By William R. Jones
You know the words "to, too and two" are homophones, as well as "by, buy and bye" and "dew, do and due." They are words classified as sounding alike with different spellings and different meanings. You may find listings upward of 500 should you google homophones. In my class, we emphasize American English pronunciations as opposed to British, Irish, Scottish, Welsh English or even that of New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. But not Canadian English, as it is much the same as what we speak here in the United States. In saying all of that, homophones certainly may be different with the different Englishes due to the conventional linguistic variety of accents. There are only a few homophones that are not unusual. However, they are unexpected. A few anomalies are: bean and been, farther and father, fort and fought. And, as I teach my class, "There are more!" Nevertheless, you can know what word one is by the context of the sentence that can specify or throw light on its meaning.
Whether speaking of homophones or of another category of specialty words, our class usually looks at the first most popular 100 words or expressions. It is important to note that our dictionaries of syllable spelling and pronunciation arrived long after our speaking. Also, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) didn't come until the late 19th century. The IPA's purpose was "to encourage the use of phonetic notation in schools to help children acquire realistic pronunciations of foreign languages and also to aid in teaching reading to young children." It did no such thing for me in my primary and secondary school days, as we depended upon the pronunciation of our teachers. Even today, the IPA is not self-explanatory, although it appears as a "Guide to Pronunciation" along with "Pronunciation Symbols" in most dictionaries.
The American Heritage Dictionary even has a "Sound-Spelling Correspondences" section as well as its own "Pronunciation Key" alongside that of the IPA. It seems to me that the publishers' insertions are to satisfy the linguistic specialists, lexicographers, speech-language pathologists, etc., that abound. At any rate, you may view the video "How to Read IPA" by Oxford Online English.
To express oneself readily, clearly and effectively for good communication, one must articulate or enunciate words as a cultivated native speaker does. In spite of English’s maddening inconsistent spelling and pronunciation, which has deplored, debated and defended rules, we must continue to emerge out of chaos. The appearance and admixture of English verbal behavior and peculiarities are ruled in many cultural directions, predominantly through immigration.
There is no expectation that you have to speak in perfectly formed sentences and paragraphs, but there is an expectation that you have depth or sound quality when you pronounce the words you know. If I may adapt a bit from the Bible book, then I say if you do not speak with distinction in the sounds, how shall it be known what ye have spoken and how shall I reply? I prefer you speak 100 words with careful enunciation that I can understand rather than speaking 1,000 words defectively.
By the way, my 1960 unabridged Webster’s New International Dictionary of 3,350 pages has no less than 58 pages of “A Guide to Pronunciation” which I have yet to master.
Mind you now, I’ve said nothing.
The author ([email protected]) published the novella “Beyond Harvard” and teaches English as a second language.
English (United States) ·