Letter Sounds You Didn't Even Know Existed!
Phoneticians agree that there are anywhere between 43 and 50 individual sound in the English language! Yet, we only have 26 letters in our alphabet! Here's some info on the sounds that we use everyday that we didn't know were their own entities! SH and sh: Hard and soft sh
Believe it or not, there's actually two different "sh" sounds in the English language! One of them is the most well known and is represented by the letters 'sh'. It's found in words such as "sheep" and "ship" and "sharp".
The second is represented primarily by 'ti"! It's found in words like "nation" and "fiction".
Say the word "sharp"... now say "nation". Hear the difference?
TH and th: Hard and soft th
"Th" also holds this dual-pronunciation quality, although it is more obvious than the "sh" examples.
Words like "three" and "thorn" contain the "hard th" sound! This sound used to have its own letter in the English alphabet entitled "thorn".
Fun fact:Thorn {Þþ} is still in the Icelandic alphabet!
Words such as "father" and "mother" contain the "soft th" sounds, which is represented by the Icelandic/Latin letter "eth" {Ðð}.
Ch, English J, and English X aren't their own letter sounds!
Although it may seem a tad obvious. These letters don't hold their own sounds! They're a combination of two letter sounds! "Ch" was simply created by placing a 't' sound infront of the sound "∫". This produced the "tsh" sound!
English "J" was a combination of two Latin letters, "D" and "ʒ" (ʒ represented the "zh" sound in Latin script). Slurring these together created the "dzh" sound. This sound was later softened into the "juh" we all know today! English "X" is probably the most obvious combination of all. English "X" is a combination of the letters "k" and "s", which creates "ks". This combination of sounds is so obvious that some people thing we should completely remove "X" from our alphabet (however, that's a whole 'nother posts worth of material}!
The Letter Eng {Ŋ ŋ}
The sound found at the end of words such as "sing" and "being" has it's own letter! The letter Eng represents the "-ng"! Can you imagine having that in our alphabet? "L, M, N, NG, O, P"
Glottal Stops and Schwa Sounds
Glottal stops {ʔ} and Schwas {ə} are two of the most common sounds in the English language! Glottal stops are whenever you punctually end a syllable either in the middle or end of a word. Glottal stops can be found in words such as "department", "cat", "button", and "uh-oh".
Schwas are used when a vowel is either silent or slurred into a sort of "uh" sound. An example of this can be {American pronunciation} "camera", "about", "pencil", "rhythm" and "elegant".
Conclusion
Did you know these (or some of these) sounds/letter existed? Do you think they should be added to our alphabet? They are definitely interesting!
~~Thanks for reading!
