As we learned last week, language is a system, and one of the basic structures of that system is its phonology. This week we will learn about how sounds are made with the mouth and how to classify and describe these sounds. The general term for the speech sounds we make when speaking is phones. The primary mistake students make when discussing phones is thinking that they have something to do with letters or spelling. As anyone who can read English knows, spelling is a terrible way to learn how to pronounce a word. For the next two weeks as we discuss phones, try to ignore spelling as much as possible and concentrate instead on the sounds of words. As an example, think about the three words “lit,” “late,” and “light.” There are major spelling differences between these words, both in the number of letters of each word and in the arrangement of those letters. The first one seems rather straightforward as a spelling, but the second one ends with a “silent e,” and the third one has 3 letters between the “l” and the “t.” In terms of sounds though, these three words differ in only one way. They are each composed of three phones: the first is an “l” sound and the last is a “t” sound. The middle vowel sound is the only difference, but we use very strange ways to indicate those sounds in writing. Is “igh” really a good way to indicate what we call the long “i” sound? We could use the spelling “lite” but even then, why is there a letter at the end that is completely unpronounced? A silent “e” at the end of a word makes no more sense than a silent “gh.”
The reason we don’t have a problem pronouncing these words when we see them is because we understand the conventions of English orthography (spelling), but only after spending many years in school learning them. Spelling is conventional in the same way that the connection between the signifier and the signified in a linguistic sign is conventional, because as a community we have agreed that we will use certain symbols in a certain order to represent speech sounds. We have agreed that letters like silent “e” will indicate how to say a certain vowel; or that in some words “gh” will be silent, and in others it will sound like “f” (as in “enough”). These are purely conventions that we accept. Sometimes people decide to change the conventions. It’s common to see spellings like “tonite” or “enuf” or even something more extreme like “cya l8r.” These are equally valid as representations of words as “tonight” “enough” or “see you later,” but not everyone has agreed with their usage, i.e., not everyone accepts the new conventions of spelling because they prefer the old ones.
As long as this agreement is maintained, there is no serious problem with English spelling, but it is insufficient for the purposes of linguistic study. Linguists must have a visual way of representing all the different sounds that exist in all the different languages in the world, and the English alphabet simply cannot handle that. Even if we were to ignore the problem of silent letters above, our other letters can often signify multiple phones. For example, the letter “o” is pronounced differently in each of the following words: open, of, off, shoot, brown, women, pot. It would be far too imprecise for a linguist attempting to specify a certain sound to say “the o sound as in ‘pot’.”
Linguists therefore use a different alphabet to represent phones: the International Phonetic Alphabet (or IPA). In IPA, the symbol /o/ represents only the sound in “open.” Other symbols would be used for the sounds in the other words given above.
This week you must learn the basic symbols of IPA, at least the 39 used for sounds in English. Pay close attention whenever you see letters within slashes / / or square brackets [ ]. These indicate that you are dealing with IPA symbols, not alphabetic letters.
