Ways to talk about sounds

Talking about sounds is something that most native English-speaking children do from a very young age. One reason for this is our writing system, which is based, however loosely, on a system where a set of twenty-six symbols is used to represent the forty-five or so sounds of English. So we learn, for example, that the letterstands for the sound [m], and the lettercan usually stand for either a [k] or a [s] sound. Learning this way gives priority to letters over sounds. For example, if we want to describe how to say a word like ‘knight’, we have to say something like ‘the “k” is silent’. The problems do not end there:stands for what is often called ‘a long “i”-sound’, which in phonetic transcription is often represented as [ai]. These ways of talking also cause us problems. What does it mean to say that the word ‘knight’ ‘has a “k”’, when we never pronounce it? It is temptingly easy to talk about words in terms of the letters we write them with rather than their linguistic structure.

We will discuss ways of representing sounds. For now, we just observe that for English, there is no one-to-one mapping of letter to sound, or of sound to letter (which is what is meant when people say English is not ‘spelt phonetically’).

We will use the word ‘sounds’ as a semi-technical term. Phonetics and phonology have a well-developed vocabulary for talking about sounds in technical ways, and many of the terms used are very specific to particular theories.