LINGUIST 1A03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Mouth, Vocal Tract, Phonation
12 Sep 2016
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One sound, many spellings: say, weigh, they, rain, flame, lei, caf , toupee, ballet. All of them contain the same vowel sound, however there are 9 different combinations of the letters, some are more common. But even if we remove the ones that didn"t originate in the english language, that still leaves us with 5 different ways to pronounce it. English only has 5 letter characters to represent vowels, but over a dozen. Many sounds, one spelling different letter sounds: cough, tough, bough, through, though, cake, century, ocean. Sequence of the same 4 letters, positioned in the same place as 5 words but pronounced 5 different ways. A single sound, and a single spelling could not be the same in everything. Why is english spelling so messy: words borrowed from other languages. Originated for celtic and germanic dialects but then normans invaded and brought french and latin descents, and there was also dutch when bringing in written form.
