Listening to the Alphabet: Sounds

Almost all children learn to speak in their native tongue by a process that develops organically. To a large degree, young children naturally teach themselves to speak by imitating the sounds of dialogue they hear. Of course, children also learn from a 'collaborative' partnership with the adults and older children who may strategically coax and reward the infant or young child's efforts.

In contrast, most children do not learn to read and write without being taught. Children are taught to read English in western societies by a process that begins with learning the alphabet. To 'learn the alphabet' involves interrelated concepts.

Learning the individual letters:

A B C

Learning the relationship between combinations of letters to sounds in words:

M A N

M A D

M A P

M O M

A R M

Learning the correct spelling of words:

NIGHT

Learning to read words in a sequence for meaning:

The

The boy

The boy loves

The boy loves leaving

The boy loves leaving the light

The boy loves leaving the light on.

Learning to read (and write) involves learning numerous patterns, and learning idiosyncratic details that stretch or break those patterns. For example, in learning the first letter of the alphabet, a child confronts a special case:

a

The letter 'a' can exist as a one-letter word. The meaning of the word, however, only gains specificity when attached to another word, or words, such as a boy or a house in a forest.

The emphasis on the phonetic qualities of written letters and words relies to a considerable extent on a child's auditory memory. Later, a transition occurs and the child learns to read visually. This is an essential step in learning to spell correctly and to read a larger vocabulary; words written in English do not follow an altogether consistent pattern that reliably relates letters to sounds phonetically in every word. Learning to read a wide vocabulary relies on a child's visual memory. This said, when encountering an unfamiliar word, children and adults alike typically resort to sounding out the syllables based on how they are spelled, combined with one's memory of the sounds of similarly spelled words.

To write English, we learn an alphabet of letters known as the Roman alphabet. That alphabet is phonetic; it is anchored in sound. Roman letters are abstract graphic symbols that indicate the sounds of English in a systematic way. English speakers see the abstract shape 'p' and can vocalize a characteristic sound associated with the symbol. However, there is no one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. Writing constitutes its own form of language; it is not the consistent representation of speech made visible. Think, for instance, how homonyms – such as pear, pair, and pare – are pronounced the same and yet appear different visually – that is, they sound alike but are spelled differently. Furthermore, the language we speak cannot be parceled into a single, atomistic, finite sequence of sounds. How many sounds are there, really, in the word 'pin'? Is 'p' one and only one sound? Should pulling the lips together at the start count as one sound and then exhaling constitute another sound?

Many scholars would make the distinction that the alphabet we use provides the foundation for a representation of language as writing; the alphabet is not the representation of speech as writing.

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

As children, we learned this alphabet one letter at a time, as well as practicing seeing letters and placing them within patterns of words. In learning the alphabet, we not only learned to recognize the unique shapes – the glyphs – of letters, but we also learned to associate those letterforms with the range of specific vocal sounds that various combinations of letters represent. These sounds parallel the characteristic sounds of the names of the letters spoken as we learn to recite the alphabet. Many speakers of English are taught to recite the entire 26-letter sequence of the alphabet in a well-known singsong cadence: 'Now I know my ABCs ...'.

The relationship between the alphabet and the sounds of spoken English is not as straightforward as one might, ideally, expect. The English language has 26 letters but, depending on the regional dialect, there are some 44 to 48 recognizable sounds in spoken English, which linguists refer to as phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest units of soundable, meaningful vocalizations in a spoken language — the atoms of language. Learning to recite the alphabet and matching the recited sounds with letters teaches some but not all of the phonemes associated with various letters. (Think of the different pronunciations of 'c' – the two c's in 'cyclone', for example.) While the phonemes paired with consonants are fairly consistently symbolized, the five vowels in the Roman alphabet (a e i o u) must each serve as the symbol for multiple sound variations, such as when speaking aloud the following words all containing 'a': tank, are, total, alabaster, diva. Other English phonemes don't require their own letter because, by convention, they are represented by a particular pairing of existing letters – th, ch, and ou, for instance.

Does the order of the letters in an alphabet signify something – anything – that is explicitly semantic? Could our alphabet be learned as easily in another order? Would we write and read as well? Because learning the sequence of letters in the alphabet remains an embarkation point for most children in the all-important process of learning to read and write, it is surprising to learn (now) what we did not learn (then): the specific order – while legitimized by cultural tradition has virtually no linguistic function. The order does not parallel grammatical or syntactical dimensions of spoken English. According to M. O'Connor,

Most people think of the alphabet as a writing device in terms of the order in which they learned it; [...] In fact, there is nothing that intrinsically binds an alphabet to the conventional order in which its elements are learned. Every alphabet has an order (and has had nearly since the beginning of alphabetic writing), but the alphabet and its order are distinct phenomena. The alphabetic order is a crucial element in attaining literacy; the fact that it is so often taken for granted does not gainsay its importance.

The reason that the order of the alphabet is crucial is not because of its specific order (abcd ...), but because the fact of having any order has proven to be such a significant aid in helping people structure their learning to achieve literacy.

If we reordered the alphabet – cefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabd – learning the letters would, it seems, occur with no greater difficulty. But having a proscribed order, whatever it is, is beneficial in enabling those critical first steps in learning to recognize the letters visually and to match them with characteristic sounds of their names. Gaining facility in matching how letters look and how they sound when spoken aloud plays a key role in facilitating learning to read. Reading is visual and aural, involving the eyes, ears, and mouth. Writing goes hand in hand with developing a level of facility in reading as well as developing other mental skills and somatic actions, typically involving small motor coordination of the fingers.

Sometimes we read aloud: a story to a child, a message from the enemy to a room of our allies. Some people read softly to themselves; words are whispered, lips barely moving, sounds of sentences flowing under one's breath. Others 'hear' the words inside their heads as they read. In these instances, letters on the page function like notes in a musical score: we sound out the words. The words we see become sounds that we hear internally. Many modern readers read silently, without translating the letters seen into the sounds of spoken words. The letters composing words function as visual signs without needing to think of their sounds.

In ancient societies, writing was almost always read aloud rather than silently to oneself. More often than not, reading was a social event 'performed' before an audience. And even if one read alone, one spoke the words audibly to oneself. According to Christian Vandendorpe,

Thus, around the year 400, Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo Regius, told how he marveled at seeing Ambrose reading with his eyes alone. In his quest for the allegorical meaning of biblical texts, the old scholar had learned to read without moving his lips.

Paul Saenger, curator of rare books at Chicago's Newberry Library, explains that reading aloud was a practical necessity because ancient texts were transcribed in scriptura continua, that is, styles of writing without spaces or other marks between words or sentences. It was not until the twelfth century C.E. that books were designed for silent reading. (Curiously, a form of continuous script has reappeared for Internet use, in e-mail addresses and domain names, where spaces are invalid.)

Written letters connect to sounds by convention

The sounds emitted in speaking an English word possess no connection (other than by convention) to the meaning of the word; and, furthermore, the sounds emitted in speaking a word possess no connection (other than by convention) to the abstract letterforms that spell a word. The aural composition of the word 'beach' (as a sequence of phonemes) does not relate logically or representationally to the meaning of the word beach (as a morpheme). The word identifying the concept we know as 'beach' could just as well be served by an altogether different set of letters (and the sounds those letters refer to) – bilpuniter or crallis, for example – and if we agreed to the change, then language usage could proceed smoothly. 'Get your swimsuit! The green bikini or the white maillot. I know a crallis that will be perfect for a day of sun and surf!'

There are multiple ways to sound vowels in English; likewise the letters for many consonants in English represent multiple phonetic sounds. English writing bears a phonetic relationship, although it is not fully consistent, to spoken English language; other writing systems (e.g., Japanese) bear much less phonetic relationship, while certain writing systems (e.g., Finnish) bear more. But, there is a beauty – a living presence – to the English language; inconsistencies are all right. Afterall, too mutch konsistensy mite bee rong for who we ar as a peepull.

While the contemporary relationship of the sounds of words bear, in most instances, no direct relationship to the meanings that we know of now, this does not mean that a relationship did not once exist. Occasional words exhibit a convincing condition of onomatopoeia in which the sounds do seem to mimic some integral aspect of the meaning (e.g., ping-pong, squish, swish). Many words and phrases exhibit a felt relationship between sounds and a general sense of meaning, which skilled, sensitive writers (or speakers) can use to their advantage.

The spelling of words in English could be revised significantly if there was general agreement to make changes. In fact, hypothetically we could cleave all relationship between writing and speaking in English. The representation of words could be developed without any phonetic relationship, and without any consistency in spelling. Our writing could continue to utilize our traditional Roman alphabet, but we could sever any link between the written symbolic form of a word and the spoken form. Why might we do this? (Simply being arbitrary with no rationale is, of course, possible, but not to our liking!) Such a change would be more efficient in terms of the number of letters required to write in English. Creating a more compact orthographic inventory would be useful whenever storage space for recording or displaying text is limited or expensive.

How would such a scheme work? The vocabulary that we possess includes, of course, arrangements of Roman letters that are 'speakable' (e.g., the words house, sit, and blossom); other arrangements that are speakable don't currently mean anything (e.g., lut, pilp), but many possible arrangements are virtually impossible to pronounce (e.g., hmnpf, xzaoe, ttpcegf). Only a limited number of all combinations of letters can be voiced. Our patterns of speaking – while they could be expanded considerably – are ultimately limited by the human anatomy. The operations of our normal tongue, larynx, throat, and roof of mouth allow us to say some sounds, but not others. We cannot string too many consonants together, we need to insert vowels, and so forth.

What this means is that we are inefficient: there are, in fact, a sufficient number of three-letter combinations to spell all the words that an ordinary literate adult uses in writing. There exist 26 × 26 × 26 = 17,576 combinations of distinct three-letter words. Many of these letter combinations would be impossible to pronounce (e.g., mnn, xzl, emr, pgi), but they would suffice to visually represent a word if the phonetic connection and spelling consistency were disregarded. By separating any wish to pronounce writing, written words can be condensed far more efficiently. Indeed, this phenomenon of compaction is taking root with the abbreviations commonly used for texting and other forms of social media communication, such as Twitter. We also could shorten writing if we encode our language in a system that features consonants and leaves most vowels untagged (as other writing systems have done). This approach, which remains somewhat phonetic, was seen in the 1950s in New York City subway ads for note-taking employment, advertised by the phrase: 'if u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb'.

In addition to the standard letters and numerals, computerized writing systems can now make regular use of 'dingbats', defined as 'an ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting. ... The term continues to be used in the computer industry to describe fonts that have symbols and shapes in the positions designated for alphabetical or numeric characters'.

Sound qualities are heightened in situ

While differences in sounds are often sufficient to distinguish words from one another ('worry' is not to be mistaken for 'sorry'), in some cases we as listeners would not be able to identify one word from another with certainty based on the sounds of the words themselves. 'Warship' closely resembles 'worship' in many speakers' pronunciation. In these cases, it is by hearing the word within a context of a phrase or sentence that we know which meaning to apply to the sounds we hear. It is only then that we can correctly pinpoint which morpheme has been uttered. Seeing a word spelled in its written form may provide clarity – such as in the case of 'warship' versus 'worship'. In other instances, spelling alone won't settle the matter; we need to know (by hearing or seeing) in what context a word is being used to identify the morpheme and interpret its shade of meaning. Indeed, the full meaning of a word intended by the speaker (or writer) and as interpreted by the listener (or reader) is rarely accessed by focusing on a word individually. The context is so critical to the process of interpretation that individual words function like ingredients in a recipe. The taste of the entire dish is our true test.

Other aural attributes of language, composed in written form, become most effective when we hear them (either spoken aloud or heard internally as we read). Rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, for example, orchestrate patterns of sound and sense as a relationship that connects multiple words usually separated by other words in a text. The writing process possesses potential for creating powerful compositions of sounds that unfold in concert with the process of reading (or hearing) a passage of text. The word choices an author makes – what is referred to as diction – contribute, often decisively, to the overall tone in written expression.

The closing stanza of a poem by Lisel Mueller entitled 'Moon Fishing' offers a memorable example of words magically synchronizing multiple levels of meaningfulness:

    And they fished with their lips and tongues
    until the water was gone
    and the moon had slipped away
    in the soft, bottomless mud.