Phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet

Word Underlying phonological form Phonetic form
long
/lɒnɡ/
[lɒŋ]
longer
/ˈlɒnɡər/
['lɒŋɡər]
longest
/ˈlɒnɡəst/
['lɒŋɡəst]
longish
/ˈlɒnɡɪʃ/
['lɒŋɡɪʃ] or ['lɒŋɪʃ]
As a result, there is, in theory, a minimal pair consisting of longer ([lɒŋɡər] 'more long') and
longer ([lɒŋər] 'person who longs'), though it is doubtful that native speakers make this
distinction regularly.
[107]
 Names of persons and places, and loanwords, are less predictable.
Singapore may be pronounced with or without [ɡ]; bungalow usually has [ɡ]; and Inge may or
may not have [ɡ].
[108]
Vowel system
It is often stated that English has a particularly large number of vowel phonemes and that
there are 20 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation,
[109]
14–16 in General American, and
20–21 in Australian English. These numbers, however, reflect just one of many possible
phonological analyses. A number of "biphonemic" analyses have proposed that English has a
basic set of short (sometimes called "simple" or "checked") vowels, each of which can be
shown to be a phoneme and which can be combined with another phoneme to form long
vowels and diphthongs. One of these biphonemic analyses asserts that diphthongs and long
vowels may be interpreted as comprising a short vowel linked to a consonant. The fullest
exposition of this approach is found in 
Trager & Smith (1951)
, where all long vowels and
diphthongs ("complex nuclei") are made up of a short vowel combined with either /j/ (for
which the authors use the symbol ⟨y⟩), /w/ or /h/ (plus /r/ for 
rhotic
accents), each thus

---

comprising two phonemes.
[110]
Using this system, the word bite would be transcribed /bajt/,
bout as /bawt/, bar as /bar/ and bra as /brah/. One attraction that the authors claim for this
analysis is that it regularizes the distribution of the consonants /j/, /w/, and /h/ (as well as
/r/ in non-rhotic accents), which would otherwise not be found in syllable-final position.
Trager & Smith (1951)
suggest nine simple vowel phonemes to allow them to represent all
the accents of American and British English they surveyed, symbolized /i, e, æ/ (front
vowels); /ᵻ, ə, a/ (central vowels); and /u, o, ɔ/ (back vowels).
The analysis from 
Trager & Smith (1951)
came out of a desire to build an "
overall system
" to
accommodate all English dialects, with dialectal distinctions arising from differences in the
ordering of phonological rules,
[111][112]
as well as in the presence or absence of such
rules.
[113]
 Another category of biphonemic analyses of English treats long vowels and
diphthongs as conjunctions of two vowels. Such analyses, as found in 
Sweet (1877)
or
Kreidler (2004)
for example, are less concerned with dialectal variation. In 
MacCarthy (1957)
,
for example, there are seven basic vowels and these may be doubled (
geminated
) to
represent long vowels, as shown in the table below: