Nine more settings in Spanish phonetic translator
We recently updated our Spanish phonetic translator.
Ever since we found this book Manual de fonética y fonología españolas, our goal was to make the Spanish phonetic transcription as detailed and precise as possible. So the transcription obtained with our translator included a lot of diacritic symbols and rare phonetic symbols to show all possible allophones for some phonemes. And for some people that was too much. They needed something simpler.
So here are the updates:
- The allophones for the phonemes /e/, /l, /m/, /n/, /p/, /t/ and /k/ are now optional. You can turn them on and off. By default, the main phoneme is shown and not the allophones. That means the default transcription is phonemic.
- We introduce the support for the aspiration of the phoneme /s/. As you may know in some Latin American countries, such as Argentina, this phoneme is often aspirated. So for example, the word este is pronounced as [ˈɛh.te].
- You can now choose how semivowels /i̯/ and /u̯/ are displayed in diphthongs. Some dictionaries use the glides /j/ and /w/ in such cases. For example, the word hay is transcribed as /haj/.
- As you may know the phoneme /s/ when followed by a voiced consonant becomes voiced too. In different sources the word mismo may be transcribed as /ˈmizmo/, /ˈmismo/ or /ˈmis̬mo/. Now you can choose any of the above variants.
- We introduced a new setting that allows you to choose the allophone for the phoneme /ʝ/. In some Spanish speaking countries the word ella may be pronounced as /ˈeʒa/, /ˈeʤa/ or /ˈeʃa/.
We would like to express our gratitude to Miguel Lescano from Ecuador. This person compiled a very detailed list of suggestions for our Spanish phonetic converter. We used his suggestions as a blueprint when we were working on this update. Thank you, Miguel!
Tags: Spanish, Spanish dialects, IPA translator, Spanish pronunciation
