The one-l lama,
He's a priest.
The two-i llama,
He's a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pajama
There isn't any
Three-l lllama.
Ogden Nash
Alphabetic spelling represents the pronunciation of words. But it is oftem the case that the sounds of the words in a language are rather unsystematically represented by orthography that is, by spelling. To discuss the way different sounds are produced, it may therefore be confusing and difficult to refer to the sounds as they are spelt in English words.
Suppose all Earthlings were destroyed by some horrible catastrophe, and years later Martian astronauts exploring Earth discovered some fragments of English writing that included the following sentence :
Did he believe the Caesar could see the people seize the seas ?
How would a Martin linguist decide that e, ie, ae, ee, eo, ei and ea all represented the same sound ? To add to the confusion, this sentence might crop up later :
The silly amoeba stole the key to the machine.
English speakers learn how to pronounce these words when learning to read and write and know that y, oe,ey and i also represent the same sound as the boldface letters in the first sentence.
