In this chapter …

In this chapter we explore a system for thinking about, and then describing, English speech sounds. We will see that there are important differences between the usual written system of English and how the system of sounds is structured – so many differences, in fact, that the familiar written system of English could never be used as a transcription of either the structure that lies behind speech or the occurrence of English speech sounds themselves. As we'll see, in order to work systematically with the sounds of English we need to analyse both the structure that lies behind speech (we call this phonology) and the nature and occurrence of speech sounds themselves (we call this phonetics).

Here, too, we begin to look at some of the principles that govern phonology: the distribution of sounds, and how they contrast. We draw an analogy between this system and the system, or timetable, of trains, and see that to study phonology is to study part of the ‘timetable of language’.

Written and spoken English

It's critical for our purposes to distinguish between the written and the spoken systems of English.