Introductory pieces for *UL*

Last time (here)  I made a silly mistake, but it was a one-letter typo which people will either have missed or overlooked or not cared about: I announced a *UL* chart and wrote about another chart entirely.

Here now is the *UL* one – though as with the other one, it is not meant to be part of the book:

And here's a first draft of the resulting text:

The sounds /ʊ/ and /jʊ/ – 80%

This vowel, either preceded or not by a /j/ glide (in largely predictable contexts), is present in a majority of *UL* words (although, because of the exclusions outlined in the Introduction , it is outnumbered in this collection by words listed in the next section).

The sound /ʌ/ – 16%

This represents an unusually low proportion for a 2nd-ranked phoneme.

The sounds /u:/ and /ju:/ – 3%

This vowel, either preceded or not by a /j/ glide (in largely predictable contexts), accounts for very few words. The /l/ is almost always sounded, except in some names (such as Leverhulme – /li:vəhju:m/).

The sounds /ə/ and /jə/ – percentage negligible

In the Macmillan English Dictionary only one *UL* word is transcribed with the sound /jə/ (formula). But as the note to that word says, many words with the sound /jʊ/ can often be heard with the /jə/ sound.