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Phoneme Inventory - For the March issue of the Simpl Speling Newsletter
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 500 ways."
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 in English, it is nearly impossible to reach agreement on the number of combinations. Here is why.
The number of pure vowels is complicated by the fact that two of them have been obscured. Two pure vowels were never assigned a letter in the traditional orthography. One of these pure vowels is often represented by the digraph [er] as in "her." the other, [schwa], has been represented by all 5 vowel letters and several digraphs. Except for a difference in stress, the sound of schwa is the same as the "so called" short [u]. It is therefore possible for those who do not want to indicate stress, to merge schwa and /^/. This makes it impossible to fully represent the pronunciation of [a'bu't]. Nu Folik and Chekt Spelng notations use the schwapostrophe to indicate the central vowels [a' schwa] and [u'p]. "Jun wi.sht shi cu.d tu'rn h'r tu'rnip tru'k a'raund." [u, i., i, u. 'r, u' a' ] are all pure vowels. [au] is a diphthong.
The phoneme inventory was charted over 100 years ago by Pitman, Ellis, Jones, and Sweet. They were all searching for the minimum number of phonemes required to graphically represent educated southern English speech. They all agreed on the number of pure phonemes and were very close to agreeing on the number of significant phonemes including blends and combinations.
According to the linguists, the minimum number of significant sounds was between 42 and 48 for RP. Most orthographers have been content to work with about 40. Orthography is a pragmatic technology, not science. It is more important to keep it simple than to be accurate.
Longman's pronunciation dictionary recognizes 45 (21v-24c) [www.awl-elt.com]. Longman's recognizes schwa but merges (a: and o). The combinations [hw] and [yu:] are not singled out. Five of the phonemes are r-combinations. If these are eliminated, the number of significant phonemes is reduced to 40.
I think the r-combinations are problematic so in the chart for Chekt Spelng, I list not 5 but 8. The extra vowels make the chart symmetrical (24v-24c). The cells with the lightest shade of gray are the pure vowels. The organization is more or less alphabetical. The central vowels are all listed in one row and are all marked with an apostrophe. Since the shwapostrofi is sufficient to mark the schwa sound alone but looks strange. o' and 'y are blends with shwa..
This chart can be reduced by 50%
to achieve a passable 150 dpi resolution.
I can convert this to gray scale to see if the colors are
different enough.
This layout of this chart was determined by the consonants which fall into three general categories. voiced, unvoiced, and other. The consonants are listed in a kind of alphabetical order: b, ch, d, dh, f, g, s, sh. It might make more sense to list them alphabetically by voiced consonant. The lighter shaded cells are unmixed or pure. Three of the r combinations ar, aur, and yr are not considered essential in many lists. [o.] is in white because it is often merged with [a:] in pronunciation guides.
There are 12 pure vowels (6 chekt, 6 free) and 22 pure phonemes for a total of 34 total unblended sounds. These phonemes are shown in the lighter shaded cells in the chart. Almost everyone recognizes these phonemes although some systems will merge schwa and /^/ and others will merge /o./ and /a:/. Everyone agrees that the consonants tsh and dzh are essential as are the diphthongs ei ai ou au and oi. This bring the total to 40.
In addition, most systems, other than Truespel, consider /ng/ to be an essential phoneme. Truespel does not recognize /ng/ as a phoneme because they cannot find a word whose meaning would be changed if it were not distinguished from the consonant combination [ng].
The 34 is the only solid number we can use. This number includes
schwa and schwr.
Since consonants do not give us much trouble, our attention can be focused on how best to array the vowels of English.
While the number of pure vowels for American English and British English are the same, they are not always distributed and combined exactly the same way for some words. For example, vowel blend or diphthong found in the word [eye] or the personal pronoun [I] is usually [schwa+I] in British pronunciation and [a:I] in American pronunciation.
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In many notations, schwa is merged with /^/. This can be done
if you do not want
to indicate stress. I think the use of the schwa simplifies
spelling. [a'bu't]
One can also merge the short O and /a:/.
There are 5 essential diphthongs (ai, ei, oi, ou, au) and 2
(j, ch) essential consonant blends.
This bring the total up to 41.
There are any number of combinations which may need to be
formalized depending
on how messy the notation and the kind of precision you want in
the pronunciation.
> The generally-accepted view is that there are 44 phonemes
in British
> Received Pronunciation.
> This includes the schwa.
> Diane McGuinness gives the figure for American English as
42.
Plees see my post which lists the sounds that most English
dictionaries give
I think the difference is due to the sounds with <r>
Some include these in the basic
3 air HAIR ***
4 ar ARM ***
10 er HER ***
This would give a total of 41 + 3
to give your figure of 44
> By the way, shouldn't we be talking about different
accents
> rather than different dialects?
> Dialects are to do with vocabulary and grammar rather than
> strictly to do with pronunciation.
