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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.
A phoneme is a range of sounds that are treated as equivalent by a speech community. It is the smallest unit of sound in the sound system of a language that can make a difference in meaning. The phoneme inventory for English was charted over 100 years ago by Pitman, Ellis, Jones, Sweet and others. They were all searching for the minimum number of phonemes required to graphically represent southern educated English speech sometimes referred to as BBC English or RP. They all agreed on 34 pure phonemes. The number with combinations, however, varied from 40 to 50. The Longman
Dictionary of American English
recognizes 45 phonemes (21v-24c). Longman recognizes schwa but merges
(a: and o) since American's do not make a distinction. 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. 40 is the most common number of
isolated sounds in popular notations and pronunciation guides
[see Spelriet, Unifon, and Truespel].
The first two columns in the chart list the 12 pure vowels (6 checked - 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. In Unifraf and Truespel notations, the lower case u refers to both /L/ and /'/ and the open back vowel [ah] is associated with one symbol rather than two [a and o]. [o. and a:] = q in Unigraf and aa in Truespel. Almost everyone agrees that the consonant combinations tsh [ch] and dzh [j] and the diphthongs ei ai ou au and oi are essential. When these 7 sounds are added to the 12 pure vowels and 22 pure phonemes, the total number of essential phonemes climbs 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. 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]. With these phoneme mergers, the number of symbols required drops to 30. Eliminating any pure vowel tends to distort the description of RP and most other variants of English. However, a carefully pruned 30 phoneme version of English would still be intelligible. A complete broad representation of spoken English
requires 34 pure phonemes. When commonly
used combinations such as J, Ch, ei, ai, ou, au, and oi are added, the
number of essential phonemes (not counting R-combinations) in a descriptive
orthography is 41.
References Article in JSSS
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| Response to the claim that phonemic representation is next to impossible
and that there can be no agreement on the number of pure phonemes.
It is true that different dialects of English have different phoneme counts. This does not preclude the development of a broad notation for all dialects. A sound that is phonemic in one dialect but not in another would have to be included. American English rhymes bother and father making it possible to merge a: and o in pronunciation dictionaries for American English. http://hawk.hama-med.ac.jp/dbk/new_romaji.html
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.http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/sitemap-l.html Index of spelling sites 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. 9.http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/sweet-short.html 10.http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/globish.html more on Globish. longer version
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, 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 500 ways." Godfrey Dewey (1971) listed examples of 561 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 relatively specific about the minimum number of pure (uncombined) phonemes required to fully describe English speech [34], it is nearly impossible to reach exact agreement on the number of phonemes when combinations are included. What is a phoneme? It is not the same as a letter or symbol although letters can represent phonemes. As illustrated below, different letters can represent the same phoneme. This is actually rather frequent in traditional English spelling where there are over 500 ways to spell less than 50 phonemes. As the prefix [phon] suggests, a phoneme has something to do with sound. Since sound is continuous and phonemes are imagined to be discrete sound segments, there are a range of articulations that will be interpreted as an instance of the phoneme. Phonetically distinctinct sounds can be categorized as instances of the same phoneme [see pie and spy below]. In English, the /p/ sound is a phoneme because it is the smallest unit of sound that can make a difference of meaning if, for example, it replaces the initial sound of bill, till, or dill, making the word pill. The vowel sound of pill is also a phoneme because its distinctness in sound makes pill, which means one thing, sound different from pal, which means another. Two different sounds, reflecting distinct articulatory activities, may represent two phonemes in one language but only a single phoneme in another. Thus phonetic r and l are distinct phonemes in English, whereas these sounds represent a single phoneme in Japanese, just as ph and p in pie and spy, respectively, represent a single phoneme in English although these sounds are phonetically distinct. A phoneme is usually defined as the smallest unit of sound (or speech)
that can make a difference in meaning. To test of whether or not
a particular sound is a phoneme one must find at least one contrasting
pair. The test for schwa might be the following contrasting pairs:
abbot / abut. [ab- 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 and accents. A narrow phonetic transcription of speech distinguishes differences in regional speech patterns. A broad transcription, attempts to ignore these differences. Each language has its own inventory of phonetic differences that it treats as phonemic-that is, as necessary to distinguish meaning. For practical purposes, the total number of phonemes for a language is the least number of different symbols adequate to make an unambiguous graphic representation of its speech that any native could read if given a sound value for each symbol, and that any foreigner could pronounce correctly if given additional rules covering nondistinctive phonetic variations that the native makes automatically. For convenience, each phoneme of language may be given a unique symbol. This is what is done here to indicate a phoneme inventory for English. . The phoneme inventory for English was charted over 100 years ago by Pitman, Ellis, Jones, and Sweet.3 They were all searching for a way to identify and graphically represent the minimum number of phonemes in 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 merge [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 in Longman's pronunciation guide 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). It is usually the free vowel (not the checked vowel) that is combined with R. Most notations substitute the symbol for the checked vowel. In Nu Folik, a:r, eir, i:r, o:r, u:r are simplified to ar, air, eer, or, and oor. Hence if the notation used [au] to represent the vowel in "awe", then "or" would be spelled [aur]. Similarly "are" should be spelled [aar]. 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 may merge similar sounding phonemes
such as the central vowels [ 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 [ai Orthographies do not have to single out a consonant combinations such
as [dzh] or [j] as a distinct phoneme. However, most do. [ 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. New Spelling adds [ue]. Chekt Spelling 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 as in *ire] and [hw as in *when] 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 (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. To rationalize the distortions
caused by the mergers and simplifications, truncated notations such as
Globish often claim to be a unique dialect and not English.8
Thru such measures as merging th/dh, o/a, u/ 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.
34 pure phonemes 48 Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences 6x8 chart (24 vowels + 24 phonemes). Light (white) cells = 12 pure vowels & 22 pure consonants Remove the 7 R-combinations and the number of phonemes is reduced to 41.
Notes & References
1. http://pages.whowhere.com/community/sbett/dewey.html Lists the results of Godfrey Dewey's analysis the various ways that 41 basic English speech sounds are spelled in (1) an abridged dictionary and (2) in 100,000 words of actual writing. The information in this html document is drawn from Dewey's two books English Spelling (1971) and Relative Frequency of English Spellings (1970). See the bibliography on spelling at spel-bib.html. If you divide 461 spellings by 41 phonemes, it yields an average of 13.7 different spellings per phoneme. 2. Span-dif.html Spanish vowel combinations in several notations: interspel, nu folik, truespel, menu-spel, etc. 3. b-romic..html Henry Sweet's broad romic. 4. "Keep it Simple" is a dictum championed by Valerie Yule and others. See pidjin.html By definition, a broad diaphonic transcription is not precise - it is not meant to capture dialects. Such an orthography is designed to be an easily learned communication tool. It is not an instrument for precise linguistic description. 5.. http://www.awl-elt.comLongman's Dictionary of American English (1997) lists 45. According to Chris Upward, The British edition lists 46 for American and 48 for RP. 6. alternota.html Alternate notations for English describes Nue Speling, Truespel, and ALC Fonetic. See also map-IPA.html. 7. The thesis of Abercrombie's short book is that there is no official IPA notation for English. He shows the variation in the schemes and transcriptions of Daniel Jones, who contributed two systems, and five other linguists. 99% of the variation was in symbol selection (grapheme correspondences) rather than the phoneme inventory. 8.map-IPA.html
Globish, New Spelling, Fonetic, Broad Romic and other reform orthographies.
Notations mapped on to the IPA phoneme inventory. There are also
web pages on each of these notations which have been listed in this column
before. There is one new one for Globish at globish.html
.
References Dewey, Godfrey. 1971. English
Spelling: Roadblock to Literacy. Columbia University
spell-sitemap-L spelling links Go to Short Version of Phoneme Inventory Discussion Paul saw all ore costs increasing Phonemic
transcriptions This phrase has three spellings of
/o:/ in TO, one in phonemic notation
costs does not contain
either a long O or a short o. It is an extended o that is often represented
as a turned c. kcsts
He bought the car she took around the world. Phonemic
transcriptions
Unispel uses lazy t(x), u(c), and U(C).
Numerology - Using Numbers as Phonograms
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Steve
Bett’s April, 1999, Simpl Speling Newsletter article
Spelling
on the Net with Steve Bett
t
/
/^]
[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.
]
and [ð] are pure phonemes but are not distinguished by the traditional
orthography [TO]. For this reason, some pragmatic orthographies also ignore
this distinction.
