![]() ![]() The last revision was fairly recent, in 2015. The most useful thing about the IPA is that, unlike English spelling, there’s no ambiguity about which sound a given symbol refers to. The first version of the IPA was created over 100 years ago, in 1888, and it’s been revised many times over the years. It’s called the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA. We need some way to be able to refer to particular speech sounds, not to English letters. Fortunately, linguists have developed a useful tool for doing exactly that. So here’s the problem: as linguists, we’re primarily interested in speech and listening, but our English writing system is notoriously bad at representing speech sounds accurately. ![]() Not all languages have writing systems, and not everyone who speaks a language can read or write it, so those skills are secondary. So in linguistics, we say that speaking and listening are the primary linguistic skills. The important thing to remember for our purposes is that everyone who knows a language can speak and understand it, and children learn to speak and understand spoken language automatically. There’s even variation within each speaker of English, depending on the context: the way you speak is going to be different depending on if you’re hanging out with your friends or interviewing for a job or talking on the phone to your grandmother. British English sounds quite different from Canadian English, which is different from Australian English, and Indian English is quite different again, even though all of these varieties are spelled in nearly the same way. Spelling hasn’t actually changed much since 1611, but English pronunciation sure has, so the way we produce the sounds of English has diverged from how we write the language.įurthermore, English is spoken all over the world, with many different regional varieties. A lot of our standard spellings became consistent when the Authorized Version of the Bible was published in the year 1611. When we borrow words like cappuccino or champagne, we adapt the pronunciation to fit into English but we often retain the spelling from the original language.Īnother factor is that the English spelling system was standardized hundreds of years ago when it became possible to print books. Modern English also borrows words from lots of languages. So even the earliest form of English was influenced by many different languages. When the technology to print books was invented, there was influence from Dutch. But then Normans invaded and brought all kinds of French and Latin words with their spellings. The area where English first evolved was first inhabited by people who spoke early forms of Germanic and Celtic dialects. There are a lot of reasons for why that might be. The letter “c” represents four quite different sounds. Not only can a single sound be represented by very many different spellings, but even a single spelling is not consistent with the sounds that it represents.Įven one letter can be pronounced in a whole lot of different ways. ![]() Here we’ve got a sequence of four letters that appear in the same order in the same position in each word, but that sequence of letters is pronounced in five different ways in English. But it’s not just the vowels that are the problem.Įnglish has the opposite problem as well. Some of them are more common ways than others of spelling the sound, but even if we take away the ones that English borrowed from other languages, that still leaves five different ways of spelling one sound. One of the problems is that English has only five letter characters that represent vowels, but more than a dozen different vowel sounds. Say, weigh, they, rain, flame, lei, café, toupee, balletĪll of them contain the same vowel sound,, but the sound is spelled with nine different combinations of letters. You might have already noticed that there’s a challenge to talking about speech sounds - English spelling is notoriously messy. ![]() In the first part of this book, we’re concentrating on the sounds of human speech. ![]()
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