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.

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