Parts of Speech Part Two

[mistertassie]

In case you missed it, Parts of Speech Part One is here: mistertassie.livejournal.com/2115.html . Now we're going to move on to some more of the parts of speech we use in English.

Articles. We're lucky in English, we only use three articles in our language and they are all neutral. I've never understood why other languages need to make tables

Comments

My apologies

[ogimhere]

What I meant was that while I understood the difference in 'starting with a vowel' (which was how *I* was taught in elementary school) and 'starting with a vowel sound', I was concerned that someone who struggles with phonetics, like an ESL student, might be a little confused.

What I was asking, for a future post, is a clearer definition of what a 'vowel sound' is, and how we can recognize it.

Sometimes, I read in the newspaper (and thus has gotten past an editor) phrases such as 'a honest man' or 'wearing an uniform', because they're working on the assumption that the vowel changes the article, rather than the sounds they make.

(English really is a mishmash of sounds that don't follow phonetic logic.)

The term 'vowel sound' just sounded a little vague, even though I understood it, and perhaps most or all of your readers do, too. But there might just be that one person out there, who's too afraid to admit that they don't understand the context behind this phrasing.

(Note: when I comment, a link is automatically generated in my FB page, as this is a public entry, and so you may get other readers besides the ones currently on your 'friend of' list for LJ.)

Re: My apologies

[mistertassie]

That is an excellent observation about the difference between vowels and vowel sounds. I am not a phonetician, however, so any clarification I could offer will not be as solid as the rest of the information I endeavour to offer.

The English vowel letters (A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y) are used to represent a variety of different sounds (for example, the letter A can create the sound in hay as well as the one in father). Some of the sounds created by those letters are "true" vowel sounds and some are not. Sometimes a word that starts with a consonant letter actually begins with a vowel sound (the most common are words that start with the letter "H" such as honest and herb - herb can be pronounced as herb or "erb").

Here's what Wikipedia has to say on the subject of vowels & vowel sounds:
"In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! [ɑː] or oh! [oʊ], pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! [ʃː], where there is a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract."

So a word that starts with a "vowel sound" is one whose first sound has an open vocal tract, and those are the words that get "an" as the indefinite article. A word that is spelled with a vowel as the first letter, but is pronounced using a constriction of the vocal tract (unicorn, university, uvula, etc.) doesn't start with a vowel sound, and therefore gets "a" as the indefinite article.

I hope that makes things clearer for anyone who found it unclear.