English Consonants

RESEARCH PAPERS 23 How roughly conformable Sounds Are There in English? How Many Consonant Sounds Are There in English? by David Deterding, guinea pig Institute of Education, capital of Singapore . Most analyses agree that thither atomic number 18 24 concordant starts in English. However, it is valuable to conceptualize in some distri providedor point a few issues that affect the spatial relation of these harmoniseds.First, we tummy teleph genius closely why the affricates /t? / and /d / atomic number 18 treated as one consonants sort of than chronological sequences of two consonants. Second, one might discuss why it is that /w/ and /j/ atomic number 18 classified as consonants rather than vowels. Third, there is the misadventure of a voiceless counterpart of /w/ that, for some speakers, differentiates which from delight. And finally, there is the headland of whether the velar nasal /? / is genuinely an allophone of /n/. After considering these issues, most spate will still conclude that there atomic number 18 24 consonants in English.However, the discussion arouse help us gain a deeper sagacity of English phonology. . s Introduction How many consonant sounds do you ideate there are in English? Of running, most of us receipt that there are 20 consonant earn in our first principle (or 21 if you let in y), but here we are public lecture about sounds, not letters.And there is a mismatch among sounds and letters sometimes two letters combine to represent one sound, so that s + h combine to represent the sound /? / and t + h combine for /? /, and sometimes one letter is pronounced as a sequence of two sounds, as x is usually /ks/. So the reduce of consonant letters in our alpha number is irrelevant when considering the number of consonant sounds (phonemes) in English. The basic answer to the original question is that there are 24 consonant sounds in English q 6 checks /p b t d k / q 9 fricatives /f v ? ? s z ? / q 2 affricates /t? d / q 3 nasals /m n ? / q 1 lateral-approximant /l/ q 3 approximants /w j r/ However, things are never quite as simple as that in the national of languages, and there are a number of issues that we might consider in much depth q Why are /t? / and /d / regarded as oneness phonemes and not as sequences of two phonemes? q Why are /w/ and /j/ regarded as consonants and not vowels? q Do those people who distinguish which from crone gift one extra phoneme, / /, a voiceless equivalent of /w/? q Should /? / really be regarded as a recrudesce phoneme?Or squeeze out it be analysed as an allophone of /n/? s The status of /t? / and /d / The two affricates are each written as a sequence of two symbols, so why do we regard them as single consonants? Why do we not, for example, analyse cheese /t? i z/ as having two consonants at the bug out, /t/ followed by /? /? The answer is that /t? / be needs phonologically as a single sound, compensate if pho lowestically it is rather quasi( prenominal) to a occlusive followed by a fricative. In analysing its deportment, we need to think about the patterns of distribution of /t/ and /? (Laver, 1994365), so we should consider what sequences of sounds laughingstock give together, particularly at the start of a syllable. English allows quite analyzable syllable onsets, much(prenominal) as /str/ in string and /spl/ in splash, but it does not generally permit a plosive followed by a fricative, so */pf k/, */ts? / and */k p/ are not possible voice communication of English. (In the few cases where the spelling does suggest a plosive followed by a fricative at the start of the word, much(prenominal) as psychology, the plosive is actually silent. ) But bill that chip /t / and check /t? ek/ are perfectly good language of English. So if we treated /t? / as a sequence of two phonemes, we would chip in to make a picky exception to the rule that an English word cannot begin with a plosive followed by a fricative. parenta ge that /t? / can withal return at the give the axe of a word, as with catch /k t? / and rich /r? t? /, and there are no new(prenominal) instances where /? / can occur after a plosive at the extirpate of a word, as */k k? / and */r? p? / are not possible words in English. The situation with /d / provides even stronger evidence.The consonant / / is rather rare in English, and apart from in some recent loan words such as genre / ? nr? /, beige /be? /, and rouge /ru / (all of which still sound rather foreign), / / can only occur in the middle of a word, mostly between two vowels, as in pleasure copyright 2005 Singapore tertiary English Teachers fraternity1, 2005 STETS Language & Communication Review, Vol. 4, No. (STETS) w 24 David Deterding s The status of /w/ and /j/ If you say /w/ and drag it out, it sounds rather like /u /, and similarly /j/ sounds rather like /i / (Roach, 200064).If they sound like vowels, why do we classify /w/ and /j/ as consonants? Sometimes it is valu able to make a differentiation between a contoid and a consonant contoids are articulated with an obstruction in the vocal tract, but consonants are sounds which can occur at the march of a syllable (Laver, 1994147-8). In other words, contoid is a phonetic term which describes the spliff of a sound, while consonant is a phonological term which describes its demeanor within a syllable.From the phonetic perspective of articulation, we find that plosives, fricatives, nasals, and the lateral approximant /l/ are all contoids, because they all involve a constriction in the vocal tract, but /j/ and /w/ (and maybe /r/ as well) are not contoids. But now we should consider phonological behaviour and thereby determine which sounds should be classified as consonants. Let us think about what can occur in the lead /et/ to create a monosyllabic English word. We have words such as bet /bet/, pet /pet/, set /set/, net /net/, and debt /det/, but not */? t/ or */ et/, so we regard /b p s n d/ as consonants because they occur at the edge of a syllable, but /? / are vowels. However, put down that we can as well as have wet /wet/ and yet /jet/. This confirms that /w/ and /j/ are consonants. In one other aspect of behaviour, we can consider the distribution of the indefinite articles a and an a occurs before consonants, while an occurs before vowels, and this depends on the pronunciation and not the spelling, so it is an hour not *a hour because /a / begins with a vowel (the h is silent).But note that we have a waste and a year, not *an waste and *an year, and ascertain that once more this is pedestald on pronunciation and not on spelling, as it is a university (which begins with /j/) and not *an university. So again we knock against that /w/ and /j/ behave as consonants, not as vowels (Roach, 200064). s The status of /? / In standard phonemic analysis, we assume that if the occurrence of a sound can be predicted from the surrounding sounds, it is regarded as an allophone and not as a phoneme.So, for example, we treat , the dark /l/ sound that occurs at the end of a word such as fill, as an allophone of /l/ because we can specify that it only occurs in the coda of a syllable (or as a syllabic consonant in words such as bottle), hostile its clear counterpart which occurs before a vowel. So what about /? /? Note that /? / can also only appear in the coda of a syllable, and furthermore we can predict that /? / rather than /n/ will incessantly occur before another velar sound, such as in bank /b ? k/ and anger / ? ?/. So should /? / be regarded as an allophone of /n/ (and then be written as ? rather than /? /)? The life-and-death test for a phoneme is the existence of a borderline pair if there are two words which only differ with respect to one sound distinction, then we crawl in that we have two separate phonemes. For example, we know that /f/ and /v/ are different phonemes of English because of the existence of the minimal pair fan /f n/ and van /v n/ where the only difference is in the initial consonant, and similarly the difference in the final sound of back /b k/ and bag /b / establishes /k/ and / / as separate phonemes of English.On this basis, we can be footsure that /n/ and /? / are different phonemes, because we have many minimal pairs such as sin /s? n/ and sing /s /, and also ran /r n/ and rang /r ? /. This would seem to be the end of the story, but of course it is not. s The possibility of / / Do you make a distinction between which and witch? For most speakers, these two words are homophones as they are two pronounced as /w? t? /, though many Americans do make a distinction (Wells, 1982126), and most Copyright 2005 Singapore Tertiary English Teachers Society (STETS) w w w /ple ? / and measure /me ? /. But notice that jet /d et/ and barge /b? d / are perfectly good words in English. So if we were to regard /d / as a sequence of two separate sounds, we would have to say that / / can only occur near the start or at the end of a word if it is preceded by /d/, which would be rather strange. So the claim that /t? / and /d / are single sounds in English is well-founded, because they behave phonologically like single sounds in the structure of English words.However, one might note that Ladefoged (200127) does treat both these English affricates as sequences of two sounds, partly because his emphasis is rather more on phonetics than on the phonological structure of English. Scottish speakers also do (Wells, 1982408). Indeed, it was once normal for all speakers of English to make this distinction, but by the end of the eighteenth century even educated southern speakers no longer maintained it (Mugglestone, 2003132). For speakers who retain this distinction, it might be necessary to include an extra phoneme, with / / representing the voiceless counterpart of /w/, so that which is / ? ? / while witch is /w? t? / However, even here the analysis is not so simple. Historically, this sound was a conson ant cluster /hw/, parallel to other clusters fount with /h/, such as /hr/, /hn/ and /hl/ (Cruttenden, 2001215). These others have now disappeared, so apart from the possibility of /hw/, the only remaining consonant cluster involving /h/ is /hj/ in words such as wide /hju d / and human /hju m? n/. And even the status of this is doubtful, as one might alternatively regard /ju / as a diphthong (Deterding, 2004).So, from a historical perspective, / / might be treated as /hw/. But from a synchronic perspective, we should note that the strain between / / and /w/ is parallel to the origin between many pairs of consonants in English, such as /t/ and /d/, /s/ and /? /, and /f/ and /v/. The fact that the voiceless/voiced contrast is wellestablished in English lends support to the treatment of / / as a phoneme in its own right. We might therefore conclude that some speakers do have this extra phoneme. w v w v How Many Consonant Sounds Are There in English? 25 so its fun being with them F9 -f40In fact, extra velar plosives also now and then get recruited at the end of words such as selling, analyse and young in relatively informal Singapore data (Lim & Deterding, 2005), as shown in the following examples also from the NIECSSE corpus selling um decorative twitch iF9-c83 that I was studying this iF9-c238 when we were young we used to erm iF10-e180 If a velar plosive gets inserted occasionally after /? /, maybe we should analyse it as present in the chthoniclying representation of the word, and then instead of saying that it sometimes gets inserted, we should present that it sometimes fails to get deleted.And if this is the case, s Conclusion It is still basically align that there are 24 consonants in English, though it may under some circumstances be possible to regard /t? / and /d / as sequences of two sounds, some speakers may have an extra phoneme / /, and the status of /? / is questionable. Even though we can conclude that there are 24 consonants in English, consideration of some of the issues regarding the phonological analysis of English can give us a deeper understanding of he structure of the sound system of the language. STETS Language & Communication Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2005 w v v An alternative possibility is to say that words like sing have a silent / / at the end, and this silent / / gets deleted when it occurs at the end of a word (Roach, 200068). In fact, for some speakers of English, this deletion rule does not gain and sing is pronounced as s (Roach, 200067), so clearly for speakers such as this, we should analyse ? as an allophone of /n/.Furthermore, in careful pronunciation, some speakers insert a velar plosive at the end of words such as being, and this can occur in Singapore English (Setter & Deterding, 2003) as is evident from the following utterance from the NIECSSE corpus (Deterding & wiped out(p), 2001) then the distribution of ? is simply predictable, so it is an allophone and not a phoneme. Finally we mi ght note that words such as long /l /, strong /str / and young /j ? / have no final / /, but there is a / / when a comparative suffix is added longer /l ?/, stronger /str ?/, younger /j ? ?/.So this seems to lend further support to the possible existence in the base form of these words of a final / / which gets deleted in some circumstances. (But note that there is no / / with the ing suffix or the agentive er suffix sing /s / and singer /s / not */s / and */s ?/. ) In conclusion, we can say that, on the basis of minimal pairs, /? / is generally regarded as a phoneme of English, but that there are some counter-arguments which raise a few questions about its status. 26 David Deterding REFERENCES Deterding, D. (2004). How many vowel sounds are there in English?STETS Language & Communication Review, 19(10) 19-21. Deterding, D. & Low, E. L. (2001). The NIE corpus of spoken Singapore English (NIECSSE). SAAL Quarterly, 56 25. Ladefoged, P. (2001). A course in phonetics (4th edition). gather Worth Harcourt College Publishers. Laver, J. (1994). Principles of phonetics. Cambridge Cambridge University Press. Lim, S. H. & Deterding, D. (2005). Added final plosives in Singapore English. In D. Deterding, A. Brown and E. L. Low (Eds. ), English in Singapore Phonetic research on a corpus, pp. 37-42. Singapore McGraw Hill. Mugglestone, L. 2003). Talking proper The rise of accent as a social symbol (2nd edition). Oxford Oxford University Press. Roach, P. (2000). English phonetics and phonology A practical course (3rd edition). Cambridge Cambridge University Press. Setter, J. & Deterding, D. (2003, August). Extra final consonants in the English of Hong Kong and Singapore. Paper presented at the worldwide Conference of Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona. Wells, J. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge Cambridge University Press. Copyright 2005 Singapore Tertiary English Teachers Society (STETS)