Speech Sounds and Symbols

Talking was around for quite some time before any type of writing systems were developed. There are
many languages still today today that have no written form. In fact, all human beings learn language
perfectly well before ever holding a pencil or decoding a scribed word. So even though symbolizing
language visually is not essential to communication, written language is one of the most significant and
foundational contributions to the civilized world. Writing systems are powerful tools for widespread
communication, documenting history, and propagating languages across the world.

1. Speech Sounds
A speech sound is a combination of acoustic properties such as pitch, amplitude, and frequency that are
produced to transfer some type of verbal message between speakers. Each speech sound, or signal is a
composition of phonetic features strung together to form words. These phonetic features each transmit
essential information linked to meaning such that if one feature is altered, the sound and thus meaning
are changed. For example, the two sentences below have quite different meanings even though the
single feature of voicing on one word is altered.

،®Eat your peas،¯ vs. ،®Eat your bees،¯.

The production of speech sounds is natural and an innate characteristic of all neuro-typical human
beings

2. Symbol

Symbols are a type of written device used to transmit information visually, created by and taught to
speakers of any given language. They serve as the building blocks of sound representation in an
orthographic system. These symbols, or graphemes symbolize various linguistic forms.

2.1 Ideographs

Ideographs are iconic representations of ideas and are widely used today in the media. They do not
transmit meaning at the morpheme/word level but rather communicate concepts or ideas. Our
discussion will not include ideographs since they are generally not considered graphemes.

2.2 Pictographs

Pictographs are one of the earliest forms of writing. These graphemes are iconic pictures that represent
entire?words and ideas,?examples of which were first discovered in Egypt and Mesopotamia and date
back to approximately 5,ooo years ago. Of the most significant pictographs are ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphs. Several pictographic languages exist today, although it is debatable as to whether any of
these writing systems is composed solely of icons. Languages such as Nahuatl and Mikmaq incorporate
phonetic components

2.3 Logographs

A logographic is a grapheme that represents an entire?unit of meaning?as either a word or morpheme.

Logographic scripts always include phonetic elements and can be consonant-based or syllable-based. ?In
a consonant-based system, the glyphs transmit both semantic and phonetic information. For example,
the glyph for crocodile not only represents the reptile itself, but also the sound ،®msh،¯. In a syllable-
based system, a glyph represents a syllable. For example, the written representation of crocodile in
Korean is???ag-eo.

Languages that incorporate pictographs and syllable-based logographs include modern Chinese (Hanzi),
Japanese (Kanji), and Korean (Hanja)

3 . Syllabarie
A syllabary is a writing system in which graphemes represent syllables. These ،®syllabograms،¯ are
usually formed as a vowel or a consonant plus a vowel.?Syllabaries vary across languages. Japanese has
two,?hiragana?and?katakana?that combined form ،®kana،¯. These syllables are mostly CV, i.e.,
consonant, vowel. Below is an example of the tri-syllabic word for ،®hotel،¯.

The?writing system for Cherokee, devised in the early 1800،¯s by Sequoyah, is quite elaborate, including
the syllabic forms V and CV.

4 . Alphabetic Writing Systems

An alphabet is a writing system in which graphemes correspond to individual sounds. Of course, this
definition is not quite as simple as it seems, as we will see

Most languages of the world with writing systems today use the?Roman alphabet, which was originally
devised for the Latin language in the days of the Roman empire thousands of years ago. Other alphabets
that have been adapted to a variety of languages are the?Cyrillic?alphabet, used to write Russian,
several other Slavic languages of Eastern Europe, and various non-Slavic languages spoken in Russia and
the former Soviet Union; and the?Arabic?alphabet, used to write Arabic, and languages of various non-
Arab Muslim countries such as Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia, and many languages of central
Asia.)
5. Historical Footprints
Not all languages developed their own tailor-made alphabets. This is often due to the affects of contact
between languages and has resulted in mixing, matching, and adopting graphemes across languages.
When a language adopts an alphabet originally designed for another, various adjustments must be
made since not all languages use the same speech sounds.

The three primary devices for such adaptation are:

the addition of new graphemes to the alphabet (e.g. the old runes ? ،®eth،¯ and ? ،¯thorn derived
fromAnglo-Saxon and brought into Latin)

the addition of diacritic marks a to existing graphemes (e.g. Spanish ?)

the use of digraphs (sequences of two letters together representing only one sound, e.g., in ،®fish،¯ the
digraph sh represents one sound.)

no longer considering silent letters part of a digraph, e.g. sign

the use of trigraphs, e.g. German/Yiddish sch,

English borrowings schnapps, schnitzel, schmooze, schlep, schmaltz,

Four or more،.chsi in fuchsia

Of all the inconsistencies found in English orthography as a result of the above adaptations, ،®silent،¯
letters wreak the most havoc. Silent letters are graphemes that once stood for sounds that have since
been deleted (lost) in the pronunciation of words ،‫ ھ‬e.g. English love, honest, debt, right.

So remember that there is a distinction between digraphs and silent letters. A digraph represents a
phoneme not represented by either of its component letters on their own, e.g., English th, sh, ch, Polish
sz, cz, Spanish ch, ll, German ch, where as the presence of an adjacent silent letter does not change the
sound of the other. For example, we know that the g in ،®sign،¯ is silent since n is still articulated and is
not altered by the presence of g.

All languages change over time, and spoken language changes relatively quickly in comparison to written
language. This phenomenon provides insight into past pronunciations and how languages may be
related. Many orthographic inconsistencies and irregularities are based in this fact. English is a prime
example.
Consider these facts:
One grapheme ،®i،¯ can represent two or more sounds:
[-son]x
One sound such as /i/can be represented by more than one grapheme.
e.g., meat, meet, mete, piece, receive, people, Caesar
Single graphemes can represent more than one sound
tax /ks/, unit /ju/, schizoid /ts/

Some graphemes (underlying graphemes) are silent in certain words and pronounced in others
e.g., bomb but bombard, night but nocturnal, sign but signal, cope but copious , receipt but reception.
6. Back to Speech Sounds
6.1 Transcriptions

When transcribing speech, we use symbols and diacritics (small markers that show added features to
sounds). Phonetic alphabets, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet and the North American
Phonetic Alphabet provide a one to one correlation between a speech sound and a representation,
representing all the sounds of the world،¯s languages! That is, more or less. Since natural language is
affected by elements such as speech rate, neighboring phonemes, and dialectal variations, it is not
always possible to give an exact representation of certain sounds, (especially when transcribing vowels)
however phonetic alphabets. In transcribing, use symbols to the best of your knowledge.

6.2 Transcription Challenge

Have a try at transcribing this excerpt from Richard Krogh،¯s poem.

I take it you already know

Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble, but not you

On hiccough, thorough, slough and through?

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,

To learn of less familiar traps?

Click here for a broad transcription and compare your results to ours.

For practice at better understanding the difference between sounds and spellings, try out our Counting
Sounds 1.1 exercise!

Want more practice? Counting Sounds 1.2.

Return to Phonetics Tutorial