Phonotactics
How many individual sounds are there in English? It turns out their are 32. 10 vowels, and 22 consonants. Vowels are your vocal cords exclusively. Vowels are chords, not individual notes, and independent of pitch. On a waveform meter they show a spread of frequencies over two octaves or so, and is really more of a white noise then anything resembling singing, but its fine because they are geared to create easily distinguishable chords or type of sound, but they still retain chord like characteristics, therefore summoning emotions. The a’s are active, the u’s are depressing, the e’s are demanding, and the i’s confused, and the o’s express fatness and quaint truths.
ā , A , In transcribing Hieroglyph the grammarians use all sorts of crazy letters, but a system has been agreed upon where the letters are all written in lower case Latin letters, and then for letters with no equivalent in English, which is quite a few, you can use upper case to signify a different sound, what this gives you is 52 letters, which should more or less work, since it’s a pain to type ā. If a’s are active, this is the most active.
ä , The word ‘awe’ is a single sound of this letter, and is by no means fancy or obscure, it is used quite a bit and could be seen as a type of activity that is internal and so private to ones self, profound class A use cases.
a , normal a, plebeian a, the so called short a, with A major being called ‘long’. But the letters have no need to last long or short, once the letter is recognized is fulfills its duty and you can move on to the next letter.
ē , y The letter y is not needed and can be thrown in the trash, it’s the same sound. Yellow is really ‘ ēelō ‘. Look how odd that looks! But that’s how you spell it in my one off system. You could also omit the special words and spell it “ee-ehloe”. When learning another language they often say ‘you cannot hear our special letters’, but I am very skeptical of that. It’s true that we say the long e very quickly, whereas ‘egalitarian’ wants you to worship each phoneme. In English we only have 26 letters, but 3 of them are fake letters! So there are only 23 letter in Latin. Y is a written letter used to express a great variety of sounds, and is somewhat like X in that respect, another useless letter that can be thrown in the trash.
e , evidently the most used letter.
ī , I following the pattern, we can replace the dot with a line.
i an intellectual category, the chord of i.
ō , O , oh my God, a potent letter, the great orifice as us fallen people see it, really Ra, the sun, who is God.
oo , ω The special letter that looks like a w is Greek, but in Greek this is a vowel close to ä, but the Copts use this letter as well, but they use it for this, ‘oo’. Writing with the special phonetic alphabets is not very pleasant to type or to read, but there are some sounds not representable with any combination of letters, other then triggering the memory of how to pronounce it through rote memorization, which is how we learn to speak. All the meaning is in the spoken sounds, but in order to have an enlightened discussion, special letters sometimes need to be added. But never used, it’s just to clarify what is going on behind the scenes.
u , The grammarians posit a letter called a ‘shwa’, and represent it with an upside down e, but as far as I can tell its a fictitious sound that is usually u, but sometimes a. There is no u long since that’s ‘yoo’, which is two letters.
The consonants can be put into classes, but these are venn diagram like classes, with a lot of overlapping characteristics, and people put them in any number of categories, and in other languages especially this is best to do, and not keep a rigid outlook. One aspect of all the consonants that is not expressed in these classes is whether the consonant has some vowel sound in addition to the airflow resonance.
Plosives, 6 of them plus a pseudo plosive, the powerful K. Their sounds are mainly from airflow turbulence in some part of the mouth, with little and sometimes no vocal cord sounds. The nature of a plosive is that the sound cannot be sustained, and is only produced in one burst. These are sounds present in virtually all languages. X is another useless letter. In English it is used for ks and z. It appears the phonetics and sounds of consonants are all ad hoc solutions to create unique sounds for the purposes of multiplying the possible words, with all the exclusive sounds in different languages being certain exotic consonants.
t , no vowel, purely a puff of air, like from an air compressor. A venturi made between the tongue and the teeth. This actually can be sustained, but requires an enormous amount of airflow, so in practice its unsustainable.
p , another pure consonant.
b , a plosive taking place on the lips, which the grammarians call labial.
d , the venturi is between your tongue and the top of your mouth, the palate, and hence d is palletized. But palletized is the completely wrong grammar and noun inflection, since d would not be d if it was not made by the tongue touching the top of the mouth. This comes from looking at too many letters and believing the written language informs the spoken language, when in fact the written language is just an artistic trick, and the invention of the sounds was the real breakthrough.
g , a major letter from Germanic, a plosive in the throat.
č , ch This a not a plosive since it can be sustained. Very similar to t, but the grammarians see it from the technical angle and call it related to d. The sound represents a unique collection of things, and it’s interesting how diametrically in interacts with d and t, either diametrically or not at all. A ‘turch’ nor a ‘durch’ nor a ‘durd’ exists. Cheers are the opposite of tears or deers, although ‘dear’ is similar to ‘cheer’, but more in the manner of the same word but inflected. In many ways you can see these are ancient just so conventions, where the letters function as definition discriminators, with the handful of ‘special’ letters. We ‘choose’ but do not ’two’s’, and dues are the opposite of voluntary.
k , q , x … Q is another useless letter we can throw in the trash. It’s just a k, and the spelling ‘qu’ is ‘kw’, and thus is just a way to make books look fancier, or to discriminate perhaps between Latin derived words and Germanic words. Also x is not a letter, and is the two sounds ‘ks’ smashed up against each other, but the bar is high to be a letter in the spoken language. However, k is special. Whether it is something to do with the white noise nature of the plosive, or some other reason, k is very often combined with other sounds to create a new letter. This goes to the historical process of fleshing out a suite of discreet sounds to clearly communicate, but is often used for prestige purposes by scribes to make their language look fancier. The strange thing about this process is that there are not enough letters for all the sounds in English, so would it be a good idea to create new letters for unindicated sounds? But no, they need 3 or 5 fake letters to add confusion, since the creation of script writing was first for cypher purposes, only secondarily for transcription of writing. For cypher purposes you want to invent gnomic letters that do not indicate what they are up to, like x q c y, or the entire alphabet of Cyrillic. Before script writing the letters were pictures, which requires great ingenuity to hide what you are saying, whereas alphabets like Hebrew are crafted to defy easy reading, and are a cypher script. Arabic is shorthand and only incidentally cypher like. Latin is the worlds more straightforward letters, and Greek is as well, but only in capitols, whereas it reverts to script which has reduced legibility for lowercase.
The next class of consonants is the fricatives, the vibrating letters.
m , a ‘labial fricative’, mouth must maintain the lips closed
n , the vibration is the tongue touching the palate, with an opportunity for nasal resonance, for languages that enjoy adding meaningless accents to sound fancy.
r , the vibration is in the throat.
j , other languages usually use this for a y or i sound, and this is one of the fairly unique German sounds.
l , the L is hard to identify in lowercase. It can be spoken without any vibration in a lisping manner, but we have ‘th’ for that.
thz , ∂ the second th
v , a very nice letter.
w , whereby what wind did this sound come from? I think it’s an ancient refined sound, that mellowed and became soft, which is why it’s in all the little grammatical words, wending our way to wonder.
z , zero.
ž [ measure , pleasure , seizure ] perhaps the only sound which cannot be indicated by any two letter combination, called digraphs but thats another useless word that means nothing. The letter is the Lithuanian second z.
I guess I chose to put the lisping letters last because they are strange, but when you see who they are, you realize these are the sounds of core English words. They are similar to plosives, but they spread the air out over a wider area, creating more of a ‘white noise’ and less a type of crack of toot. Also, Germanic uses these letters in situations calling for quite speaking, and whispers, so they are naturally letters with less expressive force, also the hissing creates a sort of ghostly quality, and it’s no surprise two letters are of the snake.
h , houses. If I wished to lord over you with my grammatical wisdom, as is so tempting and intoxicating to do, I would tell you this is a very very subtle letters which no foreigner can quite get right, but is a unique part of the heritage of our humungous language. But for some reason the English grammarians are not really that obsessed about pronunciation, just syntax, I and you are grammatically astute, but you and me is what retards say, such runs the dialectic in these twisted grammarians heads.
th , θ , the first th, thin and thoughtful.
f , fake and similar to the snakes
s , snakes and sneaky things
š , sh , more like a windstorm then a snake, perhaps f is the second snake?
As you can see, this seems overwhelming, but you know it already. The manner in which the words or formed is general a consonant followed by a vowel, but words often start with vowels. Any combinations of such letters can be pronounced, whereas only a handful of consonants can be pronounced abutting another consonant. This means for any given word that is CVCVCV, the number of words that can be denoted with this system is 220 with two letters, 4,840 with three letters, 48,400 with four letters, and 1,064,800 with five, and 10 million with six.
S-T.
sate
sought
sat
seat
set
sight
sit
sote , no longer a word but it used to mean ‘fragrant’ as in sweet and sought.
soot
sweet , which is typical for w, a unique sound but rarely alone, so here it has joined up with E. Only a few combinations have something for every vowel, but if we didn’t leave empty spots all languages would sound similar.
R-K
rake
rock
rack
reek
wreck
— reich is probably why we don’t have our own word here.
Rick
—
rook
—
I will be holding you accountable for speaking properly! Now you know better! What I find amazing is that it’s actually pretty easy to learn all these rules, now in the US and Europe 99% of the population can read and write, but 50% of people still can’t talk properly, by which I mean kids who mumble and say like this and like that even though they have a college degree, so it turns out it’s nothing special.