A New Hope

For a little over three years, my one and only blog has been here. It combined a certain amount of whimsy with reflections on ESOL, choral, musical, autobiographical, and linguistic issues. It also had details of #WVGTbook progress , and – for lack of Blogger nous  – a footer at the end of each post (which was all very well when I had only a handful of footers to update, but has become increasingly embarrassing/onerous as I approach my 250^th post).

From now on I shall confine this blog  to work on the book, and I'm kicking off with an excerpt from its proposed Introduction.

First draft of part of the Introduction

One of the most striking things about English, for an ESOL student, is its inconsistency of spelling. When Vowels Get Together showed how vowels could come together with other vowels to represent new sounds – sometimes as many as a dozen. When a vowel comes before a consonant, the result is generally less variable. The first two vowel sounds of parental are different from the vowel sounds in paternal, although the letters are the same.  And those four different vowel sounds are different again from the first two in prenatal,  though it too shares all the same letters. The vowel sounds are, respectively, /eə/ and /e/, / ə/ and /ɜː/, and /i:/ and /eɪ/.  But not all consonants are equally resistant to variability in the sound of the vowel that precedes it.

Before a stop consonant (in English, /p/, /k/, /t/ and their voiced counterparts /b/, /d/, and /g/) the letter a can represent only a few sounds – mainly /æ/, /ə/, /eɪ/, and /ɒ/  (as in pat/pad, paternal/poppadom, pate [the tonsorial sort]/made, and swat/squad. There are a few exceptions, notably in foreign borrowings and when  preceding a t that works in  conjunction with h to represent one of the dental fricatives /θ/ (path) and /ð/ (father). In this case (th), the exception is easily dealt with by a rule. The foreign borrowings are often proper nouns, such as Dada, Lada, and Prada; and they do not necessarily have to come from very far afield – as for example Scapa Flow. When the German fleet was scuttled there in 1919, it was called /skɑ:pə fləʊ/; but in the South of England it soon became  /skæpə fləʊ/, although this pronunciation left a fossil in the Rhyming Slang scarper  (="go") – where the vowel length is preserved by the insertion of an r.

But, before a consonant such as l, an a can represent 7 different vowel sounds; and sometimes the l "gives its life so dearly" that it disappears entirely after making the change, bringing to 10 the total of different letter/phoneme combinations. As well as the predictable Big Four (/əl/, /æl/, /eɪl/, and /ɒl/), there are these sounds: /ɔ:l/ and /ɔ:/ (also and talk),  /ɑ:/(calm) [as opposed to /ɑ:l/, which matches the normal exception mentioned above, /æ/ (salmon), /ɒl/ (swallow), and /ʌl/ (in a very few foreign borrowings, such as haldi). In fact, this last exception is so rare that its use is variable: the Macmillan English Dictionary, for  example, transcribes it with /ʌ/, but demonstrates it (in the audio clip) with /æ/. (Note that this book makes frequent reference to the Macmillan English Dictionary, not because of any particular hostility or preference of mine; it is simply because that was the dictionary I happened to have [that came with a CD-ROM]. Historically, it was chosen in sympathy with an application for the Macmillan Education Award for New Talent in Writing).

Note that I have included /ɒ/ in this list of variable pronunciations of "al", despite its being matched in words such as swap. The reason for this is that the /ɒ/ in swap is always represented by an a preceded by a w or a qu – that is, by a /w/ phoneme. In contrast, words spelt "wal..." have the a often representing /ɒ/ but sometimes standing for any one of several other sounds (/ɔ:l/ and /ɔ:/ in wall/squall and walk, /ɑ:/ in qualm or /eɪl/ in swale [a word that, although not very common, appears in 23 General English dictionaries found by Onelook] and a further 8 specialist ones). This introduces a further level of possible confusion for the ESOL student trying to match spellings to sounds.

This book adds to the When Vowels Get Together stable with a selection of such consonants, so that the first book can be seen as When Vowels Get Together [with other vowels] and this new addition is When Vowels Get Together [with <TBS> consonants]. The definition of <TBS> includes the consonants , but not necessarily all of them, justifying the title Whirly-gig as a working title (with the possible inclusion of /n/, /ŋ /, and /m/ if I find them sufficiently interesting).

The UCL's SAMPA page (SAMPA being a typewriter-friendly* form of phonetic transcription, in  which "N" – for example – represents the IPA symbol /ŋ/ [the nasal consonant at the end of sing] ) defines sonorant consonants like this:

The sonorants are three nasals m n N, two liquids r l, and two sonorant glides w j

[BK: note that j is the glide often represented in English as "y"].

UCL's SAMPA page 

*The web-site says 'computer-friendly' rather than typewriter-friendly, but surely in the 21st century there is not a computer – outside a museum, that is – that can't handle Unicode.

This grouping of the sonorants may at first sight seem rather arbitrary, but a quirk of English demonstrates their inter-relatedness. Consider words that can be given a negative spin by attaching the prefix in- elegant/inelegant, for example. Students of ESOL know that there are several exceptions – for words with an initial l or m or r:  illicit, immoral, irrespective... These exception-creating letters are nearly always sonorants (the im- one applies also to bilabials, as in imprecise and imbecile...).

An example from another language relates to Japanese speakers' problem with the English phonemes /r/ and /l/ . Both [r] and [l] sounds do exist in Japanese, but as context-dependent variations (allophones) of a single phoneme. (If the idea of allophones is new to you, consider the English words leek and keel. In the first, the [l] sound is formed toward the front of the mouth [the so-called "clear l"] and the [k] is formed at the back of the hard palate. In the second, the  the [k] sound is formed toward the front of the mouth,  and the [l] is formed at the back [the so-called "dark l"]. In both cases the different [l]s and [k]s belong to the same /l/ and /k/ phonemes.

Update 2016.01.10.11:05  – Fixed a couple of typos, and made a tweak (in blue).
Update 2016.01.11.10:00  – A few tiny tweaks (so small that marking them as changes would have taken lomger than actually making them).
Update 2016.06.24.15:05  – Added last two paragraphs (in green).