English Phonology

Although our species has the scientific name Homo sapiens, ‘thinkinghuman’, it has often been suggested that an even more appropriate namewould be Homo loquens, or ‘speaking human’. Many species have soundbasedsignalling systems, and can communicate with other members ofthe same species on various topics of mutual interest, like approachingdanger or where the next meal is coming from. Most humans (leavingaside for now native users of sign languages) also use sounds for linguisticsignalling; but the structure of the human vocal organs allows a particularlywide range of sounds to be used, and they are also put togetherin an extraordinarily sophisticated way.

 

There are two subdisciplines in linguistics which deal with sound,namely phonetics and phonology, and to fulfil the aim of this book,which is to provide an outline of the sounds of various English accentsand how those sounds combine and pattern together, we will needaspects of both. Phonetics provides objective ways of describing andanalysing the range of sounds humans use in their languages. Morespecifically, articulatory phonetics identifies precisely which speechorgans and muscles are involved in producing the different sounds of theworld’s languages. Those sounds are then transmitted from the speakerto the hearer, and acoustic and auditory phonetics focus on the physicsof speech as it travels through the air in the form of sound waves, and theeffect those waves have on a hearer’s ears and brain. It follows thatphonetics has strong associations with anatomy, physiology, physics andneurology.

The discussion so far may suggest a rather straightforward dichotomy:phonetics is universal, while phonology is language-specific. But thingsare not quite that simple.

 

First, phonologists also attempt to distinguish those patterns whichare characteristic of a single language and simply reflect its history, fromothers where a more universal motivation is at issue. In the case of theabsence of *fnil, or more generally the absence of word-initial [fn-]clusters, we are dealing with a fact of modern English. It is perfectlypossible to produce this combination of sounds; there are words in manylanguages, including Norwegian fnise ‘giggle’, fnugg ‘speck’, which beginwith just that cluster; and indeed, it was quite normal in earlier periodsof English – sneeze, for example, has the Old English ancestor fne¯san,while Old English fnæd meant ‘hem, edge, fringe’; but it is not part of theinventory of sound combinations which English speakers learn and usetoday. The same goes for other initial clusters, such as [kn-]: this againwas common in Old English, as in cna¯wan ‘to know’, and survives intoModern English spelling, though it is now simply pronounced [n]; again,[kn-] is also perfectly normal in other languages, including German,where we find Knabe ‘boy’, Knie ‘knee’.

So far, the examples given have been rather general ones, or have involvedanalogies from outside language. Giving more detailed examplesdemands a more specific vocabulary, and a notation system dedicated tothe description of sounds. The English spelling system, although it is the system of transcription we are most used to, is both too restrictive andtoo lenient to do the job.

 

Without a universal transcription system for phonetics and phonology,writing down the unfamiliar sounds of other languages presentsan almost insuperable challenge. Take, for example, a sound which isused only paralinguistically in English (that is, for some purpose outsidethe language system itself), but which is a perfectly ordinary consonantin other languages, just as [b] in but or [l] in list are in English, namelythe ‘tut-tut’ sound made to signal disapproval. When we see this, we donot think of a whole word, but of a repeated clicking. This description ishopelessly inadequate, however, for anyone else trying to recognise thesound in question, or learn how to make it. Hearing a native speaker usethe ‘tut-tut’ click in a language where it is an ordinary consonant doesnot help us understand how the sound is made or how it compares withothers. Likewise, adopting the usual spelling from that language (assumingit is not one of the many without an orthography) might let us writethe ‘tut-tut’ sound down; but this technique would not produce a universalsystem for writing sounds of the world’s languages, since linguistswould tend to use their own spelling systems as far as possible, and optfor representations from the languages they happened to know for othersounds. There would be little consistency, and generalisation of such asystem would be difficult.