The Consonant Phonemes of English

Abstract

In the following pages the sounds given in Jones’ “Outline” will be examined from the point of view of their possible significant function. Among the first category to be found there are the following ‘plosives’: [p, b, t, d, k, g]. The glottal stop is mentioned but ruled out by Jones since it does not fulfil a significant function in the language: “Many educated speakers of Southern English use [?] for [t] at the termination of a syllable”, when a consonant follows, especially before m, n, r, j, w as in fortnight [’fɔı?nait], Tottenham [’ɔt?nəm] for [’tɔtnəm], quite right [’kwai? ’rait], etc.; the use of [?] instead of [t] before the vowel must be regarded as exclusively dialectal. (p. 139 note). In other words, the glottal stop does not normally appear in what we have called nuclear words, but rather as a juncture phenomenon finally when the following word starts with m, n, r, j, w. It would be ruled out as an independent phoneme of the language in any case, because it can be replaced by a [t] in the above instances without any change of meaning.