Letters and sounds. Sounds and phonemes. Vowels and consonants

Letters and sounds. Sounds and phonemes. Vowels and consonants.

Letters and sounds must never be mixed up. Letters are written, sounds are spoken. It very useful to have written letters to remind us of corresponding sounds, but this is all they do. They cannot make us pronounce sounds which we don’t already know; they simply remind us. In ordinary English spelling is not always easy to know what sounds the letters stand for. We have 24 consonants and 20 vowels to consider.

Speech sounds are grouped into language units called phonemes. A phoneme may be thought of as the smallest contrastive language unit which exists in the speech of all people belonging to the same language community in the form of speech sounds and may bring about a change of meaning.

The phoneme is realized in speech in the material form of speech sounds of different type. Various speech realizations of the phoneme are called its allophones.

The organs of speech are capable of uttering many different kinds of sounds. From the practical point of view it is convenient to distinguish two types of speech sounds: vowels and consonants. Vowels are voiced sounds produced without any obstruction in the supra-glottal cavities and consequently have no noise component. In the articulation of consonants a kind of noise producing obstruction is formed in the supra-glottal cavities. Such sounds may be pronounced with or without vocal cords vibration.