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.

The situation is worse with ‘exotic’ sounds which do not happen tocoincide even with those used paralinguistically in English: gropingtowards a description in ordinary English is far too vague to allow accuratereproduction of the sound in question; and indeed, such soundstended by early commentators to be regarded as unstable or not quiteproper. John Leighton Wilson, who published a brief description ofthe African language Grebo in 1838, had considerable difficulties withsounds which do not have an obvious English spelling, and tended toresolve this by simply not transcribing them at all. Thus, he notes that‘There is a consonant sound intermediate between b and p, whichis omitted … with the expectation that it will, in the course of time,gradually conform to one or the other of the two sounds to which itseems allied’. Similarly, he observes ‘a few words in the language socompletely nasal that they cannot be properly spelled by any combinationof letters whatever’.

 

It is for these reasons that the International Phonetic Alphabet wasproposed in 1888; it has been under constant review ever since by theInternational Phonetic Association, and the latest revision dates from1996. It is true that a certain amount of learning is required to becomefamiliar with the conventions of the IPA and the characteristics of sounds underlying the notation: but once you know that ‘tut-tut’ is [|], analveolar click, it will always be possible to produce the relevant soundaccurately; to write it down unambiguously; and to recognise it in otherlanguages.

 

Although a universal system of description and transcription mightbe desirable in principle, and even in practice when dealing with unfamiliarlanguages and sounds, readers of a book both in and on Englishmight question the necessity of learning the IPA. However, precisely thesame types of problems encountered above also appear in connectionwith the phonology of English, and some new ones besides.

 

First, there is considerable ambiguity in the English spelling system,and it works in both directions: many sounds to one spelling, and manyspellings to one sound. The former situation results in ‘eye-rhymes’, orforms which look as if they ought to have the same pronunciation, butdon’t. There are various doggerel poems about this sort of ambiguity(often written by non-native speakers who have struggled with thesystem): one begins by pointing out a set of eye-rhymes – ‘I gather youalready know, Of plough and cough and through and dough’. Those fourwords, which we might expect to rhyme on the basis of the spelling, infact end in four quite different vowels, and cough has a final consonanttoo. On the other hand, see, sea, people, amoeba and fiend have the same long[i:] vowel, but five different spellings.

 

Despite these multiple ambiguities, attempts are regularly made toindicate pronunciations using the spelling system. None are whollysuccessful, for a variety of different reasons. The lack of precision involvedcan be particularly frustrating for phonologists trying to discovercharacteristics of earlier stages of English. John Hart, a well-knownsixteenth-century grammarian, gives many descriptions of the pronunciationsof his time, but the lack of a standard transcription systemhampers him when it comes to one of the major mysteries of Englishphonology at this period, namely the sound of the vowel spelled a. Hartmentions this explicitly, and tells us that it is made ‘with wyde openingof the mouthe, as when a man yawneth’: but does that mean a back vowel,the sort now found for Southern British English speakers in father, ora front one, like the father vowel for New Zealanders or Australians?Similarly, Thomas Low Nichols, discussing mid-nineteenth-centuryAmerican English, notes that ‘It is certain that men open their mouthsand broaden their speech as they go West, until on the Mississippi theywill tell you “thar are heaps of bar [bear] over thar, whar I was raised”’.Here we have two related difficulties: the nature of the a vowel, and whatthe orthographic r means, if anything. Most British English speakers(those from Scotland, Northern Ireland and some areas of the West Country excepted) will pronounce [r] only immediately before a vowel:so a London English speaker would naturally read the quote with [r] atthe end of the first thar, bar and whar, but not the second thar, where thenext word begins with a consonant. However, a Scot would produce [r]in all these words, regardless of the following sound. Which is closer towhat Thomas Low Nichols intended? Orthographic r is still problematictoday: when Michael Bateman, in a newspaper cookery column, writesthat ‘This cook, too, couldn’t pronounce the word. It’s not pah-eller; it’spie ey-yar’, he is producing a helpful guide for most English Englishspeakers, who will understand that his ‘transcription’ of paella indicatesa final vowel, since they would not pronounce [r] in this context inEnglish; but he is quite likely to confuse Scots or Americans, who wouldpronounce [r] wherever r appears in English spelling, and may thereforeget the mistaken idea that paella has a final [r] in Spanish. In short, the factthat there are many different Englishes, and that each quite properly hasits own phonological interpretations of the same spelling system (which,remember, is multiply ambiguous in the first place), means we encounterinevitable difficulties in trying to use spelling to give explicit informationabout sounds.

 

The same problems arise in a slightly different context when writerstry to adapt the spelling system to indicate accent differences:

(Mark Lawson, The Battle for Room Service:Journeys to all the safe places, Picador (1994), 22)

 

Lawson succeeds in showing that a difference exists between NewZealand and English English, and provides a very rough approximationof that difference. However, anyone who has listened to New Zealandspeakers will know that their pronunciation of pen is not identical toSouthern British English pin, as Lawson’s notation would suggest; andreaders who have not encountered the variety might arrive at a numberof different interpretations of his comments that New Zealand vowelsare ‘squeezed’ or ‘elongated’. The National Centre for English CulturalTradition in Sheffield has produced a list of local phrases, again ren-dered in a modified version of English spelling: it includes intitot (‘Isn’t ithot?’), eez gooinooam (‘he’s going home’), and lerrus gerrus andzwesht (‘Let’sget our hands washed’). Sometimes the modifications are obvious; thelack of h in intitot suggests that no [h] is pronounced, and the substitutionof r for t in lerrus gerrus signals the common northern English weakeningof [t] to [r] between vowels. But why double rr? The double vowel lettersin gooinooam presumably signal long vowels; but the rr in lerrus certainlydoes not mean a long consonant. Such lists are amusing when the readerknows the variety in question; but reading the list in a respectable imitationof an unfamiliar accent would be rather a hit and miss affair.

 

The same goes for dialect literature, even when there is an informallyagreed set of emendations to the spelling system, as is perhaps thecase for Scottish English. Tom Leonard’s poem ‘Unrelated Incidents (3)’begins:

this is thi

six a clock

news thi

man said n

thi reason

a talk wia

BBC accent

iz coz yi

widny wahnt

mi ti talk

aboot thi

trooth wia

voice lik

wanna yoo

scruff

 

Again, many of the alterations are entirely transparent for a readerwho is familiar with Scottish English – aboot does sound like a-boot ratherthan having the diphthong usually found in Southern British Englishabout, and widny rather than wouldn’t is both clear and accurate. However,not everything is so obvious.Trooth is written to match aboot, and the twowords do have the same vowel in Scots – but the former is pronouncedlike its English English equivalent, whereas the latter is not; so we mightask, why alter both? Thi is consistently written for the, and there is indeeda slight difference in those final vowels between the two varieties; butif we compare Tom Leonard with Mark Lawson, the impression given isthat thi (= the) for a Scot sounds like pin (= pen) for a New Zealander,which is not the case at all.

 

In some cases of this type, there are attempts to introduce newsymbols into the English spelling system to represent accent differences:one particularly common device is to use an apostrophe. This hasbecome a fairly conventional and familiar device; but again, it turns outto be ambiguous. For instance, take the three phrases I feel ’ot, She waswaitin’, and Give us the bu’er. The first is perhaps the most straightforward:many speakers of non-standard varieties of English consistently droptheir [h]s (and we all do, in pronouns under low stress, for instance, as inWhat did he say?, where [h] will be pronounced only in extraordinarilycareful speech). In this case, then, the apostrophe means the standard [h]is omitted. This might, however, lead us to believe that an apostrophealways means something is missing, relative to the standard pronunciation.Informal characterisations might support this hypothesis, sincespeakers producing forms like waitin’ and bu’er are frequently describedas ‘dropping their gs’ and ‘dropping their ts’ (or ‘swallowing their ts’)respectively: an article in The Independent of 28 June 2000 reports that‘… the entire cast of East Enders … swallow their ts, ps and ks like trueGlasgow speakers when using such words as “sta’ement” and “sea’belt”’.However, the phonetic facts suggest otherwise. Whereas ’ot simply lacksan initial consonant, waitin’ does not lack a final one: instead, the final [ŋ]of waiting has been replaced by [n] (recall the discussion of incoherentversus intemperate above). For most speakers, apart from some from theMidlands and north of England, there was no [g] to drop in the firstplace, simply one nasal in more formal circumstances, which shifts toanother nasal in informal conversation. In bu’er, we also find one consonant,this time [t], being replaced by another, the glottal stop; but thistime, the replacement is only found in English as an alternative foranother sound. It has no independent orthographic representation, andis strongly associated with informal, non-standard and stigmatisedusage.

 

If we are to consider these variants objectively, however, we need asystem of notation which will allow us to observe them neutrally, providingtranscriptions of each variety in its own terms: seeing the glottal stopas IPA [ʔ], which is a perfectly normal consonant in, say, Arabic, ratherthan regarding it as an unsymbolisable grunt, or a debased form ofanother consonant, may allow us to analyse the facts of accent variationwithout seeing every departure from an idealised standard variety asrequiring apology. The linguistic arbitrariness but social groundingof such judgements is apparent from forms like car park – a standardSouthern British English pronunciation will have no [r] in either word,and to a Scottish English speaker with both [r]s invariably produced,there is certainly something missing; but I have not seen this represented as ca’ pa’k, or heard southerners accused of ‘swallowing their [r]s’.For all these cases, what we need is a consistent, agreed system oftranscription, so that we can assess the accent differences we find andcompare them with confidence. Of course, no purely phonetic system isgoing to help with the meaning of items of vocabulary a reader has notmet before – an IPA transcription will not tell you what a bampot is, orglaur, or a beagie, if you don’t know. But at least you have the comfort ofknowing how the natives pronounce it.

 

At the same time, this is an introductory text on English, and not ahandbook of general phonetics, so only those sections of the IPA relevantto English sounds will be considered, beginning with consonants inChapter 3, and moving on to vowels, where most accent variation inEnglish is concentrated. However, before introducing the IPA in detail,we must also confront a phonological issue. As we have already seen,native speakers of a language cannot always be relied upon to hear everytheoretically discernible gradation of sound. In some cases, the IPAsupplies alternative symbols in cases where speakers will be quite surethey are hearing the same thing; and this is not a universal limitation ofhuman ears, but rather varies from language to language. To illustratethis, and to resolve the problem that sometimes speakers think they arehearing something quite different from what they objectively are hearing,we must introduce the concept of the phoneme.