I’ve just released “The Alphabet and Sounds of USA English: Truespel Book 4
(Authorhouse.com).” In it is the consummate table of how often the sounds
of USA English are used (in text and speech) and the top six ways they are
spelled. The database is the Collins Cobuild word frequency count for the
top 5,000 words in English (15.4 million instances). The notation is
truespel. Truespel is nearly identical to DfES (Department for Education
and Skills -UK) 0280-2004 phonemic notation. site
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primary/publications/literacy/948809/nls_phonics028004intro.pdf
It’s estimated that these top 5k words make up 90% of a typical page of text
(newspaper, magazine) and 90% of speech. The table is available as a file.
I can send it to anyone who is interested via email. The book analyzes the
frequency of letters of the alphabet first and then the sounds of English
second.
Tom Z
Also,
The text I am reading says “a phoneme is a sound in a word. A grapheme is a
letter or sequence of letters that represent a phoneme. The same grapheme
can represent more than one phoneme.”
I like the fact that the definition of phoneme does not bring up word
meaning.
I would rather think that a grapheme is a representation of a phoneme in a
phonetic system, such that different phonetic systems would have different
graphemic representations. So if one asks “What is the grapheme for that
sound?” You know they are asking for a phonetic spelling in a certain
notation.
But then what will we call letters in traditional spelling (tradspel) that
spell phonemes, which is what are called “graphemes” above. They need a
name. I call them tradneemz or tradstreengz. In English sometimes several
different tradstreenz spell the same sound.
Tom Z
|