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KENYON AND KNOTT

(Redirected from A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English)
'Kenyon and Knott' is the informal name for ''A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English'', first published in 1944 by John Samuel Kenyon and Thomas A. Knott. It provides a phonemic transcription of General American pronunciations of words, using symbols largely corresponding to those of the IPA.
Kenyon and Knott use a broad transcription rather than a narrow one. For example, the long ''o'' vowel of "toe", which is a diphthong in open syllables in most American accents, is represented by the single symbol [o], rather than as it would be represented in a narrow transcription.
Deviations from the IPA found in Kenyon and Knott are mostly made for typographical convenience:

★ The symbol (a small capital U) is used instead of for the vowel of ''foot'' and the second part of the diphthong of ''mouth''.

★ The "looptail g"
is used instead of the "opentail g"
of the IPA.

★ The symbol is used instead of to denote the alveolar approximant of American English.

★ The markers for primary and secondary stress tilt slightly toward the center rather than being absolutely vertical. In other words, they look more like and / than like | and |.

★ The colon [:] is used in place of IPA to indicate length, although length is rarely marked in KK.

★ In foreign words, a barred g () is used instead of to indicate a voiced velar fricative.
One principal application of Kenyon and Knott's system is to teach American English pronunciation to non-native speakers of English. It is commonly used for this purpose, not without controversy, in Taiwan.
Many of the pronunciations in Kenyon and Knott seem antiquated today and dictionaries such as ''Longman Pronunciation Dictionary'', ed. John C. Wells, Longman Group Ltd. 1990, ISBN 0-582-05383-8, have replaced it, providing more contemporary pronunciations.

Contents
Reference

Reference



A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English, , John S., Kenyon, Merriam-Webster, 1944/1953, ISBN 0-87779-047-7

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