G.B.Shaw
The discrepancy between spelling and sounds gave rise to a movement of 'spelling reformers'. They wanted to revise the alphabet so that one letter would correspond to one sound, and one sound to one latter, thus simplifying spelling. This alphabet would be a phonetic alphabet.
George Bernard Shaw followed in the footsteps of three centuries of spelling reformers in England. In typical Shavian manner, he pointed out that we could use the English spelling system to spell fish as ghoti yhe gh like the sound in enough, the o like the sound in women, and the ti like the sound in nation. Shaw was so concerned about English spelling that he included in his will a provision for a new 'proposed English alphabet' to be administered by a 'public trustee' who would have the duty of seeking and publishing a more eficient alphabet. This alphabet was to have at least 40 letters to enable 'the said language to be written without indicating single sounds by groups of letters or by diacritical marks'. After Shaw's death in 1950,450 designs for such an alphabet were submitted from all parts of the globe. Four alphabets were judged to be equally good, and the 500 pound prize devided among their designers. An 'expert' collaborated with these four to produce the alphabet designated in Shaw's will. Shaw also stipulated in his will that his play androcles and the Lion be published in the new alphabet, with 'the original Doctor Johnson's lettering opposite the transliteration page by page and glossary of the two alphabets'. This version of the play was published in 1962.
If we look at English spelling, it is easy to understand why there is a need for a phonetic alphabet. Different letters may represent a single sound, as shown in the following sentences :
to
too
two
through
threw
clue
shoe
A single letter may represent different sounds :
dame
dad
father
call
village
many
A combination of letters may represent a single sound :
shoot
either
coat
character
deal
glacial
Thomas
rough
theatre
physics
nation
plain
Some letters have no sound at all in certain words :
mnemonic
pterodactyl
psychology
bough
whole
write
sword
lamb
resign
hole
debt
island
ghost
corps
gnaw
knot
Some sounds are not represented in the spelling. In many words the letter u represents a y sound followed a u sound :
cute
(compare: coot)
fuel
(compare:fool)
use
(compare:ooze)
One letter may represent two sounds; the final x in Xerox represents a k followed by an s.
Whether we support or oppose spelling reform in English, it is clear that to describe the sounds of English, or any other language, we cannot depend on the spelling of words. Shaw was not totally wrong. The alphabets designed to fulfill Shaw's will, however, were not the first phonetic alphabets In 1617, Robert Robinson produced an alphabet that attempted to provide a relationship between 'articulation' and the shapes of the letters. In Shaw's lifetime, the phonetician Henry Sweet, the prototype for Henry Higgins in the play Pygmalion (which many people know as the musical, My Fair Lady), produced a phonetic alphabet.
Alphabet such as these were not developed by 'spelling reformers' but by scholars interested in methods by which speech sounds could be described and symbolised. This interest led the International Phonetics Association (IPA) to develop in 1888 a phonetic alphabet that could be used to symbolise the sounds found in all languages. Because many languages use a Roman alphabet like that used in the English writing system, the IPA phonetic symbols are based on the Roman letters. These phonetic symbols have a consistent value, unlike ordinary letters, which may or may not represent the same sounds in the same or different languages. The IPA phonetic alphabet is still the primary one used all over the world today by phoneticians, language teacher, speech pathologists, linguists, and anyone wishing to symbolise the spoken word.
It is of course impossible to construct any set of symbols that will specify all the minute differences between sounds. Even Shaw recognised this limitation when in his will he directed his trustee :
to bear in mind that the proposed British Alphabet does not pretend to be exhaustive as it contains only sixteen vowels whereas by infinitesimal movements of the tongue countless different vowels can be produced, all of them in use among speakers of English who utter the same vowels no oftener than they make the same fingerprints.
Even if we could specify all the details of different pronunciations, we would not want to. As mentioned earlier, a basic fact about speech is that no two utterances are ever physically the same. If a speaker says 'Good moening' on Monday and again on Tuesday, there will be some slight differences in the sounds on the two days. In fact, if the same person says 'Good morning' twice in succesion on the same day, the two utterances will not be physically identical. If another speaker says 'Good morning', the physical sounds (that is, the acoustic signal) produced will also differ from those produced by the first speaker; yet all "Good mornings' are considered to be repetitions of the same utterance.
This fact about language is interesting. Some differences in the sounds of an utterance are important in trying to comprehend it, and other differences can be ignored. Even thouh we never produce or hear exactly the same utterance twice, speakers know when two utterances are linguistically the same or diffeent. Some properties of the sounds are therefore more important linguistically than others.
A phonetic alphabet, for a particular language, should include enough symbols to represent the 'crucial' differences. At the same time it should not, and cannot, include all non-crucial differences, because such differences are infinitely varied.
The symbols omit many details about the sounds and how they are produced in different words, and in different places in words. These symbols are meant to be used by pesons knowing English. These are not all the phonetic symbols needed for English sounds; when we discuss the sounds in more detail later in the chapter, we will add appropriate symbols.
The symbol [ ə ] is called schwa. It will be used to represent unstrssed vowels, vowels is a syllable that are somewhat softer and shorter than other syllables. The wedge symbol [ʌ], which will be used only in stressed syllables.
To differentiate between the spelling of a word and the pronunciation, we will sometimes enclose the phonetic symbols in brackets [ ]. Thus the word spelt boat would be transcribed phonetically as [ boʊt ].
The list of phonetic symbols for consonants, vowels and diphtongs includes a number of examples of English words given in English spelling. In all cases the different spellings represent the same sound in Australian English.
In the chart the first symbols given are those of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA); where these symbols are given in parentheses.
continued
IPA distinguishes between [ r ( inverted) ] and [ r ] the first normal Australian pronunciation, the second being the trill that does not occur in Australia. Since the two do not contrast in our dialect, it will be convenient to use the r symbol foe both variants.
Using these symbols, we can now unambiguously represent the pronunciation for words. For example, words spelt with ou may have different pronunciations. To distinguish between the symbols representing sound and the alphabet letters, we put the phonetic symbols between bracets :
Notice that only in rough do the letters gh represent any sound; that is, the sound [f]. Notice also that ou represents six different sounds, and th two different sounds. The l in would, like the gh in all but one of the words above, is not pronounced at all.
