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.
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.
Symbols Stress is indicated by a digit immediately following a vowel. Auxiliary symbols are identical in 1- and 2-letter codes. In 2-letter notation, segments are separated by a space.
+ Vowels ARPABET IPA Example(s) 1-letter 2-letter a AA ~ balm, bot (with father–bother merger) @ AE bat A AH buck c AO caught, story W AW bout x AX comma AXR letter, forward Y AY bite E EH bet R ER bird, foreword e EY bait I IH bit X IX roses, rabbit i IY beat o OW boat O OY boy U UH book u UW boot UX dude
+ Consonants ARPABET IPA Example 1-letter 2-letter b B buy C CH China d D die D DH thy F DX butter L EL bottle M EM rhythm N EN button f F fight g G guy h HH or H high J JH jive k K kite l L lie m M my n N nigh G NX or NG sing NX winter p P pie Q Q uh-oh r R rye s S sigh S SH shy t T tie T TH thigh v V vie w W wise H WH why (without wine–whine merger) y Y yacht z Z zoo Z ZH pleasure
+ Stress and auxiliary symbols 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
TIMIT In TIMIT, the following symbols are used in addition to the ones listed above:
Symbol IPA Example Description AX-H suspect Devoiced BCL obtain closure DCL width closure ENG Washington Syllabic GCL dogtooth closure HV ahead Voiced KCL doctor closure PCL accept closure TCL catnip closure PAU Pause EPI Epenthetic silence H# Begin/end marker
See also Comparison of ASCII encodings of the International Phonetic Alphabet SAMPA, language-specific X-SAMPA, encoding the whole International Phonetic Alphabet Pronunciation respelling for English
References
External links The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary