![]() This is why the names of most letters sound an awful lot like some other letter. Stopped consonants-those that force you to halt the flow of air from your mouth, like B, D, and T-are named as if you wrote “ee” after the letter: “bee,” “dee,” and “tee.” Nasals (sounds made through the nose, like M and N) and fricatives (sounds made by forcing air through a narrow space in your mouth, like S and F) are named by putting the letter “e” before them: “emm” and “ess.” Then there are the weirdos with their own histories, like J, Y, and Q. Vowels are usually pronounced with their long sound. ![]() English letters fall into rough groups for these purposes. A modern, updated, globally friendly English spelling alphabet would be pretty useful right now, but getting people to use one might be harder than you’d think.Īll alphabets that use letters to represent sounds have names for their letters, to refer to them for things like spelling. The general connectivity of the world-including the ease of international video calls and the use of foreign call centers-means that spelling out a name or word is an increasingly common practice. As mobile phones have replaced landlines, call quality has, strangely, gone down. Plus there’s the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is something else entirely.) The history of spelling alphabets is fascinating and winding, but it’s notable that there hasn’t been an official update to the most commonly used English version in about half a century. This uses what is what’s called a “spelling alphabet,” or, confusingly, a “phonetic alphabet.” (The latter is confusing because it has little to do with phonemes, or a unit of sound in a language. “N as in Nancy, O, S as in Samuel, O, W, I, T as in Thomas, Z as in Zebra,” I chant. Because it’s uncommon, and because it would be a problem if my bank writes my name down as “Moskowitz,” I err on the side of caution. ![]() So far as I know, there are somewhere between 10 and 20 Nosowitzes in the world, and they’re all closely related to me. When someone on the phone-the doctor’s office, the bank, the credit card company-asks for my name, I always offer to spell it out-it’s a pretty uncommon surname.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |