ARPABET

ARPABET (also spelled ARPAbet) is a set of phonetic transcription codes developed by Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a part of their Speech Understanding Research project in the 1970s. It represents phonemes and allophones of General American English with distinct sequences of ASCII characters. Two systems, one representing each segment with one character (alternating upper- and lower-case letters) and the other with one or two (case-insensitive), were devised, the latter being far more widely adopted.^[1]

This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

ARPABET has been used in several speech synthesizers, including Computalker for the S-100 system, SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) for the Atari 8-bit computers and Commodore 64, the Say utility shipped with the Amiga, TextAssist for the PC and Speakeasy from Intelligent Artefacts which used the Votrax SC-01 speech synthesiser IC. It is also used in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. A revised version of ARPABET is used in the TIMIT corpus.^[1]

[1]

ARPABET		IPA	Example(s)
1-letter	2-letter	IPA	Example(s)
a	AA	ɑ~ɒ	balm, bot (with father–bother merger)
@	AE	æ	bat
A	AH	ʌ	buck
c	AO	ɔ	caught, story
W	AW	aʊ	bout
x	AX	ə	comma
N/a	AXR^[3]	ɚ	letter, forward
Y	AY	aɪ	bite
E	EH	ɛ	bet
R	ER	ɝ	bird, foreword
e	EY	eɪ	bait
I	IH	ɪ	bit
X	IX	ɨ	roses, rabbit
i	IY	i	beat
o	OW	oʊ	boat
O	OY	ɔɪ	boy
U	UH	ʊ	book
u	UW	u	boot
N/a	UX^[3]	ʉ	dude

ARPABET		IPA	Example
1-letter	2-letter	IPA	Example
b	B	b	buy
C	CH	tʃ	China
d	D	d	die
D	DH	ð	thy
F	DX	ɾ	butter
L	EL	l̩	bottle
M	EM	m̩	rhythm
N	EN	n̩	button
f	F	f	fight
g	G	ɡ	guy
h	HH or H^[3]	h	high
J	JH	dʒ	jive
k	K	k	kite
l	L	l	lie
m	M	m	my
n	N	n	nigh
G	NX or NG^[3]	ŋ	sing
N/a	NX^[3]	ɾ̃	winter
p	P	p	pie
Q	Q	ʔ	uh-oh
r	R	ɹ	rye
s	S	s	sigh
S	SH	ʃ	shy
t	T	t	tie
T	TH	θ	thigh
v	V	v	vie
w	W	w	wise
H	WH	ʍ	why (without wine–whine merger)
y	Y	j	yacht
z	Z	z	zoo
Z	ZH	ʒ	pleasure

AB	Description
0	No stress
1	Primary stress
2	Secondary stress
3...	Tertiary and further stress
-	Silence
!	Non-speech segment
+	Morpheme boundary
/	Word boundary
#	Utterance boundary
:	Tone group boundary
:1 or .	Falling or declining juncture
:2 or ?	Rising or internal juncture
:3 or .	Fall-rise or non-terminal juncture

Symbol	IPA	Example	Description
AX-H	ə̥	suspect	Devoiced /ə/
BCL	b̚	obtain	[b] closure
DCL	d̚	width	[d] closure
ENG	ŋ̍	Washington	Syllabic [ŋ]
GCL	ɡ̚	dogtooth	[ɡ] closure
HV	ɦ	ahead	Voiced /h/
KCL	k̚	doctor	[k] closure
PCL	p̚	accept	[p] closure
TCL	t̚	catnip	[t] closure
PAU	N/a	N/a	Pause
EPI	N/a	N/a	Epenthetic silence
H#	N/a	N/a	Begin/end marker

ARPABET

Symbols

TIMIT

See also

References

External links

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