In her letter to the Daily Express, Masha said: "We have 256 ways of representing the 45 basic sounds of our language." According to Jean,  Diane McGuinness (1998) gives the figure for American English as 42. In Alan Campbell's letter to The Press, he said, "There are 41 sounds in English and almost 600 ways of spelling them." In PV7, Steve said, "There are 41 significant speech sounds or phonemes. "In a phonemic or alphabetic system, these sounds would be spelled about 41 ways. "In the traditional English writing system they are spelled over 500 ways." Godfrey Dewey (1971) listed examples of 561 ways that 41 English sounds could be spelled. 

Allan asked, "Is there any way to pin down these statistics so there is some consistency in our public claims." The quick answer is probably not. While we can be specific about the minimum number of pure (uncombined) phonemes required to fully describe English speech [34], it is nearly impossible to reach agreement on the number of  phonemes when combinations are included. The key reasons for this are ... 

1. There is no obligation for a particular orthography to list any  

combination or blend.
2. An orthography that listed every combination or blend used in a  

transcription as a separate phoneme would have over 60 phonemes. 

The Longman dictionary of American English (1997) recognizes 45 phonemes (21v-24c).  Longman recognizes schwa but merges (a: and o).  Longman does not single out the combinations [hw] and [yu:]. Five of Longman's phonemes are r-combinations. If these are eliminated, the number of significant phonemes is reduced to 40. 
 

25 Vowel Phonemes for English - 12 pure IPA - Chkt Spl - Unigrafdownsize
6 Chekt - short	6 Free - long	Difthongs	4-7 with schwa
aea. a	a:a q	ai'yI	aarqr |aiyrIr
at, ax, ask,  cat	alms, want, watch	eye, ice, bite	are, car    |  ire, fire
ee  e	3:'r R	eiei A	ecer er
edge, edit, elbow	her, girl, skirt, urban	ace, ape, vein	air, care, there, barely
i   i.  i	i: i E	oi oi Q	i:c    ir   ir
it, in, index, ill	eel, east, mere, very	oil, boy, loyal	ear, fear, deer, pier
o turned ao. q	o: turned c o o	ou oO	or or  or
ox, otter, cot, pot	awe, call, cost, loss,	oh, oat, low	for, four, floor, more
u u. c	u: uC	ju iuU	uc ur Ur
hook, put, would	ooze, zulu, zoo, duty	you, few, fuse	your,  sure,  tour, poor
^   u' u	c turned ea' u	au auM	auc aurMr
up, cut,a'bu't a'kUt	ago, sofa, atom, silent	out, down, cow	our, flower, power
IPA turned e, a, and c are unavailable in ASCII and Latin-1 Darker shaded cells not members of Jones' minimum phoneme set

The first two columns in the chart list the 12 pure vowels (6 chekt, 6 free). Chekt vowels are
always short and always followed by a consonant.  Descriptive orthographies include all 12
pure vowels. Pragmatic notational systems, such as Unigraf, may merge similar sounding
phonemes such as the central vowels u = [a' and u'] or the back vowels q = [o. and a:].

Almost everyone agrees that the consonant combinations tsh [ch] and dzh [j] and the
diphthongs ei ai ou au and oi are essential. This brings the total number of essential
phonemes to 41.

Sweet and Jones add 4 schwa combinations yielding 21 essential vowels and a phoneme
inventory of 45. In their transcriptions Jones and Sweet used more than the 45 phonemes
found in their inventory. Their list did not include combinations with consonants [ju] or
triphthongs [ai@ and au@].  Chekt Spelling adds [iu] and 3 more schwa combinations to
bring the total number of vowels to 25 and the total number of phonemes to 50. New
Spelling also adds [ue].

The minimum number of pure phonemes required to accurately transcribe English speech is
34 (12 vowels + 22 consonants). Pragmatic orthographers have frequently chosen to merge
[a:/ o],  [u/shwa], and [th / dh] reducing the number of phonemes by 3.  TrueSpel and
Globish also ignore [ng]. Eliminating any pure vowel tends to distort the description of RP
and most other variants of English. However, a carefully pruned 30 pure phoneme version of
English would still be intelligible.

A complete broad representation of spoken English requires 34 pure phonemes.  The
minimum number of essential phonemes (not counting R-combinations) in a descriptive
orthography is 41.
  (end) 652 words

References

1. http://pages.whowhere.com/community/sbett/dewey.html Godfrey Dewey's frequency studies

2. http://pages.whowhere.com/community/sbett/Span-dif.html Spanish vowel combinations

3. http://pages.whowhere.com/community/sbett/sweet.html Henry Sweet's broad romic.

4. Keep it Simple

5. http://pages.whowhere.com/community/sbett/alternota.htmlAlternate notations for English

6.. http://www.awl-elt.com Longman's Pronunciation Guide for English

7. Abercrombie's book shows how variable phonemes are even for linguists.

8.http://pages.whowhere.com/community/sbett/map-IPA.html Globish and other reform orthographies. The phoneme inventory.

http://pages.whowhere.com/community/sbett/globish.html more on Globish.

Comments welcomed mail to Steve Bett sbett@mailcity.com

Steve sed:

We should come up with the most elegant pronunciation guide.
I believe that this guide should be usable (i.e. understandable) across a
range of languages other than English. In other words, an effort should be made to
select graphemes that are not at odds with interpretations in other languages

This has largely been achieved by IPA so the pronunciation guide should
probably be a simplified variant of IPA.  The simplifications include
finding alternatives for the special characters used in IPA.

The next step would be to produce a dictionary that used this notation and
then promote the script as a secondary code for the writing of English.

What if every school child had to spell their name phonetically using this
phonetic notation?  Eventually, authors would start using the notation to
clarify the pronunciation of place names and other obscure words.

Currently there are about ten different notations used in pronunciation
guides.  None of them are suitable for writing. Usually, if you move from
one dictionary to another, you have to learn a new guide.

The APA, MLA, NEA, and others produced a pronunciation guide in 1908,
one of the high points in the history of simplified spelling.  It was edited by
Calvin Thomas and supported by members of the major literary and educational
organizations.  It was not unlike IPA in that it created a few special characters
and required a special font to reproduce.  It was also, I feel, unnecessarily complex
with more than 30 vowel phonemes.

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Can we pin down
the number of phonemes in English?
What is the minimum phoneme inventory for English speech?

In her letter to the Daily Express, Masha said: "We have 256 ways of representing the 45 basic sounds of our language." In Alan Campbell's letter to The Press, he said, "There are 41 sounds in English and almost 600 ways of spelling them, and nearer 1000 rules ..to try to explain it." In PV7, Steve said, "There are 41 significant speech sounds or phonemes. In a phonemic or alphabetic system, these sounds would be spelled about 41 ways. In the traditional English writing system they are spelled over 400 ways." Godfrey Dewey (1971) listed examples of 461 ways that 41 English sounds could be spelled.¹

Allan asked if there is any way to pin down these statistics so there is some consistency in our public claims. The quick answer is probably not. While we can be specific about the minimum number of pure (uncombined) phonemes required to fully describe English speech [34], it is nearly impossible to reach agreement on the number of phonemes when combinations are included. There is no obligation for an orthography to list any combination or blend and if every combination used in a transcription were denoted, then the orthography could have well over 60 phonemes.²

Although often defined as the minimal or smallest distinctive unit of speech, a phoneme is a range of sounds that are treated as equivalent by a speech community. Most acoustical differences between speakers are ignored which is what makes it possible to communicate across dialects. A narrow phonetic transcription of speech distinguishes differences in regional speech patterns. A broad transcription, attempts to ignore these differences.

The phoneme inventory for English was charted over 100 years ago by Pitman, Ellis, Jones, and Sweet.³ They were all searching for the minimum number of phonemes required to graphically represent educated southern English speech sometimes referred to as BBC English or RP (received pronunciation). They all agreed on the number of pure phonemes [34] and were close to agreeing on the number of significant phonemes including blends and combinations [45 ± 4].

According to the linguists, the minimum number of significant sounds was between 41 and 48 for RP. Most orthographers and spelling reformers, however, have been content to work with 39 to 41 phonemes. Orthography is a pragmatic technology, not science. It is more important to "keep it simple" than to be precise.⁴

Longman's pronunciation dictionary recognizes 45 phonemes (21v-24c)⁵ . Longman recognizes schwa but merges (a: and o). [The Truespel and Spelwel notations also merges [a:] and [o] but ignore schwa.⁶. Longman does not single out the combinations [hw] and [yu:]. Five of Longman's phonemes are r-combinations. If these are eliminated, the number of significant phonemes is reduced to 40.

In most notations, r-combinations are problematic. In the Chekt Spelng phoneme chart, one of the few notations with accurate combinations, all 7 are included. The extra vowels make the CCS chart symmetrical (24v-24c).

(insert image here)The first two columns in the chart list the 12 pure vowels (6 chekt, 6 free). Descriptive orthographies include all 12 pure vowels. Pragmatic notational systems may merge similar sounding phonemes such as the central vowels [/^] [a' and u'] or the back vowels [o. and a:]. The white (unshaded) cells in the chart indicate possible mergers. As shown above, Unigraf uses [u] and [q] to denote these mergers. *upstart = upstqrt.

No diphthong or vowel combination needs to be singled out as a distinct phoneme. Jones and Sweet listed 5 diphthongs and 4 schwa combinations. In their transcriptions they used more combinations than found in their phoneme list. Their list did not list combinations with consonants [ju] or triphthongs [aiand au].⁷

Orthographies do not have to single out a consonant combinations such as [dzh] or [j] as a distinct phoneme. However, most do. [] and [ð] are pure phonemes but are not distinguished by the traditional orthography [TO]. For this reason, some pragmatic orthographies also ignore this distinction.

When the 12 pure vowels are added to the 22 consonants (that are not combinations such as [j] and [ch]), the number of unblended sounds comes to 34. (Pragmatic orthographers may dispute the necessity of inclucing the [th/ dh], [a:/ o], or [u/ schwa] distinction or an [ng] phoneme.)

Almost everyone agrees that the consonant combinations tsh[ch]and dzh [j]and the diphthongs ei ai ou au and oi are essential. This brings the total number of essential phonemes to 41. Sweet and Jones add 4 schwa combinations yielding 21 essential vowels. This brings their phoneme inventory to 45. Chekt Speling adds [iu] and 2 more schwa combinations to bring the total number of vowels to 24 and the total number of phonemes to 48. With [yr] and [hw] the total would balloon to 50. Ian's SaundSpel adds an [e:] phoneme between e and ei to provide a more comfortable way to transcribe "barely" [beeli]. Jones used [e:] for the Scottish dialect but did not use it for RP.

The minimum number of pure phonemes required to accurately transcribe English speech is 34. Reducing this number tends to distort RP and most other variants of English. A carefully pruned 30 phoneme version of English, however, would still be intelligible. (see Globish⁸)

The minimum number of phonemes with all essential combinations (other than the r-combinations) is 41. As above, by mergeing th/dh, o/a, u/, and eliminating [ng], this number could be reduced to 37.

The minimum number of pure phonemes in English is 34 and the minimum number of essential phonemes (not counting r-combinations) is 41.