Introducing English Linguistics

ance, and /ə/ in addiction.
There are a number of reasons why over time English graphemes have
deviated from English pronunciation. First of all, English uses the Roman
alphabet, an alphabet originally designed to spell Latin. Because Latin and
English have different sounds, the Roman alphabet had to be adapted to
spell certain English sounds. For instance, Latin lacks the phonemes /ð/
and /θ/ found at the beginning of English words such as the and  thin,
respectively. To spell these sounds in English, the digraph th had to be cre-
ated. Writing is also more conservative than speech. As a result, changes
in pronunciation are not reflected in spelling. The word knight has six
graphemes but only three phonemes: /n/, /ai/, and /t/. However, during
Chaucer’s time, the word had a pronunciation that more closely reflected
its spelling: /kənixt/. The spelling of knight therefore reflects the history of
the word: additional phonemes that are no longer pronounced, and one
phoneme, /x/, spelled with the digraph gh, that no longer exists in English
(and is roughly equivalent to the final sound in Bach).
To advance the study of speech, the International Phonetic Association
was founded in 1886 with the goal of developing a phonetic alphabet
known as the International Phonetic Alphabet (or IPA). This alphabet
went through several revisions, with the most recent version established
in 2005 (see www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html, accessed April 30,
2008). In this alphabet, each symbol corresponds to a single sound, mak-
ing it possible to describe the sounds of any language in the world. The
IPA allows for two types of transcription: a broad transcription or a nar-