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3.2.Phonetic transcriptions

The speakers all read aloud translations of the same text, namely the fable ‘The North Wind and the Sun’. This text has often been used for phonetic investigations; see for example The International Phonetic Association (1949 and 1999) where the same text has been transcribed in a large number of different languages. A database of Norwegian transcriptions of the same text has been compiled by J. Almberg (see note 3). As mentioned in the previous section, we only used the transcription of Lillehammer from this database. In future, we would like to investigate the relations between Norwegian and other Germanic varieties, using the greater part of the transcriptions in this database. Therefore, our new transcriptions should be as comparable as possible with the existing Norwegian ones. To ensure this, our point of departure was the Norwegian text. This text consists of 91 words (58 different words) which were used to calculate Levenshtein distances (see Section 4). The text was translated word for word from Norwegian into each of the Germanic language varieties. We are aware of the fact that this may result in less natural speech: sentences were often syntactically wrong. However, it guarantees that for each of the 58 words a translation was obtained. The words were not recorded as a word list, but as sentences. Therefore in the new recordings words appear in a similar context as in the Norwegian varieties. This ensures that the influence of assimilation phenomena on the results is as comparable as possible.

Most new recordings were transcribed phonetically by one of the authors. To ensure consistency with the existing Norwegian transcriptions, our new transcriptions were corrected by J. Almberg, the transcriber of the Norwegian recordings. In most cases we incorporated the corrections. The transcription of the Faroese language was completely done by J. Almberg. The transcriptions were made in IPA as well as in X-SAMPA (eXtended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet). This is a machine-readable phonetic alphabet, which is also readable by people. Basically, it maps IPA-symbols to the 7 bit printable ASCII/ANSI characters_¹³. The transcriptions were used to calculate the linguistic distances between varieties (see Section 4).