Phonetics is the study of speech sounds.
Most of the sounds of speech we make are represented by letters in the Alphabet – ABC. In phonetics the names of the letters are not important: the sound the letters represent is most important. We know those sounds best as being the short sounds of the letters. The letter B is called ‘be’ but the sound it makes is ‘bu’. By the way, the short sound each letter makes is called a phoneme. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound.
A phoneme can be a consonant [a pluck] or it can be a vowel [a vibration]. Together, a consonant and a vowel make a syllable. We speak in syllables. Syllables make words. It is true that we write in words, but we speak in syllables. Making the right syllable makes for clearer speech.
Below are the names and phonemes of the letters used in English and the other long vowels used to make English speech.
Footnote I am sad to report that [recently] in Phonics [reading and writing] the phoneme of L is given as ‘ul’. The letter L never makes that sound – ul. The sound ‘ul’ appears at the end of words that are spelt …el, …le, or … al for example the words little and animal both end in ‘ul’. No word that starts with L starts with the sound ‘ul’. The ‘ul’ sound can be found at the beginning of this word ‘ultra’ but L is a consonant and ‘ultra’ begins with a vowel. The phoneme of L is ‘lu’. I am also sad to report that R [ar] is a vowel. It is the vowel in car – ar. The consonant phoneme for R is ‘ru’ but like A, E, I, and O, the sound R is a pure vowel.
Hold your knowledge lightly.
Letters at the beginning of of the alphabet most likely start words, and letters at the end most likely end words. That is how the alphabet is ordered. The alphabet is Phoenician so it’s an old system and based on writing of consonant phonemes. bu’ – ku – du – fu – gu. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound. The names of letters are not single sounds at all: for example ‘bu’ + E make ‘B’. The letters are actually syllables. Syllables have a consonant and a vowel, ‘bu’ is the consonant and E. is the vowel.
Rather than order letters from A-Z they can be grouped based on what vowel they use. For example B, C, D, E, G, P, T, V and Z end in E. Sometimes it helps to group the sounds differently.
Fun Fact: What can only be found in nature? The answer is, the name of this letter ‘H’. It is spelt ‘aych’. It is not spelt haych! The sound ‘aych’ is nowhere else in English. The phoneme of H is ‘hu’. It makes the sound ‘hu’. H never makes the sound aych. Even in the word nature, the syllable is split in two, nay-chu[r], so the sound ‘H’ does not exist as a syllable except for it’s name. The letter H Is mutton dressed up as lamb! A fraud! There is no H in English! The letter W is another one. It just goes to show that knowing the names doesn’t help you to say anything. The phonemes, i.e. the short sounds are where it’s at.
Footnote: the English girl’s name Rachael is the only other place you hear it. If you are called Rachael r + atch + ul you are as unique as nature because you have ‘aych’ in your name, but as they say, ‘you can’t use proper names as evidence coz proper names are made up, and you can’t make stuff up’. That leaves only the word nature.
The funny thing is – Who called H – aych? I’ll bet it was a Phoenician scribe whose name was aych!
Blending Sounds
Some of the consonant phonemes – ABC – blend to make sounds like cr, pr, str, scr, and str. Those sounds are called consonant blends or clusters. There are about 18 single consonants and 27 consonant blends so there are about 45 consonant sounds altogether. If you times that by the 17 vowels there are about 780 English syllables. We don’t use all of the possible syllables but we use about 500.
Note that some of the consonant blends are misspelt. For example sky has a ‘gu’ not a ‘ku’ in it, and sport is pronounced sbort. The reason for this may be that both ‘ku’/’gu’ and ‘pu’/’bu’ are consonant pairs. A consonant pair is the same mouth shape but the noise comes from wind or your voice box. These paired sounds are mouthed the same way but are described as voiced or wind sounds. – b/p, k/g, f/v, s/z t/d, th’ bath/with.
The Alphabet only represents 9 of the 17 vowel sounds in English. From the alphabet we get A, E, I, O and a’, e’, i, o’, and u’, but there is also, oow [glue], Ow [how], or [for], ar [far] ur [fur], air [hair], oy [boy] and ou [should]. There is no rule for how those vowels are spelt. The vowel ‘air’ is spelt, there, their, they’re, stare, and chair. This is why phonics [sounds and writing] is so difficult to teach. When demonstrating sound it helps to stick to one spelling. Don’t stair at the chair over thair. – ABC
All the Sounds of English
Making SPEECH SYLLABLES
This is going to be confusing so strap yourself in.
All English words are at least one syllable except for these words, ‘a’ ‘eye’ ‘or’, ‘air’ and ‘are’ which are vowels. Syllables have a consonant and a vowel. The shortest syllables are two letter words like be, to, go, and my. The longest single syllable words are ‘screeched’ and ‘stretched’. They are all one note. Some syllables have meaning but meaning is given to blends of syllables. The word little has two syllables that don’t mean anything on their own ‘li’-‘tul’ but mean something together. The word wa-ter-me-lon has 4 syllables. If you put the back of your hand under your chin and say watermelon your chin will drop 4 times. That’s called the chin drop method for counting syllables. With the word stretched your chin drops once.
In the sentence, My name is Tom, there are 4 words and each word is a syllable. Do you know how to read it aloud? In speech you have to start with a consonant and end in a vowel. To say that sentence the syllables change to my-nay-miz-tom. You can check it using the chin drop method. Writing deals with this phenomenon by including the ‘an’ article so an egg becomes u-neg; an apple become a – na-pul and an elephant becomes u’-ne’-lu’-funt. So, as you can see, the way we speak and the sounds we hear are different to writing. This happens when words begin with a vowel, It is easy to read ‘a number’ but more difficult to read ‘an umbrella’. Once you see they both begin u-num it becomes easier to read.