Sound-spelling Discrepancies

There are five principal reason for the discrepancy between the written representation of many English words and their actual pronunciation:

1. English orthography had several diverse origins with different spelling conventions:

1. The system that had evolved in Wessex before the Norman Invasion of 1066 gave us such spellings as ee for the sound in words like deed and seen.

2. The system that was overlaid on the Old English system by the Normans, with their French orthographic customs, gaves us such spellings as queen (for the earlier cween) and thief (for earlier theef).

3. A Dutch influence from Caxton, the first English printer, who was born in England but lived in Holland for thirty years, gave us such spellings as ghost (which replaced gost) and ghastly (which replaced gastlic).

4. During the Renaissance, an attempt to reform spelling along etymological (that is, historically earlier) lines gaves us debt for earlier det or dette and salmon for earlier samon.

2. A spelling system established several hundred years ago is still used for a language that continues to change and develop its spoken form. Thus the initial k in knock, know, knee, and certain other words was once pronounced, as was the gh in knight and thought, among others. As to vowels, change in progress when the system was developing and continuing change in pronunciation have led to such matched spelling for mismatched pronunciations as beat/great and food/foot.

3. English is spoken differently in different countries throughout the world (and in different regions within a single country), despite a relatively uniform standard for written orthography. Though this orthographic uniformity certainly facilitates international communication, it also increases the disparity between the way English is written and spoken in any given place.

4. Words (and their meaningful subparts) alter their pronunciation depending on the adjacent sounds and stress patterns. For example, in electric the second c represents the sound [k] as in kiss, but in electricity it represents the sound [s] as in silly. Compare also the pronunciation of i in senile (pronounced like the i of I'll) with its pronunciation in senility (in which it has the i of ill).

5. Spoken forms differ from one set of circumstances to anotherfor example, in formal and informal situations. While some degree of such variation is incorporated into the written system (do not/don't; was/'twas), there is relatively little tolerance for such spelling variation as gonna ('going to'), wanna ('want to'), gotcha ('got you'), and jeat yet? ('did you eat yet?'). Such variable spelling of variable speech would force readers to determine the pronunciation of the represented speech before arriving at meaning, instead of directly for meaning, as adult readers normally do, with the necessity of silent pronunciation.

Articulators above the larynxAll the sounds we make we speak are the result of muscles contracting the muscles in the chest that we use for breathing produce the flow of air that is needed for almost all speech sounds; muscles in the larynx produce many different modifications in the flow of air from the chest to the mouth. After passing through the larynx the air goes through what we call the vocal tract, which ends at the mouth and nostrils. Here the air from the lungs escapes into the atmosphere. We have a large and complex set of muscles that can produce changes in shape of the vocal tract, and in order to learn how the sounds of speech are produced it is necessary to become familiar with the different parts of the vocal tract. These different parts are called articulators and the study of them is called articulatory phonetics.

Fig. 1 is a diagram that is used frequently in the study of phonetics. It represent s the human head, seen from the side, displayed as though it had been cut in half. You will need to look at it carefully as the articulators are described.

i) The pharynx is a tube which begin just above the larynx. It is about 7cm long in women and about 8cm in men, and its top end it is divided into two, one part being the back of the mouth and the other being the beginning of the way through the nasal cavity. ii) The velum or soft palate is seen in the diagram in a position that allows air to pass through the mouth. Yours is probably in that position now, but often in speech it is raised so that air cannot escape through the nose. The other important thing about the velum is that it is the one of the articulators that can be touched by the tongue. When we make the sounds k and g the tongue is in contact with the lower side of the velum, and we call these velar consonants. iii) The hard palate is often called the roof of the mouth. You can feel its smooth curved surface with your tongue.

iv) The alveolar ridge is between the top front teeth and the hard palate. You can feel its shape with your tongue. Its surface is really much rougher than it feels and is covered with little ridges. Sounds made with the tongue touching here such as t and d are called alveolar.v) Fig. 2 shows the tongue on a larger scale with these parts shown: tip, blade, front, back, and root.

vi) The tongue is in contact with the upper side teeth for many speech sounds. Sounds made with the tongue touching the front teeth are called dental.

vii) The lips are important in speech. They can be pressed together (when we produce the sounds p, b), brought into contact with the teeth (as in f, v) or rounded to produce the lip-shape for vowels like u: . sounds in which the lips are in contact with each other are called bilabial, which those with lip-to-teeth contact are called labiodentals.

Vowels and ConsonantIf we say that the different between vowels and consonants is a difference in the way that they are produced, there will inevitably be some cases of uncertainty of disagreement ; this is problem that cannot be avoided. It is possible to establish two groups of sound(vowels and consonants) in another way. Consider English words beginning with the sound h, what sounds come next after this h? we find that most of the sound we normally think as vowels can follow(for example e in the word hen)but practically none of the sounds we class as consonants.

We need to know in what ways vowels differ from each other. The first matter to consider is the shape and position of the tongue. It is usual to simplify the very complex possibilities by describing just two things: firstly the vertical distance between the upper surface of the tongue and the palate. And secondly the part of the tongue, between front and back, which is raised highest. Lets look at some examples:i) Make a vowel like the i: in the English word see and look in a mirror, if you tilt your head back slightly you will able to see that the tongue is held up close to the roof of the mouth. Now make an vowel as in the word cat. And notice how the distance between the surface of the tongue and the roof of the mouth is now much greater. The difference between i: and is a difference of tongue height and we would describe i: as arelatively close vowel and as a relatively open vowel. Tongue height can be changed by moving the tongue up or down or moving the lower jaw up or down. Usually we use some combination of the two sorts of movement. It is usually found simpler to illustrate tongue shapes for vowels as if tongue heights was altered by tongue movement alone without any accompanying jaw movement. So, we would illustrate the tongue height difference between i: and as in Fig.3.ii) In making the two vowels describe above, it is the front part of the tongue that is raised. We could therefore describe i: and as comparatively front vowels. By changing the shape of the tongue we can produce vowels in which a different part of the tongue is the highest point. A vowel in which the back of the tongue is the highest point is called a back vowel.

The idea of cardinal vowels

So far, we have been treating the IPA vowel symbols as standing for the sounds that occur in certain English words.

This doesn't make it very easy for us to compare vowels between languages or dialects. How do we write the difference between monophthongal [o] in Winnipeg English and a monophthongal [o] in Scottish English or a monophtongal [o] in Italian?

The IPA symbols for vowels are better seen as similar to international standards for things like colour names. "Red" paint has to be of a certain hue and intensity, otherwise modifiers have to be added: "dull brick red". Similarly, the symbol [o] refers to a vowel made with the tongue body in a relatively exact place (and which will therefore have the formants at certain frequencies). A very narrow transcription would record any deviation from this place.

So the symbol [] does not stand for the vowel in English father. It stands for the vowel that is the furthest back and the lowest possible vowel in the vowel space (the vowel with the highest F1 and the closest F2 to F1). Period. Canadian English just happens to have the vowel in father very close to this position. When we make statements about other dialects, for example, when we say that the typical pronunciation of the vowel of father in the northern U.S. is more front than [], we aren't saying that the Canadian pronunciation is more deserving of the symbol [] because it is somehow better, we are merely saying that the northern U.S. pronunciation is not in the lowest, backest part of the vowel space.

The idea of cardinal vowels originated with Daniel Jones.

The cardinal vowel chart organizes the vowel space between the two most extreme tongue body positions: high front [i] and low back [].

The high/low dimension is divided into four equally spaced levels. These correspond to the vowels we have been describing as:

1. high tense

2. mid tense

3. mid lax

4. low

The four back cardinal vowels are [u], [o], [], and [].

The equal spacing between the height levels can be determined articulatorily (make your tongue body move in four equal steps from high to low) or acoustically (divide the F1 dimension into four levels from lowest to highest). Jones' original proposal only considered the articulatory definition.

Other vowels are placed on the vowel chart using these cardinal vowels as landmarks.

The eight vowels seen so far are called the primary cardinal vowels. The secondary cardinal vowels are obtained by using the opposite lip-rounding on each primary cardinal vowel. The primary and secondary cardinal vowels are often referred to by a number as well as by their symbols. Short Vowels

English has a large number of vowel sounds, the first ones to be examined are short vowels. The symbols of these short vowels are , e, , , , . Short vowels are only relatively short. Each vowels is described in relation to the cardinal vowels.

Consonant Chart

The IPA features 58 standard consonant symbols, only a fraction of which are used in any given language. For this reason, I will not describe every consonant here. Rather, this guide defines the phrases used on the top and left-hand side of the standard IPA consonant chart:

The top row of phrases on this chart refer to the Consonant positions: that is, what part of the mouth or throat is used to create the consonant. The phrases on the left side of the chart are the manners of articulation of those consonants: that is, the type of sound that is created.

Here are some definitions of the phrases used on this chart:

CONSONANT POSITIONS

Bilabial: Made with the lipsEnglish Example: b in bed

Labiodental: Made with the bottom lip and the top teethEnglish Example: v in very

Dental: Made with the tip of the tongue and the top teethEnglish Example: th in thing

Alveolar: Made with the tip of the tongue and the area just behind the top teethEnglish Example: t in Tom

Post-Alveolar: Made with the tip of the tongue and the are just behind where the alveolar consonats are pronouncedEnglish Example: sh in short

Retroflex: Made with the tip of the tongue curved backward behind the alveolar ridge.English Examples: r in some dialects of American English

Palatal: Made with the tongue and the palate (see definition here)English Examples: y in yes

Velar: Made with the back of the tongue and the velum (the back of the mouth).English Examples: c in cat

Uvular: Made with the back of the tongue and the uvula.English Examples: No English examples. This is how the French r is usually made.

Pharyngeal: Made with the root (far back) of the tongue and the pharynx.English Examples: None. Arabic is the most well know language with Pharyngeals.

Glottal: Made with the glottis (see definition in the glossary). In essence glottal consonants are made with the throat.English Example: h in hat

Now lets look at a rundown of the manner of articulation or qualities that consonants can have:

CONSONANT QUALITIES

Plosive: Part of the vocal tract or mouth is closed, then air is released with a sharp burstEnglish Examples: p in pet, t in Tom

Nasal: Made with the back of the mouth closing up so that air passes through the nasal cavityEnglish Examples: n in nose, m in me

Trill: Made with part of the vocal tract or mouth fluttering rapidly.English Examples: None in standard English. The trilled r in Spanish and Italian.

Tap or Flap: Basically like it sounds. The consonant is made with the tongue quickly tapping some part of the mouth.English Examples: The t in better in American English. The r in Spanish cara

Fricative: Made by closing some part of the mouth or vocal tract and pushing air through a small opening.English Examples: The f in free, the s in silly

Lateral Fricative: Made with the tip of the tongue placed against the top teeth, and creating a fricative consonant using the sides of the mouth. If youre confused about this, dont worry. Its used in very few languages.

Lateral Approximant: Made with the tip of the tongue placed against the top teeth, and air coming out the small space between the sides of the tongue and the top of the mouth.English Example: l in lake

The best way to learn what sounds are which is to find the IPA symbol you dont know on the chart, then cross reference the manner of articulation with the consonant position.

Diphthong

Diphthongs are types of vowels where two vowel sounds are connected in a continuous, gliding motion. They are often referred to as gliding vowels. Most languages have a number of diphthongs, although that number varies widely, from only one or two to fifteen or more.

A vowel is a specific type of sound, characterized by a lack of full obstruction to the air flow. Vowels can be contrasted with consonants, where there is such an obstruction. As air comes out when you are speaking a consonant, there is a build up of pressure as the air flow is constricted. When speaking a vowel, there is no built up pressure, the sound is simply shaped by the position of the tongue.

Vowels are generally characterized by three different criteria: the position of the tongue in the mouth relative to the roof of the mouth (height), the position of the tongue in either the front or back of the mouth (backness), and the shape of the lips as the vowel sound is being made (roundedness). There are other things that may characterize vowels, but they are not very common in English things such as the position of the root of the tongue, for example, rarely affect English vowels, though they affect the vowels in many African languages.

When vowels come together, they may either be two distinct syllables, or may merge into one syllable. When they merge, they form what are known as diphthongs. If they stay separate they are simply two monophthongs. An example of two single syllable vowels can be seen in the word triage, in which the i and the a are both pronounced on their own. An example of a diphthong can be seen in the word mouse, in which the ou part of the word obviously consists of two distinct vowels, but there is no syllabic break between the two.

Diphthongs can usually be seen as having two distinct parts the nucleus, and the off-glide. The nucleus of the diphthong is the vowel that is most stressed, and forms the center of the sound, while the off-glide is the vowel which seems to flow into or off of the nucleus vowel.

There are eight English diphthongs altogether. To make diphthongs, your tongue, lips (and your jaw on occasions!) have to move. Sometimes the journey your tongue makes is short and very controlled; in some of the diphthongs, it has to move a long distance in your mouth, involving a lot of jaw movement too.

Learners find diphthongs difficult because producing them is a motor skill (like body building!) which has to be practised in order to obtain a good result. You cannot succeed in English pronunciation by understanding alone. The muscles you have to train to make English diphthongs are unlikely to be identical to those you use in production of vowel sounds in your first language.

The three major diphthongs in Standard English, which are known as phonemic diphthongs, are ai, aw, and oy. All three of these diphthongs are very common, and many people simply think of them as single vowels in some contexts. For example, in the English word ride, the i would be transcribed phonetically as ai. Although it appears as a single letter in our writing, it actually consists of two vowels if you say the word you should be able to hear the two. Similarly, the word how contains the diphthong aw at the end, and the word boy contains the diphthong.

In English, there are two main types of diphthongs: centring and closing. Theclosing diphthongs are further subdivided into two as indicated in the chart below:

Centring diphthongs end with a glide towards //. They are called centring

because / / is a central vowel.

E.gs.

hear //

pear /e/

poor //

Closing diphthongs end with a glide towards // or towards //. The glide is

towards a higher position in the mouth.

E.gs. bail /e/ row //

right /a/ owl /a/

toy //

Other diphthongs in Standard English are the ei sound in the word fame or the pronunciation of the letter a, and the ou sound in the word phone. Other languages have many more diphthongs aside from these, and other dialects of English may have more diphthongs as well. Languages such as Finnish have nearly twenty diphthongs, while the Received Pronunciation dialect of English has an extra five or so diphthongs not found in Standard English.

In addition to diphthongs and monophthongs, there are also what are called triphthongs. These are similar to diphthongs, but instead of moving simply from one vowel sound to another, a third sound is also added.

Triphthongs

Definition of triphthong

A triphthong is a glide from one vowel to another and then to a third, all producedrapidly and without interruptions (Roach, 2010). For e.g., a careful pronunciation ofthe word our starts with a vowel similar to /a:/ which then glides towards the backclose rounded area (as represented by the symbol //) then ends with a mid-centralvowel (schwa, // ). our is transcribed as /a/.

The triphthongs are composed of the 5 closing diphthongs described earlier butthey end with a schwa //. Thus, we get:

/e/ + / / = /e/ as in mayor, payer

/a/ + / / = /a/ as in tire, dryer

// + / / = // as in royal, loyal

// + // = // as in buoyant, follower

/a/ + / / = /a/ as in sour, flower

Whether triphthongs (and tetraphthongs) actually exist is also somewhat debated: the issue is, as with diphthongs, what status/difference is there between the glides (semi-vowels) /j/ and /w/ and "true" vowels

Some people argue that the accent of English has, in addition to diphtong, some triphtong, or vowels which have three distinct qualities. If you say the words fire very slowly and carefully, you may notice that it starts with an open vowel, moves to a close vowel, and then moves again to a more central vowel. However, it is not clear if this should be regarded as triphthong or as a diphthong, followed by a monophthong. The issue can be illustrated by comparing fire with higher. Many people consider that fire has just one syllable , which suggest that it has single vowel. But higher has two syllable.

It would be thus be theoretically possible for English to have distinction between triphthong, a single syllable, and a diphthong followed by monophthong, two syllable. However there is no evidence that anyone really makes this distinction in English.

The consonants Plosives Plosives are defined as consonant sounds which involve, first, a stricture of the mouth that allows no air to escape from the vocal tract and, second, the compression and release of the air. So, there are four phases in the production of plosives: closure, hold, release and post-release.

English has six plosive consonants, p, t, k, b, d, g. /p/ and /b/ are bilabial, that is, the lips are pressed together. /t/ and /d/ are alveolar, so the tongue is pressed against the alveolar ridge. /k/ and /g/ are velar; the back of the tongue is pressed against an intermediate area between the hard and the soft palate. /p/, /t/ and /k/ are voiceless. /b/, /d/ and /g/ are normally voiced. The release of the voiceless plosives is followed by audible plosion and in the post-release phase, by an aspiration. So, the most noticeable difference between the voiceless and the voiced plosives is this aspiration. In VC position, the vowels preceding the voicelessplosives are much shorter. Place of articulation

Fricatives and Affricates Fricatives are characterised by a hissing sound which is produced by the air escaping through a small passage in the mouth. Affricates begin as plosives and end as fricatives. These are homorganic sounds, that is, the same articulator produces both sound, the plosive and the fricative. Place of articulation

Voiceless fricatives have the effect of shortening the preceding vowel, in the same way as voiceless plosives.

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