'Levels' of Language
The Sounds/Letters Level:
Phonology (speech) and Graphology (writing)
Spoken language physically consists of distinctive speech sounds (phonemes)
strung together to make up words. Phonemes are sounds which distinguish
one word from another (e.g. /bet/ vs. /pet/ or /bit/) and linguists indicate
phonemic transcriptions of speech by enclosing the transcription in slash
brackets (/). This level of language is often called the phonemic
or phonological level. Written English does not have sounds (although
we can to some degree 'hear' the sounds behind the writing in our imagination).
Instead it has a set of alphabetical symbols which we conventionally associate
with the (phonemes) of English, sometimes in a one-to-one fashion, or
sometimes in spelling combinations (for example, the two-letter combination
'sh-' is used to represent one phoneme /S/,
as at the beginning of the word 'shin' (/Sin/).
The written equivalent to the phonemic or phonological level in speech
is usually called graphology.
Let us look at a simple sentence to illustrate phonology and graphology:
1. Girls like cats.
In graphological terms, substituting the letter 'h' for the 'c' at the
beginning of the written word 'cats' above changes the spelling from;
'cats' to 'hats', and its spoken equivalent would change from /kats/ to
/hats/. In both cases, not only would the sound or letter change, but
also the whole word and so the meaning of the sentence as a consequence:
2. Girls like hats.
At the end of the words 'cats' and 'hats' there is no graphological
difference between the spelling symbol and the phonemic transcription
symbol used to represent the sound. But it is not difficult to find differences,
and this is not surprising once you know that there are 26 letters in
English but more than 50 phonemes. This explains why the alphabet needs
to use combinations of letters like 'sh-' to represent some sounds. Phonemic
transcriptions, although they use equivalent alphabetical letters where
they can, have to resort to other symbols in order to have a different
transcription symbol for each phoneme. For example 'girls' has 5 letters
but only 4 sounds /gÎùlz/,
and although the plural at the end of each word is indicated by the letter
's', the plural marker is pronounced as /z/ in /gÎùlz/
and /s/ in /kats/.
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