Toward a Transcription Standard for Lyric Italian

Toward a Transcription Standard for Lyric Italian Leslie De'Ath (bio) LANGUAGE AND DICTION PHONEMIC VS. PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION In 2006, I made a plea for distinguishing between phonemic transcription and phonetic transcription in lyric diction discourse—a standard that had been understood in general linguistics for several decades.1 For the reader's convenience, I review this here. The distinction between a broad phonemic transcription (//) and a narrow phonetic one ([ ]) is the absence of allophonic differences in the former, and the presence of same in the latter. Chapallaz states, … the foreign learner who, in using transcription as a visual aid to memory, often needs to be reminded of certain allophones which he might otherwise forget to pronounce correctly … A narrow transcription has a further advantage in that it shows how a word may be differently pronounced in a sentence from the way it is pronounced in isolation.2 Traditional lyric transcriptions do a combination of broad and narrow transcription, enclosed between phonetic transcription brackets, but without specifying all allophonic distinctions. A good example in Italian is the letter <r>. The notation /r/ refers to the phoneme in Italian, which embraces all the possible specific articulations that the letter <r> may have. Depending on environment, /r/ may be realized as a single-flap [ɾ]. Or it may need to be trilled (rolled). Such gemination occurs at syllable junctures [r.r], and is often notated with the length mark [rːr]. All other environments of <r> in Italian have a latitude in their degree of gemination, which will vary according to speaker, singer, speed of utterance, level of formality of the occasion, and other factors. The relationship between the phoneme /r/ and its allophones is found in Table 1. When choosing symbols for the allophones of a phoneme, linguists typically choose the most common allophone as the symbol for the phoneme—in this case [r]. The articulation [r] is the most frequently encountered environment of /r/ in Italian, so it is the symbol chosen for the Italian phoneme. This results in considerable confusion. It also happens to be the alphabetic letter, which is why it is important to distinguish alphabetic symbol <r> from phoneme /r/, from the articulation [r], all of which employ the same glyph. Each language will have its own distribution of the phoneme /r/, or any other phoneme, as it is uniquely realized in that language. Unlike English, French, or German, Italian /rː/ is a separate phoneme from /r/. A simple application of the minimal pair test, as in caro/carro, proves [End Page 89] Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. that consonant length is phonemic in Italian. That is, all geminate consonants are phonemically as well as phonetically distinct. Distinctiveness of length almost doubles the number of consonant phonemes of Italian, from 20 to 35. It is standard practice among musicians to notate Italian <r> as [r] in transcriptions of vocal texts, for all environments including intervocalic, where [ɾ] is the required articulation. This does not drill down to the level of detail that operatic and concert performance expects. It is understood that the performer knows the environments in which each allophone of <r> is to be used, and will apply it accordingly. Trilled <rr> is generally indicated in vocal repertoire transcriptions as [rr] or [rːr]. That is, transcriptions distinguish the phonemes /r/ and /rː/, but do not distinguish between the two allophones of /r/. This lack of specificity may be fine for the singer experienced in Italian, but not for the student. Thus, it is the recommendation of this article to distinguish [r] and [ɾ] henceforth in all lyric IPA transcriptions. One can employ either a flap [ɾ] or a trill [r] with a varying number of flaps in the two environments mentioned in Table 1 (trionfo, fortuna), without changing the word. In other words, the variant articulations exist in free variation. This is not true of /r/ and /rr/, which are separate phonemes in complementary distribution. But by employing [r] in brackets for both, one superimposes broad phonemic notation /r/ within a narrow phonetic transcription ([ ]). For trilled /rː/, the narrow transcription possibilities are [rːr], [rː], or [r.r]. The first is the most commonly...