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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