English Essay: The Sounds Of English

802 Words2 Pages

The Sounds of English English has 44 sounds but only 26 letters to represent them. Hence various combinations of letters are used to represent these sounds; sometimes the same letter (or a combination of letters) may represent different sounds acquired to bring accuracy in our speech. For example, the letter ‘c’ represents two different sounds as shown below. 1) ‘C’ as in care, cake and cat (with/k/sound) 2) ‘C’ as in cinema, cell and city (with/s/sound) Further, when we put together the sounds of English to produce continuous speech, we need to pay attention to some other features of English such as stress strong and weak forms of words, etc. When we speak sentences in English all words are not pronounced with the same breath force. …show more content…

It also refers to letters of the alphabet that represent those sounds: Z, B, T, G, and H are all consonants. Consonants are all the non-vowel sounds, or their corresponding letters: A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y are not consonants. In hat, H and T are consonants. A consonant sound is one in which the air stream coming out of the lungs is modified in the mouth cavity by some blockage created by the tongue, lips, etc. The syllable We have seen that the sounds of a language form a system or a system of sub-systems in which the various elements are opposed to one another. However this is not enough to explain the organisation of the sound pattern of language, whose units are used to convey meaning. The various elements of the system or sub-systems combine in certain ways which reveal the various levels of structure of the sound system. On the first level we find the structure called syllable. In English a syllable consists of a phoneme or a sequence of phonemes. If the syllable receives word stress it can be associated with meaning and form what is usually called a word. No word in English can consist of anything less than a syllable and no syllable can consist of anything less than a

More about English Essay: The Sounds Of English

Open Document