in the realization of any particular vowel sound exists both between speakers and within the output of any individual speaker), for there to be a single unambiguous one-to-one mapping between English vowels and possible IPA representations. Therefore, consistency between different transcriptions is just a product of convention, and in fact different people have used different conventions for various reasons.

Some of the possible criteria that people have used to judge phonemic transcription conventions:

• phonetic accuracy: how close are the characters to the phonetic definitions for the IPA symbols?

• simplicity: how many unique characters are used in the transcription system? How many characters are used that are expected to be unfamiliar to people who are just starting to learn the system?

• symmetry: how well does the transcription reflect the phonological relationships between sounds, and the way sounds behave phonologically?

• redundancy: does the system distinguish different vowels in only one way (e.g. ɪ vs. i, or i vs. iː) or in two (e.g. ɪ vs. iː)? Are the vowels that occur in unstressed vowels identified with any of the vowels that occur in stressed syllables (e.g. is the vowel in "strut" transcribed the same way as the vowel at the end of the word "comma", since for most speakers, these do not contrast) or are reduced vowels transcribed with special symbols reserved for vowels in unstressed syllables?

• conservatism: how similar is the transcription system to transcription systems that have been used in the past?

Actually, the issue of "conservative" phonemic transcriptions that don't use the IPA letter that is closest to the usual modern phonetic realization of a phoneme doesn't only come up with regard to English. The transcription of Danish vowels is similarly problematic (with the symbol ɛ being used to represent a vowel that many speakers pronounce more like [e], and the symbol æ being used to represent a vowel that many speakers pronounce more like [ɛ]). There is at least one similar case in the transcription of French: the nasal vowel found in words like vin is conventionally transcribed as /ɛ̃/, even though for many speakers it has a noticeably different quality from non-nasal /ɛ/.

The following blog posts may be illuminating:

• "IPA transcription systems for English", by John Wells (KarlG's answer also links to this resource)

• "IPA vowel symbols for British English in dictionaries", by Jack Windsor Lewis

• "The British English Vowel System" by Geoff Lindsey -- an attempt proposal for a new system for transcribing Southern British English that Lindsey says more accurately indicates the phonetics used by most present-day speakers in this region

• A response to Lindsey's proposal on John Wells's blog (note that Wells talks about an earlier, slightly different version of Lindsey's transcription than the one you can see currently on Lindsey's site)

I would say the best way to learn more about English phonetics is to

• practice listening to the way various speakers pronounce the sounds

• get feedback about your own pronunciation from a good teacher, if you can,

• to learn about phonetic details, read* explanations from phoneticians. For example, the web sites I linked to have a number of additional posts about various aspects of pronunciation, and there are other good sites like Alex Rotatori's blog.

  *(Or listen, I suppose--there seem to be a number of Youtube videos and so on nowadays that cover these topics, although I don't have much experience with using videos to learn about English pronunciation so I can't give any specific suggestions.)

As Windsor Lewis says in the post I linked to above, the kind of transcriptions you find in places like dictionaries are mainly for telling you the distribution of phonemes in a word--they won't tell you exactly how to pronounce a word in terms of phonetics.

Solution 2:

Within one language community, the IPA may be simplified for dictionary entries. The /r/ is a classic example. In strict IPA usage, it is the sign for an r sound with a short trill, as in Italian Roma, but English sources routinely use this sign for any standard pronunciation of r.

In this recording from the late 1920s of John Gielgud delivering a speech from Othello, the actor uses the tapped /ɾ/ in very, the retroflex standard /ɹ/ in dearest, and initial, trilled /r/ in several words. These would all likely be transcribed as /r/ because the differences are either positional variants or dictated by the stage pronunciation of the day.

In contrast to German and French, English does not need to distinguish between two open, unrounded, middle vowels, one of which generations of schoolchildren on both sides of the Atlantic have learned (and learnt) to call short e. In other words, your “historical reasons” boil down to habit, custom, and a reluctance to use symbols outside the Latin alphabet, including standing one on its head like /ɹ/.

When Oxford Press took on Clive Upton as a pronunciation consultant for its dictionaries for native speakers, he introduced a more truly international method of transcription by insisting that English short e be rendered as ɛ. This was adopted by the Concise Oxford Dictionary in 1995. Moreover, both sources for dictionary.com, the American Random House and the British Collins, both render shred as /ʃrɛd/.

John Wells of University College London comes up with a rather odd objection:

In some languages, notably French and German, one needs to distinguish two e-type vowels, a closer one (IPA [e]) and an opener one (IPA [ɛ]). The English bet vowel lies between them, but is more similar to [ɛ], which is why Upton prefers that symbol. However, from the point of view of an EFL learner whose native language is, say, Japanese or Greek — languages that have no such distinction — it is quite unnecessary to distinguish the "[e]" at the starting point of the face diphthong from the "[ɛ]" of bet. And following IPA principles, if we are to choose just one of the two symbols we should prefer the simpler one.

Wells does not mention why he would favor EFL learners from Japan and Greece over those from Germany or France except that it is “simpler,” i.e., using the standard Latin e rather than an epsilon so it looks like the short e of old.