Re: YAEPT: Enuf is Enuf: Some Peepl Thru with Dificult Spelingz

On 7/7/06, Caleb Hines <bachmusic1@...> wrote:
> I have no strong opinions on the topic one way or another, but the following
> article may be of interest to some on this list.
>
> http://www.livescience.com/othernews/ap_060707_simpler_spelling.html
Of interest, surely...

"[The American Literacy Council] says English has 42 sounds spelled in
a bewildering 400 ways."

My pop-sci decoder ring interprets this as a statement that English
has 42 phonemes.  How does that number track for you folks?

The consonant set is probably not subject to too much dispute.  I count 24:

/p/,/b/,/tS/,/dZ/,/t/,/d/,/f/,/v/,/k/,/g/,/h/,/S/,/Z/,/l/,/m/,/n/,/N/,/r/,/s/,/z/,/w/,/j/,/T/,/D/

Which presumably leaves 18 vowels.  Anyone care to guess which 18 the
ALC recognizes?  (The full list isn't available on their website; you
have to buy their book, I guess.)

Wells gives 27 vocalic lexical sets, but they don't map to phonemes
one-to-one; there are sets like BATH which don't represent unique
phonemes.  That number also includes /oi/ and various vowel+R pairs,
which might be regarded as biphonemic by some analysts, although this
page on the ALC website implies that such sequences are counted
separately:

http://www.americanliteracy.com/variations.htm

Counting such sequences as monophonemic, even after all of the mergers
in my 'lect (most of which are generally true over here in Leftpondia,
and one might assume that the *American* Literary Council would base
its conclusions on General American English...) yields 19 distinct
vowels, and that's not counting vocalic versions of consonant sounds.

I suppose it's possible that they recognize fewer consonants; perhaps
they don't consider /T/ and /D/ separately?  Some folks regard /tS/
and /dZ/ as biphonemic, but that seems unlikely for an
English-oriented org, though.  Maybe they don't consider /Z/...

I dunno.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

Reply