Can you write a sentence where you can show all the letters? Yes, you can find all the letters within a single sentence. Look at the sentence below which will show you all 26 letters.
Though
there are five vowel letters, there are twenty vowel sounds because these
vowels are pronounced differently in different words. The rest of the sounds
are consonants. Understanding the English alphabet and speech sounds are highly
important for pronouncing and spelling words.
Note: you cannot make or pronounce a word without a vowel or a
semivowel. Which letter is called a semivowel? 'Y' is called a
semivowel. Look at the following words: buy, cry, dry, etc.
These vowel sounds are inevitable to pronounce speech sounds known. The speech sounds are also called phonemes.
What do we mean by speech sound?
As one letter can represent more than one sound, you cannot
automatically pronounce a word correctly. Look at the following words:
· cat (hard) city (soft)
· tin thank
· girl (hard) ginger (soft)
· sit (hissing) has (buzzing)
Of course, there are rules to understand how our speech sound
works. Moreover, you have to expose yourself to an environment where you can
practice listening to a great extent. By the way, your listening practice
should be assisted with IPA/phonemic symbols. The symbols are shown
below:
What is a phoneme? A phoneme stands for the smallest unit of sound in a word. It may represent one letter or more than one letter. So, letters are used as a code of symbols to spell phonemes in words. Look at the following word where one phoneme stands for one letter:
- dog
If you go to break/segment this word, it will sound like this: /d/ /o/ /g/. In this word, we have seen three letters to spell three phonemes. Here, each phoneme has been represented by one letter. But, keep in mind that we don't use only one letter all the time to represent one phoneme. We may use up to 4 letters to represent a phoneme. look at the examples below:
- gain /g/ /ai/ /n/ (Here, we are to use two letters to represent phoneme "ai".)
- batch /b/ /a/ /tch/ (Here, three letters have been used to spell the last sound /phoneme of the word.
- borough /b / /r / /ough / (Four letters we have to use here.)
So, phonemes are the central part of reading and spelling. You
must know how to segment a word into its sounds if you want to hear the word's
phonemes. You must know how to sound out and blend the phoneme quickly.
But keep in mind that a phoneme or unit of sound can be spelled in several ways. Therefore, becoming a fluent speaker at first speed is not easy. It takes much time to be familiar with alternatives. Think about the alternatives of the phoneme /oe/: goal, soul, grew, hope, toe, dough. This familiarity with these alternatives comes with time, not overnight.
Grapheme
Representing phonemes through a letter or letter combination is called graphene. So, it is a system of spelling any sound in a word.
Morpheme
If you want to understand morpheme, you have to understand
morphology. Morphology deals with a word's internal structure. Each unit of the
internal structure of a word is called a morpheme. Some morphemes can stand
alone such as "drink", "walk", "play" etc. But
some morphemes are not full words. They sit before or after a word and change
the meaning and part of the speech of that word. The morphemes used before a
word is called prefix: unhappy, return. The morpheme which
changes the part of speech is called a derivational morpheme. And the
morpheme used after a word is called a suffix: beautiful, kindly, etc. Other morphemes are used to change the
number or tense of a word: eats, dogs, played, etc. This type of morpheme is known as inflectional morpheme.
By the way, let's come back to our discussion we are trying to
understand and pronounce phonemic symbols. You can try to practice using the
IPA symbols in the following way:
Now, take some words randomly and pronounce them with the help of a dictionary.
Answer
the following questions:
1. How many sounds do 26 letters
represent?
2. What are the five vowel
letters?
3. Mention at least five speech
organs.
4. What does IPA stand for?
5. Can you write some pairs of words
and show how one word represents more than one sound?
6. How many phonemes does the word
“gain” have?
7. How many letters does the word “gain”
have?
8. Try to represent the phoneme /oe/ in
a few alternative letters.
9. What is the difference between
phonemes and morphemes?
10. What is the difference between
inflectional and derivational morphemes?
11. What are suffixes and prefixes?
Parts of Speech Noun Pronoun Adjective Verb Adverb Preposition Conjunction Interjection
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