Appendix Phonemes of British and American English This appendix is designed to be useful to teachers and parents whether or not they wish to use i.t.a. script to help their children to learn to read. Those who do not intend to use i. t.a. will find that this appendix will clarify what are the main units or phonemes of English speech. This will provide a clear guide to what sounds must be distinguished in teaching phonics. If the teacher or parent wishes to use i.t.a., this appendix constitutes a comprehensive set of rules for using i. t.a. spelling to represent the pronunciation of English. But both the i.t.a. teacher and the non-i.t.a. teacher need to know something about i. t.a. in order to get the most out of the guide to phonic sounds given in this appendix. Any code has a two-way function: one direction is decoding, that is, translating the symbols of the code back into the message they are intended to communicate, and the other is encoding, that is, putting a message into the symbols of the code. Similarly, one can explain or describe a code in two ways. One can say, for example, 'this letter represents that sound', which is like decoding. Alternatively, one can describe a code by saying, 'this sound is represented by that letter', which is like encoding. The i.t.a. code has been described in different publications sometimes in the decoding style and sometimes in the encoding style. Each style has its advantages and disadvantages. Letter-to-sound The decoding or letter-to-sound style is the simpler and quicker way to describe the i. t.a. code to an adult teacher or parent who has only a little time to spare for learning this new alphabet. Its chief advantage is in economy of time. 155 The disadvantage of this letter-to-sound way of describing the i.t.a. code is that it tends to suggest the false notion that there is a simple one-to-one correspondence between each i.t.a. character and each phoneme indicated in Table 7-6 in Chapter 7 (p 92). This oversimplified conception of i. t.a. may cause disappointment when the teacher begins to work more closely with i.t.a. It is better for the teacher to be forewarned that i. t.a. still retains some complexities or 'irregularities' in its code, though they are far fewer than exist in the t.o. code (the traditional orthography or con­ ventional spelling of English). The reason why i.t.a. cannot be a simple one-to-one code is that its function is not to provide a perfect phonetic transcription of English speech, but to aid children to learn to read t.o. Therefore, there has to be a compromise between (I) the need for a simple code for beginners and (2) the aim of facilitating the transition from i.t.a. to t.o., once fluency in i.t.a. reading has been achieved. This second aim is the chief reason why the i. t.a. code cannot be as simple as Table 7-6 may suggest. For example, t is shown as the symbol for the initial sound in 'ten', but in 'littl' the tis doubled. The phoneme is the same but coded with tin one word and tt in the other. This is because all double-consonant letter spellings from t.o. are retained in i.t.a. to increase similarity of word configurations in the two codes-one of the chief aids to transition in i.t.a.'s design. Another reason why i. t.a. cannot be a perfect code for anyone's pronunciation of English is that it is a deliberate attempt to meet the needs of different dialects. This com­ promise means that it is unlikely that any particular English-speaking individual will be absolutely satisfied with i.t.a. as a code for his own speech. However, the result is that, in our wide variety of dialects, everyone should find i.t.a. better than t.o. For example, no one pronounces the word once according to a simple phonic rendering of its t.o. spelling. Its i.t.a. spelling is 'wuns' which would be a recognizable pronunciation even by those who have a different vowel in their own dialect. The care taken by Sir James Pitman (1969) in designing i.t.a. to take account of different pronunciations of English is shown, for example, by his inclusion of the two i.t.a. characters wand~- In North America particularly, many speakers of English will find that the use of these characters in i.t.a. reflects their own speech, in which the initial phoneme in witch is quite different from that in which (i.t.a. witdt and ~i(jl). But other English-speakers will ask, 'why does i.t.a. have two symbols wand~ for the same sound?' because they pronounce witch and which identically. In Scotland the two different sounds are regarded as normal, whereas in England it is unusual to hear any difference. But imagine how difficult it would be if Scottish people were deprived of the initial clue to discriminating waute.r from ~isky! Another example is the pronunci­ ation of the words caught and cot. The t.o. spellings indicate a different vowel phoneme whereas for many American speakers they constitute an acceptable rhyme. But the majority of British speakers pronounce them quite differently, and they are helped by having two different written symbols for the different sounds. The i.t.a. code preserves this difference in spelling which helps many English-speaking children even though it results in there being two different ways of writing the same sound in the perception of many others. Thus the i. t.a. spellings are caut and cot. The solution to this problem is related to the funda­ mental feature of i.t.a.'s design as a transitional alphabet. It is not intended to be a perfect phonetic code. Rather, it is designed to provide a code which is a better approximation to the child's experiences of spoken English than t.o., and yet which does not differ too dramatically from t.o., so that transfer from i.t.a. to t.o. will be quite easy once the child has developed a basic understanding of and ability in the decoding and encoding processes. Therefore, like t.o., i .t.a. does not attempt to dif­ ferentiate between the pronunciation of, for example, American English and British English, and certainly it cannot, and should not try to provide variant spellings for regional differences. If this characteristic of the i.t.a. code is recognized and accepted as inevitable, regional variations in pronunciation need create no real difficulty either for teachers or for pupils. Indeed, teachers can use this problem in i.t.a. to discuss dialect and regional pronunciation with 157 their pupils in a way which may lead even the youngest children to develop an interest in the English language as a living and changing entity. The experienced teacher of i.t.a. knows that the problems discussed above are of minor importance in actual practice in the classroom. The great reduction in the complexity of decoding and encoding difficulties which i.t.a. provides far outweighs the residual complexities which have been discussed in the preceding paragraphs. Nevertheless, it is desirable for teachers to approach their task of learning i.t.a. knowing that, although i.t.a. is simpler than t.o., it does require some concentration and effort to master it completely. It is desirable also that the teacher should know why these complications exist in the i.t.a. code. Sound-to-letter The encoding or sound-to-letter style of describing i. t.a. has the disadvantage of being more complex, and con­ sequendy takes more time to study. Nevertheless the remainder of this appendix must be based on this encoding approach if we are to understand the phoneme system of English. Also, the teacher who learns the i. t.a. code by encoding sound-to-letter will obtain a much clearer understanding of the child's conception of a printed code. The encoding approach reflects the direction that the child's learning must take naturally. The new knowledge the beginner must acquire in learning to read and write is the code. The young child has to attach this new code to his previously-learned spoken language, i.e. the natural develop­ ment is from sounds to letters (not vice versa as in the decoding letter-to-sound style). This helps the teacher to understand how the child approaches the problem of learning a code. The problem of dialect differences must be faced up to again at this point. An account of a code is bound to be based on the writer's own perception of the language to be coded. For the purpose of this appendix it was decided to take two widely-accepted dictionaries as a guide to pronunciation. For British English, we have employed Daniel Jones's English Pronouncing Dictionary (1956) and, for American ISS English, The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition (1969). According to Bronstein (1969), in his introductory chapter to this American dictionary: 'The pronunciation key on the inside of the front of the dictionary . is the central point of departure . The user of the dictionary who is unfamiliar with the sound represented by a certain symbol should find the symbol in the key and pronounce the sample words aloud in order to hear the sound itself.