How do you represent phonology from other languages?

Question

a) How do you provide the lexical underlying form of a language?
b) How do you explain the phonological process involved?
c) How do you show the internal representation?

This has nothing to do with IPA but with representing rules involved in different languages

Answer 1

The International Phonetic Alphabet is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists. It is intended to provide a standardized, accurate and unique way of representing the sounds of any spoken language, and is used, often on a day-to-day basis, by linguists, speech pathologists and therapists, foreign language teachers, lexicographers and translators. In its unextended form (as of 2005) it has approximately 107 base symbols and 55 modifiers.

Answer 2

Phonological representation is done in one fairly standard way for all languages. The underlying phonemes are written between slashes usually with symbols from the IPA, so that the underlying form of English "pot" is /pat/, the underlying form of Hungarian "kutya" (dog) is /kuca/, the underlying form of Greek "agapao" (love) is /agapa/, etc. These are the lexical underlying forms. Phonological rules are usually written with a combination of phonemes in slashes and distinctive feature notation (I can't show that here because of font limitations). I'm not exactly sure what the question means by "internal representation" unless that is another way of talking about distinctive features.

EDIT: OMG, DrShorty, mentioning Optimality Theory should be done in hushed tones like you would talk about Black Magic to the pope :p I HATE Optimality Theory, it's just Generative Phonology with ordered columns instead of ordered rules :p LOL

Answer 3

Taivo got it. If you know words like "lexical" and "phonology", I'm kind of surprised that you don't already know the answers to these questions. Maybe if you just stay in your linguistics class, these questions will be answered for you later in the term.

By the way, the most current theories of phonology don't usually explain phonology by "rules". So, again, stay in your linguistics classes, and your questions will be answered. (But if you're dying to know, you can read about optimality theory.)