English Spelling [antikvár]

It is rather difficult to acquire perfection in English spelling as it is highly irregular in comparison with the spelling of other languages. Somé of the sources of difficulty in English spelling are as follows: 1) The totál number of phonemes in English is 46. To represent these phonemes we have only 26 letters in the alphabet. It is quite obvious from the number of phonemes and letters to represent them that a one-to-one correspondence is impossible; there would be 20 phonemes left over. This is one of the reasons which accounts for the use of numerous letter combinations and letter diacritics in English spelling. In present-day English spelling a grapheme1 may be used to represent several different phonemes, that is to say, it may have several sound values: ai] nice, library i] British, linguistics ch i:] regime, unique^ tj] ghalk, teach f] chauffeur, machine _k] sehool, epoch A grapheme may sound both as a vowel and a consonant. Consider the pronunciation of the letter y in the words yes [jes], yellow ['jelou], and type [taip], city ['siti]. The same phoneme, on the other hand, is often represented by different letters and letter combinations. There are, for instance, numerous ways of representing the phoneme [i:]. Consider the spelling of such words as be [bi:], see [si:], meart [mi:n], believe [bi'li:v], receive [rifsi:v], police .po'lirs], key [ki:], people ['pi:pl], amoeba [9fmi:b9], Caesar 'sirzo]. The phoneme [ei] is found differently spelled in 1 By grapheme we mean a letter (monograph) or a letter combination (digraph, trigraph, porygraph) used to represent one phoneme: th-r-ee [0ri:], b-r-o-th-er ['brAÖa]: