Building Blocks

Sounds are what makes language come alive. The more natural languages you know the more you want to be able to pick and choose the sounds in any language you create, and the more you want the differences in sounds to show up on paper or on the screen.

There is no real need to go to great lenghs to find vowel and consonant sounds, even if you don't speak any language but English. I'm a native speaker of what's called the North Central dialect and accent of American English. It's the one that's heard the most on American TV and in American movies. I even had a friend from New York tell me in amazement, "You don't have any accent, at all!" Of course, like everyone else, I do. It's just one Americans are so used to hearing, they frequently don't think of it as an accent.

There may be 5 vowel letters and 2 other letters sometimes used as vowels or in diphthongs, but my dialect has 12 vowel sounds. Linguists like to pin down sounds with what are called minimal pairs. I'd like to show you a perfect set of all minimal pairs for the vowels I use all using the exact same context, but that's not possible. Here's an approximation

1. had
2. Hades
3. head
4. heed
5. hid
6. hide
7. huddle
8. hoed
9. hood
10. who'd
11. hod
12. hawed

If you don't pronounce each of the stressed vowels in the words above differently, obviously you don't have the same accent I do. But chances are you still have 10 or more vowels to work wtih. I pronounce the odd "command" Marry merry Mary! with all three words sounding exactly the same. You may well not. So each of us would like to show some distinction in the vowels we use in our own languages to say we want the vowels pronounced in a particular way.

Things are a bit simpler with consonants. With a few exceptions most English speakers pronounce consonants the same. Chances are that even if you do not pronounce the r in hard, there is a probably a vowel length difference between that word and the way you pronounce hod. Pronouncing the r itself in such positions may take some thought for many non-North Americans and Bostonian Americans as well. Americans can perfectly well pronounce schedule with an intial 'sh' sound, but we don't.

Consonsant that don't show up very well in English orthography are
sh as in nation
zh as in azure
th as in think
dh as in this

All tolled in my dialect there are 12 vowels and depending on how you define the word, between 21 and 28 consonants. All of which are supposedly represented by 26 letters.