{"id":2578,"date":"2010-12-26T22:00:18","date_gmt":"2010-12-27T04:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/?p=2578"},"modified":"2016-11-25T08:23:50","modified_gmt":"2016-11-25T14:23:50","slug":"the-vowels-of-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/archives\/2578","title":{"rendered":"The Vowels of Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my 2007 article in Birding <\/em>magazine<\/a>, I distinguished three methods of describing a bird sound in words: transliteration, analogy, and analytic description.\u00a0 But the article was so focused on promoting the third of those methods that it gave the other two short shrift.\u00a0 I was particularly scathing in my condemnation of phonetic transcription, bemoaning its “limited capacity to carry information,” with “little or no regard to pitch, tone quality, variation, or any other crucial components of birdsong.”<\/p>\n

However, the more I study phonetic transcriptions, the more I become convinced that they tend to be more informative than I thought.\u00a0 In fact, even though the people writing the transcriptions may be completely unaware of it, their choice of vowels almost always follows a consistent set of rules for indicating the pitch and inflection of the bird sound<\/strong>.\u00a0 Consonants are another story, but the consistency of the vowel rules is extraordinary once you learn to see it.<\/p>\n

The first principle is this: different vowels represent different pitches in bird sounds.\u00a0 The following list arranges common (American) English vowels — plus the semivowels r, w, and y — from highest transcription pitch (at the top of the list) to lowest transcription pitch (at the bottom of the list).<\/p>\n