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The
Phoneme Inventory 
What are the significant speech sounds in English?
plus 9 diphthongs or vowel combinations: Total 21 in RP (British BBC English) What is unessential for RP (received pronunciation) may be essential for another dialect . 6 checked, 6 unchecked, 6 diphthongs, and 6 R-combinations or shwa combinations. There is no agreement on the total number of combinations. It depends on the dialect and the number of combinations that the orthographer thinks are not self evident. If the sound of a combination is not obvious, there may be a need to make it explicit. The following table lists 13 vowel combinations bringing the total number of vowel phonemes to 25. Vowel Phoneme Table for British English (RP) with key words Three notations for the 21 essential sounds for RP English - 4x6 table (Jones was searching for the minimum number of phonemes and did not include 3 listed below (with peach background)) 6 checked + 6 unchecked + 5 diphthongs + 4 ending with schwa = 21 essential vowels
An adequate orthography for English should have a unique character assigned to 10 of the 12 pure vowels and a unique graf, digraf or trigraf for 24 of the 25 sound categories (or phonemes) listed above. Ideally, the letters assigned to the pure vowels in the first two columns can be reused in the diphthongs and other vowel blends. Notice that most of the variants of New Spelling below do not always reuse the pure vowels (ai=ie) When one is limited to the ASCII character set, the puzzle becomes a little more difficult. The SAMPA (J.C. Wells) solution is shown above. SAMPA uses upper case letters for the checked vowels with the exception of e . The E is reserved for a related sound used in other languages and some dialects of English. The letters that would be difficult to understand without a code book are { for /ae/ and Q for the vowel sound in [pot], and V for the vowel in [up]. SAMPA uses an extender mark [:] for 5 of the 6 unchecked pure vowels. The exception is shwa where the turned e is replaced with an @ sign. The long shwa is indicated with a number which resembles yogh [her=h3:]. When one is limited to 5 letters [aeiou] for 12 pure vowels, the puzzle is impossible to solve without using markers. TO (the traditional orthography) often uses e as a marker and New Spelling standardized this tradition. A digraph for a pure vowel might be justified if this were the most frequent TO spelling. However, since TO uses single letters in multisyllable words, it isn't. [ae is not the most frequent way to spell /ei/]. If the chart was a perfect representation of the segmental sound categories used in speech and there was one more vowel letter, then it would be possible to represent the extended vowels by doubling the associated short (checked) vowel. The traditional analysis calls for 5 checked vowels rather than 6. The vowel sound in "hook" and "put" is left out. In an alphabetical list of checked vowels, the first and last are problematic. Should [a] be used for the /ae/ phoneme? Should [u] be used for a central vowel sound in "up". With these exceptions, there is general agreement on what grapheme should be associated with the checked vowels. While there is general agreement on appropriate checked vowel grapheme, there is no agreement on the how the checked vowels relate to the free vowels. It makes sense to indicate similar sounds with similar shapes. It doesn't take much research to conclude that sounds with the closest affinity to the graphemes checked vowels are as follows: [ ill-eel,
west-waist, wonder-wander, bomb-balm, cot-caught, cook-kook ]
English speakers are taught [1] that a long e is the vowel in [eel], [2] that a long [i] is the vowel sound in "ice", and [3] that the extended [a] is something close to the final vowel in [resumé]. In the linguist's chart, the symbols associated with these three sounds are /i:/, /ai/ and /ei/. The linguists have sorted out the strongest relationships so we know how the checked vowels relate to the other sounds in the chart. What has been illusive is coming up with a coding scheme that will embody this analysis and be easy for those who can read TO. Checked vowels could be marked with
a double consonant.Checkt Speling
uses an after-dot or underdot
Lingren's idea of marking the long
vowels with a shwa-apostrophe also works.
Since the traditional orthography (TO) does not mark consistently, any system that does will look strange or odd half the time. littl and ill look right but itt and izz do not. If consonant doubling is used as the marker for a short (checked) vowel, then there is no need to mark (or double) free vowels. If consonant doubling or some other marking is not used for checkt vowels, then the free vowels need to be marked. Clearly if one uses consonant doubling as the marker, then long vowel doubling is redundant. In the following tables, the notations are listed in the columns with the gold heading and the corresponding examples are listed in the columns with the green headings: eg, PHONOGRAM ay --> KEYWORD ayz (eyes)
Note that there are 9 combinations
(instead of 12). [yu] doesn't count as a vowel, D. Jones did not
list triphthongs such as au@ and ay@. Axel Wijk mentions triphthongs
in his list and Sweet uses them in his transcriptions.
Notice
that the word [are] is transcribed as [aa]. In British English there is
no signficant difference between aa and a@. If the base language
was American English, [are] would be transcribed as [ar].
Sample 1: Speling riform The closest modern orthographies to Sweet's Broad Romic are Chekt Speling
and Ian's SaundSpel. [sample]
IPA-Broad
Romic and Paul Mitrevski's World
English Vowel Notation
Paul's orthography is almost identical to Sweet's broad romic except for the following character substitutions: @ for ae, a for up, ' for schwa, oo for awe. Representing the following 25 foneems in riting involvs constantly havving tu make decissions. 1. Ay as in play, they, ate, raid, great? 2. Ar as in car, calm, heart? 3. Ah as in banana, verandah? 4. Air as in fair, dare, bear, there or their? 5. Aw as in law, taut, caught, talk or all? 6. Short 'e' as in bed, head and many? 7. Er as in her, fir, fur or worm? 8. Ee as in feet, meat, believe, receive, recede and he? 9. F as in fun, photo or cough? 10. Short 'i' as in bit, pretty or women? 11. 'I' as in die, mile or fly? 12. J as in jet, gem or edge 13. Ks as in accept or ax? 14. Oo as in food, move, group, blue or do? 15. Oe as in toe, slow, shoulder, boat or bold? 16. Ow as in cow, bough or house? 17. Or as in for, door, board, more or your? 18. Oi as in oil, noise or boy? 19. Our as in flour or flower? 20. S as in sad, cent or science? 21. Sk as in skip, school or scalp? 22. U as in mud, young, blood or some? 23. Uh as in good, push or could? 24. Ue as in due, duty, new, ewe, view or you? 25. Z as in zip or in advertise? Havving tu menny alternativs tu choose from for the same foneem is crux of the problem. This is whot led peepl tu clame that TO really has no basic code at all. Fonnics is certanly of verry limmited value when it cums tu resolving cunundrums like those abuv. U end up havving tu memmorise so menny individual words insted of just lerning the code that u can no longer bee certan whot the basic code is. So forget about introducing new letters. Here are the English phonemes:
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