Foreword

Getting there. Here's a more complete version of an earlier post.

Foreword

Letters and Phonemes

There is an admittedly uneasy blurring – in my approach, both here and in the first When Vowels Get Together book – between printed/written letters on one hand and phonemes. I look here at vowels "before an l" for example, and list words alphabetically (referring to letters as written). But the letter a represents the /ɒ/ phoneme only when it follows a /w/ phoneme (as in both "swallow" and "qualify") – in Received British Pronunciation, that is. In fact I was surprised that reviewers did not mention this – which, I suppose, might be regarded by some as a flaw.

My justification for this is based on the history of language development. Sounds always precede letters (except in special cases such as acronyms). Sometimes, the link between letters and phonemes remains firm (as in Castilian Spanish, which has a fairly reliable correspondence between letters and phonemes – nearly one-to-one, with a few exceptions). But in English this link is shakier.

The link is still there, though, when you consider the history of spellings. The common silent "gh" for example was originally an attempt to represent the sound /χ/ as in the Scottish "loch" or the German "Bach". In parts of Scotland, indeed, "night" is pronounced /nɪχt/ (as "night" was, at one time, in English); and in Northern Ireland a lake is a "lough", with (uniquely, among British English words – along with the Scottish "loch") the final consonant /χ/.

In some cases letters have no phonemic value – as is often the case with silent letters. There are various reasons for this. Two examples will give a hint of the (often meddlesome) justifications:

• The "b" in "debt" (Chaucer was writing "dette" in the fifteenth century, but later scholars imposed the "-bt" spelling in deference [some would say craven deference] to the Latin debitum.)
• The Greek "ρ" with a spiritus fortis (also known as a "rough breathing") persuaded scholars to take the word "rime" (as used by Coleridge, for example) and insist that it should be spelt with an "rh".

In other cases a "silent letter" spelling was imposed by false analogy with another word with a silent letter that had once had a phonemic value. For example both "should" and "would" had one of these "real" silent letters (the words were sceolde and wolde, the past tenses of sculan and willan). But the past tense of another word that came to be used as a modal verb (like "would" and "should") was a word that Chaucer, for example, had spelt "koude" – with no phonemic "justification" for a silent l. So, basing their suggestion on a false analogy, language "experts", (thinking "modal verbs that end /ʊd/ should share the spelling -ould "), introduced the spelling "could". (I wonder if the irony was intentional in Dr Johnson's definition of lexicographer as "a harmless drudge";  some would say that the harm lexicographers have done has sometimes been a major contribution to the complexities of English spelling.)

But quite often (I would guess more oftten than not, excepting Magic E spellings [where the presence of the e makes its presence felt, audibly, alhough it itself is not sounded]) the presence of a silent written letter does have some force with reference either to pronunciation at some stage in the development of the language or to etymology.

So while it would be wrong to say that written letters in English correspond to phonemes, quite often they make some reference to a real sound produced at some time in the chequered history of English (though, on reflection, a chequerboard seems an inappropriately regular image; a fiendishly irregular patchwork quilt, with the colours bleeding into each other seemingly randomly, would be nearer the mark.

Anyway, for better or worse, these books use alphabetical lists for convenience.

A note about my major source

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 giving examples of actual pronunciations]. Historically, it was chosen in unspoken (and un-called for) sympathy with an application for the Macmillan Education Award for New Talent in Writing. For the record, the CD-ROM's Version number is 2.3.0711, Impression 5. When, as is occasionally the case, I have found a discrepancy between the pronunciations given on the CD-ROM and at Macmillan Online Dictionary, I imagine that there has been an update to the CD-ROM.

b

Update 2016.09.06.14:15 – Supplied version number of CD-ROM.