1. Middle School Journal Article #2  Phonics and Spelling

 

In a true alphabet, all the letters have a sound.  We may ask:
What sound is associated with A in the traditional English writing system? [TO] We can't say for sure because the English TO is polyvalent.  Each vowel letter is associated with six more more sounds and each sound can be spelled over 20 different ways. [see how many ways can you spell the sound in day].

Traditional	IPA	traditional	IPA	Spanglish	SS	Unifon
A	ae	CAT	kaet	catt	a.	A
	a:	BATH	baaq	baath	aa	X
	a:'	ARE	aar	aar	aar	XR
	ey	ABLE	eibl	eybl	ey	L
		QUALITY WATER	kwoliti: kwliti: wt'	quaality kwolity wotr	aa o	X o
	:	ALL  walk	ool     l wlk	aol  wolk	ao	X
	e'	CARE  air	ke'r   fe'r	caer /feyr	ae/ey	A
	'	AGO equal	'gou   i:kw'l	agow  equal	a	c

Polyvalence means that the same letter represents several didfferent sounds and versa.  Conversely the same sound is represented by several letters.  The phoneme s can be spelt c in mice, s in send sc in scent and ss in miss.  Polyvalence of a much more serious proporiton was discovered by Nyikos (1988).  In a survey of common words, he found 80 different graphemes for the back V phoneme /u/ and 1,120 graphemes for the 40 phonemes of English. [an average of 28 different sounes per letter]. This is nearly twice as many as Dewey [1969] located in his study of 70,000 words and probably indicates a larger sample and a different methodology. 

English illustrates that a writing system does not nead to be fully alphabetic.  It does not need to graphically represent [re-present] the phonological structure of speeh.  

The consistency of english stops at the word level.  There is also some morphological consistency, e.g. plural endings are s and es even if the pronunciation is z and ez.  
 
 
 
 

Letters and Associated Sounds

Letter	lst sound	2nd sound	3rd saund	overlaps	combinations	R-comb.
a	/a:/  alms	'a   /'/  up	ae   ash at	ae, 'a, ei, o	ai, au, aw	ar  are
e	e /e / elbow	'e, 'er   /'/	ei/ey	'r  'a	ei ew eu eau	/er/ eric, air
i	/I/ bit, ill	/i:/ beat, eel	/ai/  my mice	schwa-schwi	ia iu via few	ir /ir/  ear
o	awe: all cost	owe: oat bow	haat  hot	au, ou, aa	ow, oa	or  ow'r
u	guru pool	put book	up cut  / L /	u, ^, 3:  w	ou, iu, eu	ur  tour
w v		/u/ hook	/^/ up cup
y	unstressed / i:/	'y = ai in fl'y
b	/b/ bib	/v/	/p/	debt	bl, bq, br	b'rg  berg
c	/k/	/s/ circl	ch /tsh/ cello	k, s, ch, sh	ci, ce, ca, co	c'rd curd
d	/d/	/dh/	t	dh	da de di du	d'r'abl
f	/f/	/v/	--	v	fif of ofn	f'r

With three sounds per vowel letter, the notation is still manageable as long as there are no code overlaps.  We want the sound code or script to be streamlined and short.  The first sound does not refer to frequency but to a default pronunciation that could be understood by all.  ahp can still be understood as up.  ahx [ox] can almost be understood as ax.  caer however is not car. 

syllabary
 

alphabet

phoneme

  in linguistics, the smallest unit of speech distinguishing one word (or
  word element) from another.  For example, sound [t] in "cat"
  separates that word from "cab," "cap," and "can." Variants which are
  understood as instances of a particular phoneme are called allophones.
  It is possible to understand people speaking different dialects because 
  we can ignore the phonetic distinctions and acoustical variations and 
  concentrate on the phonemic similarities. 

  Most languages get by with less than 30 phonemes.  English has 35
  uncombined phonemes but around 50 important sound categories evenly
  divided between vowels and consonants. In a perfect alphabet, there would be a
  one to one correspondnece between phonemes of speech and distinctive
  visible marks. A writing system based on such a code would
  be referred to as phonemic or alphabetic.
 

msj

Phonics and Spelling Improvement

To what extent can phonics improve spelling?

Phonics refers to the isolation of patterns of consistent sound representation in the English writing system.  Wijk showed that the English writing system uses 106 symbols to represent the 40 or so sounds in the language. In other words you should be able to spell every word in English using 26 letters in just 106 different combinations.  This sounds like an instant recipe for spelling success until you realize that most of the 106 symbols represent more than one sound.

Here is the polyvalence [multiple values] found in the first letter in the alphabet.  .

Traditional	IPA	traditional	IPA	Saxon*	SS	Uni	IPA
A	ae	CAT	kaet	catt	a.	A	a
	a:	BATH	baaq	baath	aa	X	aa
	a:'	ARE	aar	aar	aar	XR	aar
	ey	ABLE	eibl	eybl	ey	L	ae
		QUALITY WATER	kwoliti: kwliti: wt'	quaality kwolity wotr	aa o	X o	aa o
	:	ALL  walk	ool l wlk	aol  wolk	ao	X	o
		pawl caught	pcl kct	pol cot cost	o	X	au
	e'	CARE  air	ke'r   fe'r	caer /feyr	ae/ey	A	air
	'	AGO equal	'gou   i:kw'l	agow  equal	a	c	u

Phonic awareness, therefore has to include all of the sound that can be associated with each vowel letter.  Sometimes there is a cue given by the consonant.  al has only two means either ael or ol.
as in Al almost caught the animal.  won the race.  

Most of these symbols represent more than one sound.  There is a code overlap.  This means that  Phonics can be an aid in sounding out words

In an ideal alphabetic writing system, one can easily spell any word that can be correctly pronounced.  This is because the writing system accurately maps the phonological structure of the language.  It is possible to create such a code for English.  

A number of such codes have been developed but have never caught on except for use as a pronunciation guide in the dictionary.  The basic reason is that any phonemic code will respell 60% or more of the words in the language.  

This statement can quickly be checked by going to the dictionary and picking 20 words at random.  Count the number of times the pronunciation guide spelling matches the traditional spelling.  If you found more than 8 words that matched, you are better than average.
 
 
 

I hav obviusly missd out on some emails about this, as I do 
not know about Eigoji, altho we used romaji in lerning Korean. 

Curiusly, if u tested English speakers with both 
the Romaji and Eigoji spellings below, in a proper cross-over 
design, I reckon u would find that most English speakers could read 
the romaji much faster, both silently and aloud, and with no 
more mistakes, exept perhaps with Kato pronounced like Cato. 

vy 

David writes: 
>Well, if I asked my students to write their family names in Romaji (i.e. 
according to the so-called "Roman" system of vowels and consonants), 
they might write: 

>Shimizu 
Nomura 
Kato 
Yamamoto 
Oki 

>But if I asked them to write the same names in Eigoji (i.e. according to 
the so-called "English" system of vowels and consonants), they might 
write the same words as: 

>Sheemeezoo 
Noemoorah 
Kahtoe 
Yahmahmoetoe 
Ohkee