I am confusing with phonetic symbols between /iə/ and /ɪə/. I know that /ɪə/ is a diphthong vowel, combining between /ɪ/ and schwa /ə/. But what is /iə/? Is it /i:/+/ə/? How different are they pronounced?
Learn English – /iə/ in English
morphologyphoneticsphonologypronunciation
Related Solutions
For Cambridge Dictionaries Online, at least, part of the answer may be to do with syllabification. First note that the transcriptions are phonological, as indicated by the slashes //, not phonetic, which would be indicated by square brackets []. That means that the phonetic realization might be identical even if the phonological representation is different (for any given speaker).
The generalization seems to be that the sound is represented as a /j/ if it is in the onset of a syllable, but as /i/ elsewhere. For instance:
- pantheon: /ˈpæn.θi.ən/
- grammarian: /ɡrəˈmeə.ri.ən/
- Paralympian: /ˌpær.əˈlɪm.pi.ən/
vs.
- Italian: /ɪˈtæl.jən/ (with /-i.ən/ given as an alternative)
- minion: /ˈmɪn.jən/
- onion: /ˈʌn.jən/
and
- galleon: /ˈɡæl.i.ən/
- bullion: /ˈbʊl.i.ən/
- Euclidean: /juˈklɪd.i.ən/
- Syrian: /ˈsɪr.i.ən/
In the first set of words, the sound is not in the onset of the syllable, but in its nucleus. In English syllabification, the nucleus must be vocalic. In the second set, the sound is in the onset. Since in English syllable onsets must be consonantal, it has to be represented as /j/. In the third set, the /i/ is in a syllable on its own, and hence is the nucleus of the syllable.
Words with only one consonant before the /i/ or /j/ can be divided into either two syllables or three (as /ɪˈtæl.jən/ vs. /ɪˈtæl.i.ən/ shows). Words with two consonants before the sound can only be divided into three syllables with /i/ as nucleus, since English syllabification prefers to balance consonants across syllables in certain ways. So /ˈpænθ.jən/ is not a well-formed syllabification.
As for whether there is a genuine contrast between champion and million, I think there may be in some instances. I can pronounce the latter either as /ˈmɪl.i.ən/, with three syllables, or as /ˈmɪl.jən/, with two, but /ˈtʃæmp.jən/ just sounds wrong to me. YMMV, though.
Consonants, as Ladefoged has said, are just different ways of starting and ending vowels. The difference you are hearing are the two different ways of ending the vowel. Bringing the tongue dorsum up to make a complete closure with the velum is a relatively slow gesture that changes the resonant properties of your mouth.
Raising the tongue dorsum up towards the velum causes the second and third formants to move towards each other (phoneticians call it the "velar pinch"), and because the gesture is slow, you can easily perceive the change in the way the vowel sounds during the time it takes for the closure to be made (the pure vowel should have steady formant if pronounced carefully). The gesture for making /t/ is done with the tongue tip, and it is faster and produces less of a disturbance on the vowel. It produces less of a disturbance because vowels are made with the tongue body, which can stay still while the tongue tip flicks up.
However, many English speakers draw their vocal cords together as they form a word-final /t/, creating a creak in the voice or even a complete stop in airflow (unrelated to the stoppage caused by the tongue tip gesture).
Make a sound spectrograph using praat and you will see more vividly the differences you are hearing. The waveform itself is normally not useful except for illustrating sound intensity.
Best Answer
Take, for example, the word beer. Here we would use the transcription /bɪə/ in Southern Standard British English (SSBE). Notice that this word has two phonemes, the consonant /b/ and the vowel /ɪə/. That vowel—often referred to as the NEAR vowel—is a single vowel. We use two symbols to represent it because this vowel changes quality as we say it. It starts of with a KIT-like quality, [ɪ] and finishes with a schwa-like quality, [ə]. Notice that we don't treat it as two distinct vowels, but as a single unit, even though we use two symbols to represent it.
In English we also talk about the HAPPY vowel (the vowel at the end of the word happy). For most younger speakers this is an allophone of the FLEECE vowel which occurs in unstressed, unchecked syllables (an unchecked syllable is just a syllable with no consonant at the end of it). For other speakers this is an allophone of the KIT vowel. Because this vowel may be considered one of either /ɪ/ or /i:/ by different speakers, and because it occurs at the end of such a large number of English words, we use the convention of representing this occurrence of the vowel using a single < i > with no length marks in transcriptions of SSBE. (Whether this is more confusing than helpful, is open to some debate. John Wells remarked in one of his blogs that "it seemed like a good idea at the time"!).
Now, consider the verb copy. The normal transcription for this in SSBE would be /kɒp.i/. At the end of that transcription, we see an occurrence of /i/. Now we can add an -er suffix onto this verb to turn it into the noun copier. In speech, this suffix is realised as a single schwa, /ə/. So the transcription you'll see in many dictionaries for this word will be /ˈkɒp.i.ə/. This, for example, is the transcription given by the Cambridge English Dictionary. And also by John Wells's Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Notice that, according to this transcription, there are two distinct phonemes at the end of this word /i/ and /ə/, not a single diphthong /ɪə/. This also fits neatly with the morphology of the word.
The use of /i/ to represent a vowel in positions where the FLEECE-KIT distinction, iː vs. ɪ, is neutralized is a relatively modern innovation, and fifty years ago, nearly all phoneticians were using /ɪə/ in words like copier. Indeed, this transcription is still used by some dictionaries. This however, gives the rather unsatisfactory result of a morpheme being represented by half of a vowel (urgh!).
Note: The capitalised words FLEECE, KIT, HAPPY and so forth, are the keywords from John Wells's lexical sets. They can be thought of as names for the vowels concerned (so FLEECE is used to refer to the phoneme /i:/ and so forth). The HAPPY vowel refers, of course, to the second vowel in the word happy. Wells couldn't use a one syllable word there because this vowel only occurs in unstressed, unchecked syllables—any single syllable word would inevitably be pronounced with stress in its citation form and therefore with a regular full length FLEECE vowel.