English Phonology

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.

Recognising that two objects or concepts are ‘the same but different’ought to present a major philosophical problem; the phrase itself seemsself-contradictory. However, in practice we categorise elements of ourworld in just this way on an everyday basis. A two-year-old can grasp thefact that his right shoe and left shoe are very similar, but actually belongon different feet; and as adults, we have no difficulty in recognisingthat lemons and limes are different but both citrus fruits, or that miseryand happiness are different but both emotions. This sort of hierarchicalclassification is exactly what is at issue when we turn to the notion of thephoneme.

Since we are more used to thinking explicitly about written languagethan about our speech, one way of approaching this issue of abstractionis through our conscious knowledge of the rules of writing. Whenchildren learn to write, they have to master the conventions governingthe use of capital and lower-case letters. Children often tend to learnto write their name before anything else, and this will have an initialcapital; and children are also great generalisers, and indeed overgeneralisers;for instance, first words often have a much wider range ofmeanings than their adult equivalents. Thus, for a one-year-old, cat maymean ‘any animal’ (whether real, toy, or picture), tractor ‘any vehicle’,and Daddy ‘any male adult’; these broad senses are later progressivelynarrowed down. It follows that children may at first try to write all wordswith initial capitals, until they are taught the accepted usage, which inmodern English is for capitals to appear on proper names, I, and the firstword in each sentence, and lower-case letters elsewhere, giving theprescribed patterns in (1).