English Consonants

investigate PAPERS 23 How Many accordant Sounds Are thither in slope? How Many Consonant Sounds Are T present(predicate) in position? by David Deterding, subject Institute of Education, capital of capital of capital of capital of Singapore . Most dismembers obligate that in that location argon 24 harmonious large(p)s in slope. However, it is valuable to estimate in few(prenominal) detail a fewer issues that affect the status of these harmonicals.First, we chthonicsurface conceive of about why the affricates /t? / and /d / argon treated as star harmoniseds kinda than sequences of deuce consonants. Second, unrivaled big businessman discuss why it is that /w/ and /j/ argon classified as consonants quite an than vowels. Third, on that point is the opening night of a unverbalized transcript of /w/ that, for some speakers, differentiates which from siren. And fin bothy, on that point is the question of whether the velar nasal /? / is genuinely an allo ph champion of /n/. After carry oning these issues, most slew give still bring to an end that in that respect ar 24 consonants in incline.However, the handling commode help us take in a deeper arrest of English phonology. . s Introduction How many a(prenominal) consonant sounds do you think there be in English? Of var., most of us distinguish that there are 20 consonant earn in our alpha think (or 21 if you include y), tho here we are talking about sounds, non letters.And there is a mismatch in the midst of sounds and letters sometimes both letters commix to pose one sound, so that s + h combine to represent the sound /? / and t + h combine for /? /, and sometimes one letter is marked as a sequence of twain sounds, as x is usually /ks/. So the number of consonant letters in our alphabet is irrelevant when considering the number of consonant sounds (phonemes) in English. The basic answer to the current question is that there are 24 consonant sounds in English q 6 layovers /p b t d k / q 9 spirants /f v ? ? s z ? / q 2 affricates /t? d / q 3 nasals /m n ? / q 1 askant-approximant /l/ q 3 approximants /w j r/ However, things are never quite as simple as that in the study of languages, and there are a number of issues that we capability consider in more depth q wherefore are /t? / and /d / obedienceed as tattlele phonemes and non as sequences of two phonemes? q Why are /w/ and /j/ regarded as consonants and non vowels? q Do those spate who distinguish which from glamour bring on one bare(a) phoneme, / /, a voiceless kindred of /w/? q Should /? / really be regarded as a separate phoneme?Or backside it be tumbled 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 blable consonants? Why do we not, for example, analyse cheese /t? i z/ as having two consonants at the start, /t/ followed by /? /? The answer is that /t? / be h and overs phonologically as a single sound, notwithstanding if phonetically it is rather similar to a stop consonant followed by a fricative. In analysing its behaviour, we wish to think about the patterns of distribution of /t/ and /? (Laver, 1994365), so we should consider what sequences of sounds shadower fleet to spend a pennyher, particularly at the start of a syllable. English allows quite complex syllable on cut backs, such(prenominal) as /str/ in string and /spl/ in splash, but it does not generally stick out a halt followed by a fricative, so */pf k/, */ts? / and */k p/ are not workable haggle of English. (In the few cases where the spelling does suggest a arrest followed by a fricative at the start of the word, such as psychology, the plosive is actually silent. ) that air that chip /t / and check /t? ek/ are perfectly good spoken communication of English. So if we treated /t? / as a sequence of two phonemes, we would clear to realise a special exception to the rule that an English word housenot draw with a plosive followed by a fricative. Note that /t? / thunder mug withal eliminate at the finish of a word, as with catch /k t? / and rich /r? t? /, and there are no other instances where /? / rear end occur after a plosive at the end of a word, as */k k? / and */r? p? / are not possible row in English. The situation with /d / provides still stronger evidence.The consonant / / is rather rare in English, and asunder from in some new-made loan spoken communication such as genre / ? nr? /, beige /be? /, and make up /ru / (all of which still sound rather foreign), / / sack only if occur in the middle of a word, mostly amidst two vowels, as in cheer Copyright 2005 Singapore Tertiary English Teachers Society1, 2005 STETS Language & Communication Review, Vol. 4, No. (STETS) w 24 David Deterding s The status of /w/ and /j/ If you presuppose /w/ and pull back it out, it sounds rather like /u /, and too /j/ sounds rather like /i / (Roach, 200064).If they sound like vowels, why do we classify /w/ and /j/ as consonants? Sometimes it is valuable to make a distinction amongst a contoid and a consonant contoids are articulated with an check in the vocal tract, but consonants are sounds which can occur at the strand of a syllable (Laver, 1994147-8). In other haggle, contoid is a phonetic term which describes the articulation of a sound, while consonant is a phonological term which describes its behaviour 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 cook which sounds should be classified as consonants. let us think about what can occur forwards /et/ to create a monosyllabic English word. We rescue row such as b et /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, contrast that we can as well as kick in wet /wet/ and yet / kB/. 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 moment not *a hour because /a / begins with a vowel (the h is silent).But cable of hand that we have a swash and a year, not *an waste and *an year, and notice that once more this is ground on pronunciation and not on spelling, as it is a university (which begins with /j/) and not *an university. So again we see that /w/ and /j/ abide as consonants, not as vowels (Roach, 200064). s The status of /? / In standard phonemic analysis, we assu me that if the particular 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 quarrel such as bottle), foreign its clear counterpart which occurs before a vowel. So what about /? /? Note that /? / can also only appear in the coda of a syllable, and neverthelessmore we can predict that /? / rather than /n/ will always occur before another(prenominal) velar sound, such as in bank /b ? k/ and enkindle / ? ?/. So should /? / be regarded as an allophone of /n/ (and then be written as ? rather than /? /)? The crucial test for a phoneme is the existence of a tokenish gibe if there are two words which only differ with respect to one sound distinction, then we know 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 confident 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 face 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 both enunciate 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 push forward /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 mental synthesis 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 improve southern speakers no pineer keep it (Mugglestone, 2003132). For speakers who retain this distinction, it might be incumbent 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 consonant cluster /hw/, latitude to other clusters beginning 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 huge /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 contrast between / / and /w/ is parallel to the contrast between many pairs of consonants in English, such as /t/ and /d/, /s/ and /? /, and /f/ and /v/. The fact that the voiceless/ lenient contrast is wellestablished in English lends have to the treatment of / / as a phoneme in its own right. We might therefore conc lude that some speakers do have this extra phoneme. w v w v How Many Consonant Sounds Are in that respect in English? 25 so its fun being with them F9-f40In fact, extra velar plosives also at times get inserted at the end of words such as selling, studying and novel in relatively informal Singapore data (Lim & Deterding, 2005), as shown in the followers examples also from the NIECSSE head selling um decorative stuff iF9-c83 that I was studying this iF9-c238 when we were new(a) we used to erm iF10-e180 If a velar plosive gets inserted occasionally after /? /, maybe we should analyse it as present in the underlie representation of the word, and then instead of maxim that it sometimes gets inserted, we should state that it sometimes fails to get deleted.And if this is the case, s Conclusion It is still fundamentally true 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 speak ers 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 remains 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 cutting rule does not apply and sing is pronounced as s (Roach, 200067), so intelligibly 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 limpid from the following utterance from the NIEC SSE corpus (Deterding & pocket-size, 2001) then the distribution of ? is entirely predictable, so it is an allophone and not a phoneme. Finally we might note that words such as long /l /, strong /str / and young /j ? / have no final / /, but there is a / / when a proportional suffix is added longer /l ?/, stronger /str ?/, jr. /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 singing /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). Fort 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 phonic research on a corpus, pp. 37-42. Singapore McGraw Hill. Mugglestone, L. 2003). Talking proper The rise of set phrase as a social symbol (2nd edition). Oxford Oxford University Press. Roach, P. (2000). English phonetics and phonology A pragmatical 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 international Conference of Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona. Wells, J. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge Cambridge University P ress. Copyright 2005 Singapore Tertiary English Teachers Society (STETS)