What is the most common vowel sound in English? Would you say it is the o of
hot, the a of cat, the e of red, the i of in, the u of up? In fact, it is none of these. It
isn't even a standard vowel sound. It is the colorless murmur of the schwa,
represented by the symbol [a] and appearing as one or more of the vowel sounds
in words without number. It is the sound of i in animal, of e in enough, of the
middle o in orthodox, of the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth vowels in
inspirational, and of at least one of the vowels in almost every multi syllabic
word in the language. It is everywhere.
This reliance of ours on one drab phoneme is a little odd when you consider that
English contains as lush a mixture of phonics as any language in the world. We
may think we're pretty tame when we encounter such tongue twisters as the
Czech vrch pin mlh (meaning "a hill in the fog") or Gaelic agglomerations like
pwy ydych chi ( Welsh for "how are you?"), but on the other hand we possess a
number of sounds that other languages find treacherous and daunting, most
notably the "th" sound of the and think, which is remarkably rare in the world at
large, or the "1″ sound that Orientals find so deeply impossible. (I once worked
with a Chinese fellow in England who when things went wrong would mutter
darkly, "Bruddy hairo!" which I took to be some ancient Cantonese invective; it
was not until many months later that I realized he was just saying, "Bloody
hell.")
If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost
nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled
the same way and yet pronounced differently. Consider just a few:
heard – beard
road – broad
five – give
fillet – skillet
early – dearlybeau – beauty
steak – streak
ache – mustache
low – how
doll – droll
scour – four
grieve – sieve
paid – said
break – speak
In some languages, such as Finnish, there is a neat one-to-one correspondence
between sound and spelling. A k to the Finns is always "k," an I eternally and
comfortingly "I" But in English, pronunciation is so various—one might almost
say random—that not one of our twenty-six letters can be relied on for
constancy.
Either they clasp to themselves a variety of pronunciations, as with the c in race,
rack, and rich, or they sulk in silence, like the b in debt, the a in bread, the
second t in thistle. In combinations they become even more unruly and
unpredictable, most famously in the letter cluster ough, which can be
pronounced in any of eight ways—as in through, though, thought, tough, plough,
thorough, hic-cough, and lough (an Irish-English word for lake or loch,
pronounced roughly as the latter). The pronunciation possibilities are so various
that probably not one English speaker in a hundred could pronounce with
confidence the name of a crowlike bird called the chough. (It's chuff. ) Two
words in English, hegemony and phthisis, have nine pronunciations each. But
perhaps nothing speaks more clearly for the absurdities of English pronunciation
than that the word for the study of pronunciation in English, orthoepy, can itself
be pronounced two ways.
Every language has its quirks and all languages, for whatever reason, happilyaccept conventions and limitations that aren't necessarily called for. In English,
for example, we don't have words like fwost or zpink or abtholve because we
never normally combine those letters to make those sounds, though there's no
reason why we couldn't if we wanted to. We just don't. Chinese takes this matter
of self-denial to extremes, particularly in the variety of the language spoken in
the capital, Peking. All Chinese dialects are monosyllabic—which can itself be
almost absurdly limiting—but the Pekingese dialect goes a step further and
demands that all words end in an "n" or "ng" sound. As a result, there are so few
phonetic possibilities in Pekingese that each sound must represent on average
seventy words. Just one sound, "yi," can stand for separate words. Partly the
Chinese get around this by using rising or falling pitches to vary the sounds
fractionally, but even so in some dialects a falling "i" can still represent almost
forty unrelated words. We use pitch in English to a small extent, as when we
differentiate between "oh" and "oh?" and "oh!" but essentially we function by
relying on a pleasingly diverse range of sounds.
Almost everyone agrees that English possesses more sounds than almost any
other language, though few agree on just how many sounds that might be. The
British authority Simeon Potter says there are forty-four distinct sounds—twelve
vowels, nine diphthongs (a kind of gliding vowel), and twenty-three consonants.
The International Phonetic Alphabet, perhaps the most widely used,
differentiates between fifty-two sounds used in English, divided equally between
consonants and vowels, while the American Heritage Dictionary lists forty-five
for purely English sounds, plus a further half dozen for foreign terms. Italian, by
contrast, uses only about half as many sounds, a mere twenty-seven, while
Hawaiian gets by with just thirteen. So whether the number in English is forty-
four or fifty-two or something in between, it is quite a lot. But having said that,
if you listen carefully, you will find that there are many more than this.
The combination "ng," for example, is usually treated as one discrete sound, as
in bring and sing. But in fact we make two sounds with it—employing a soft "g"
with singer and a hard "g"
with finger. We also tend to vary its duration, giving it fractionally more
resonance in descriptive or onomatopoeic words like zing and bong and rather
less in mundane words like something and rang.We make another unconscious distinction between the hard "th" of those and the
soft one of thought. Some dictionaries fail to note this distinction and yet it
makes all the difference between mouth as a noun and mouth as a verb, and
between the noun thigh and the adjective thy. More subtly still, when we use a
"k" sound at the start of a word, we put a tiny puff of breath behind it (as in
kitchen and conquer) but when the "k" follows an s (as in skill or skid) we
withhold the puff. When we make an everyday observation like "I have some
homework to do," we pronounce the word "hay." But when we become emphatic
about it—"I have to go now"—we pronounce it "haff."