Pronunciation and Phonology in the EFL Classroom - Traditional Spellings to Phonemic Spellings Pt. 2
As mentioned before our four words here all are similar in using the 'b' and 't' sounds at the end. So we know that those phonemes will be used in spelling each one of those words phonetically. Now what we're left to do is assign a phoneme for our vowel sounds. So if we analyze the word, it's 'e' as in bet. We look at our chart, we see the phoneme which corresponds to that sound and that happens to be the standard 'e' that we all recognize. Here, bet phonetically looks very similar to bet in the Roman script. Now let's take a look at 'i' bit. Now we look at our chart and we see that this symbol represents the 'i' sound and that resembles a capital I not a lowercase I but a capital I and so we've arrived at bit. Now with 'but' we have to find the sound and that corresponds to this symbol here as in cut but we simply put it into but and now we've got 'but'. Finally we have 'bought' and we have to find the phoneme for the 'ough' sound and we look here in our pure vowels and we see that this symbol here is used in pot and that's a very similar sound in fact the same sound as in 'bought' so we know that we use this phoneme here to arrive at 'bought'. Now we can take a look at the word 'photo'. Here we have 'f' and we need to find a phoneme for the O. We can look on our chart and locate this symbol for the O sound and again we have 'toe' 'photo', the only difference being the T for the F. We've arrived at photo, four phonemes there. Now we have 'taxi'. We have 't' as in the first sound then we have 'a' and we have to locate the vowel and now we have the 'a' symbol. The X here actually has two phonemes the 'k' and 's' so we look at the 'k' and the 's' phonemes and the last phoneme there E as in the long I sound 'taxi'. Wow we have unite. As mentioned previously there's a slight 'y' sound at the beginning so we begin it with our 'y' phoneme and then we continue on 'u' as in 'ooh' 'jun' phoneme and then 'ite'. We have our vowel 'i' as in buy and our final 't' sound 'unite'.
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