1.13 ‘Regular’ correspondences
2. The phonemes of spoken English
2.1 Choosing an accent to analyse
English is spoken with many accents, and the number of phonemes, and the exact sounds of many of them, vary across accents. In order to list phonemes, therefore, I first had to choose an accent to base my list on.
Because this book deals with British spelling, the accent I have chosen is the British accent known to many linguists as ‘Received Pronunciation’
(RP). Recently some linguists have re-named it ‘Southern British Standard’
(SBS), or ‘Standard Southern British’, or even ‘General British’ (Cruttenden, 2014), but I have retained the term RP because it is more widely known.
The French textbook of English from which I learnt phonetic transcription (see below) in 1963 called it the accent ‘des milieux cultivés du sud-est anglais’, but that was too narrow a definition; though it is particularly prevalent in educated circles in the South-East of England, people from all over Britain have this accent, and their regional origins are therefore difficult to deduce from their accent.
© 2015 Greg Brooks, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0053.02
2.2 How many phonemes?
In RP there are 44 phonemes. Of these, 24 are consonant phonemes, and 20 are vowel phonemes.
From the fact that there are many more phonemes in RP than the 26 letters of the English alphabet, it is fairly clear that some phonemes have no predominant one-letter spelling. But for the purposes of this book a single way of representing each phoneme is needed. To do this, I use the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). You will need to learn to read this system fluently in order to be able to use the rest of this book.
Many words in this book are written in IPA alongside the conventional spelling, so that you can do some incidental learning as you read. The symbols for consonant phonemes are easier to learn (because most are ordinary letters, though some have unfamiliar values), so I start with them.
For some purposes it is important to distinguish between voiceless consonant phonemes – those pronounced without vibrating the vocal cords – and voiced consonant phonemes – the rest. Those which are voiceless are so labelled in Table 2.1, and various sub-systems which rely on this distinction are discussed under /d, t/ in sections 3.5.2 and 3.5.7, under /ɪ/ in section 5.4.3, and also in sections 3.7.8, 5.7.2 and 7.2.3.
There is little difference in the number or pronunciation of the consonant phonemes across much of the English-speaking world, and much less variation than in the vowel phonemes – in fact, differences in vowel phonemes almost entirely define the differences between accents.
However, two consonant phonemes which do not occur in RP (and are therefore not counted in my analyses of correspondences) but do occur in many Scots accents are mentioned in a few places:
• the voiceless counterpart of /w/, which is usually spelt <wh>, sounds roughly like ‘hw’, and is symbolised /ʍ/; examples would be which, when
• the throat-clearing sound which is spelt <ch> in some Scottish words, e.g. dreich, loch, Sassenach, and German names like Schumacher (or
<gh> in some Irish words, e.g. lough, or <kh> in transcriptions of some Russian names, e.g. Mikhail), and is symbolised /x/ - on no account to be confused with letter <x>, but I have not included this correspondence in my analysis because /x/ is not a phoneme of RP.
See Notes to sections 9.9/15/19 and 10.33.
The phonemes of spoken English 15
2.3 The consonant phonemes of Received Pronunciation
Table 2.1 presents the IPA symbols for the 24 consonant phonemes of RP.
TABLE 2.1: THE INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET SYMBOLS FOR THE 24 CONSONANT PHONEMES OF THE RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION ACCENT OF ENGLISH.
Consonant phonemes with doubled spellings* which are rare in one-syllable words
/b/ as in the first sound of by /baɪ/
/d/ as in the first sound of dye /daɪ/
/g/ as in the first sound of goo /guː/
/m/ as in the first sound of my /maɪ/
/n/ as in the first sound of nigh /naɪ/
/p/ as in the first sound of pie /paɪ/ voiceless
/t/ as in the first sound of tie /taɪ/ voiceless
/r/ as in the first sound of rye /raɪ/
Consonant phonemes with doubled spellings* which are regular at the end of one-syllable words after a short vowel phoneme spelt with one letter
/k/ as in the first sound of coo /kuː/ voiceless
/ʧ/ as in the first sound of chew /ʧuː/ voiceless
/f/ as in the first sound of few /fjuː/
/ʤ/ as in the first sound of jaw /ʤɔː/
/l/ as in the first sound of law /lɔː/
/s/ as in the first sound of sue /suː/ voiceless
/v/ as in the first sound of view /vjuː/
/z/ as in the first sound of zoo /zuː/
Consonant phonemes without doubled spellings
/h/ as in the first sound of who /huː/
/ŋ/ as in the last sound of ring /rɪŋ/
/∫/ as in the third sound of fission /ˈfɪ∫ən/ voiceless
/ʒ/ as in the third sound of vision /ˈvɪʒən/
/θ/ as in the first sound of thigh /θaɪ/ voiceless
/ð/ as in the first sound of thy /ðaɪ/
/w/ as in the first sound of well /wel/
/j/ as in the first sound of yell, union /jel, ˈjuːnjən/
* For doubled spellings see section 3.2 and much of chapter 4.
2.4 The vowel phonemes of Received Pronunciation
Table 2.2 presents the IPA symbols for the 20 vowel phonemes of RP and, as mentioned in section 1.12, the 2-phoneme sequence /juː/.
TABLE 2.2: THE INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET SYMBOLS FOR THE 20 VOWEL PHONEMES OF THE RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION ACCENT OF ENGLISH, PLUS /juː/.
Short pure vowels
/æ/ as in the first sound of ant /ænt/
/e/ as in the first sound of end /end/
/ɪ/ as in the first sound of ink /ɪŋk/
/ɒ/ as in the first sound of ox /ɒks/
/ʌ/ as in the first sound of up /ʌp/
/ʊ/ as in the second sound of pull /pʊl/
/ə/ (schwa) as in the first sound of about /ə’baʊt
Long pure vowels
/ɑː/ as in the first sound of aardvark /ˈɑːdvɑːk/
/ɜː/ as in the first sound of earl /ɜːl/
/ɔː/ as in the whole sound of awe /ɔː/
/uː/ as in the first sound of ooze /uːz/
/iː/ * as in the first sound of eel /iːl/
Special 2-phoneme sequence
/juː/ * as in the first two sounds of union /ˈjuːnjən/
Diphthongs
/eɪ/ * as in the first sound of aim /eɪm/
/aɪ/ * as in the first sound of ice /aɪs/
/əʊ/ * as in the first sound of oath /əʊθ/
/aʊ/ as in the first sound of ouch /aʊʧ/
/ɔɪ/ as in the first sound of oyster /ˈɔɪstə/
/eə/ as in the whole sound of air /eə/
/ɪə/ as in the whole sound of ear /ɪə/
/ʊə/ as in the second sound of rural /ˈrʊərəl/
* These four vowel phonemes and /juː/ are the ‘letter-name’ vowels – see sections 5.1, 5.7, 6.2 and 6.3. Phoneme /uː/ also belongs with them.
The phonemes of spoken English 17 The last short pure vowel listed in Table 2.2, the /ə/ phoneme, is heard in
the first syllable of about /əˈbaʊt/ and the second syllable of oyster /ˈɔɪstə/.
It is the least distinctive phoneme in English – think how little effort is needed to say it. However, that does not mean it is unimportant, because it has three special characteristics:
• in RP it occurs only in unstressed syllables, and (almost) never in stressed syllables (except that RP-speakers now increasingly pronounce because as /bɪˈkəz/ rather than /bɪˈkɒz/). In occurring only in unstressed syllables /ə/ is unique among English vowel phonemes (but note that this applies only to English – in many other languages /ə/ occurs in both stressed and unstressed syllables);
• in (my analysis/version of) RP it is the only short vowel phoneme which occurs word-finally;
• it is the most frequent phoneme of all in spoken English, in every accent, because a high proportion of unstressed syllables contain it. In RP, for example, it constitutes about 10% of running speech.
Also uniquely, this phoneme has a special name (derived from Hebrew):
schwa, or the schwa vowel.
As stated in section 1.2, the phonetic symbols used in this book are identical to those used in the 18th (2011) edition of the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary. They are also identical to those used in most of the eight editions of Gimson’s Pronunciation of English, including the 7th.
However, as this book was nearing publication, my attention was drawn to the fact that, in the latest (eighth) edition of Gimson’s Pronunciation of English (Cruttenden, 2014), Cruttenden has introduced two changes:
• for the ‘short a’ sound, listed above as ‘/æ/ as in the first sound of ant’, he now uses plain /a/ (for the reasons for this see his page xvii);
• for /eə/ as in the whole sound of air he now uses /ɛː/, on the grounds that this phoneme, in the mouths of most speakers of ‘General British’
(≈ RP), is no longer a diphthong but a long pure vowel.
One of the current editors of the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary, Prof. Jane Setters of the University of Reading, kindly told me that, although she and her fellow editors are aware of these changes and use them in their teaching, they do not propose to introduce them into the Dictionary. Since I wish this this book to parallel the Dictionary I have not adopted them either.
2.5 Polysyllabic words and word stress
In all English words of two or more syllables, one of the syllables is spoken with heavier emphasis than the rest. For example:
• oyster is stressed on the first syllable
• about is stressed on the second syllable.
In IPA transcriptions the stressed syllable is marked with a small vertical notch placed in front of it: /ˈɔɪstə, əˈbaʊt/. Analysing and marking word stress is not just an exercise; many phoneme-grapheme and grapheme-phoneme correspondences apply only in words of more than one syllable, some only in stressed syllables, others only in unstressed syllables. The clearest example is the occurrence of /ə/ only in unstressed syllables.
Occasionally for simplicity I use an acute accent on the ordinary spelling of a word to indicate stress, e.g. aríthmetic (noun), arithmétic (adjective).
The question of predicting from the written form of polysyllabic words where the stress falls on them is attempted, and largely failed, in section A.10 in Appendix A.