The English alphabet has 26 letters. These letters can be classified into two forms: capital & small letters shown below.

Can you write a sentence where you can show all the letters? Yes, you can find all the letters within a single sentence. Look at the sentence below which will show you all the 26 letters.

These 26 letters can again be classified into two groups--Vowels and consonants.

The rest of the letters are consonants: b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, z

Note: you cannot make a word without a vowel or a semivowel. Which letter is called semi vowel? "Y" is called a semivowel. Look at the following words: buy, cry, dry, etc.

These vowel sounds are inevitable to produce speech sounds known. They are also called phonemes. What do we mean by speech sound?

As one letter can represent more than one sound, you cannot automatically pronounce a word correctly. Look at the following words:

• gun          germ
• cat           city
• his          has      pleasant
• ginger    germ   page

Of course, there are rules to understand how our speech sound works. Moreover, you have to expose yourself to an environment where you can practice listening to a lot. Our institution (“Insight English Learning Domain”) ensures such an environment. By the way, your listening practice should be assisted with IPA/phonemic symbols. The symbols are shown below: 

What is a phoneme? A phoneme stands for the smallest unit of sound in a word. It may represent one letter or more than one letter. So, letters are used as a code of symbols to spell phonemes in words. Look at the following word where one phoneme stands for one letter: 

•  dog 

 If you go to break/segment this word, it will sound like this: /d/   /o/ /g/. In this word, we have seen three letters to spell three phonemes. Here, each phoneme has been represented by one letter. But, keep in mind that we don't use only one letter all the time to represent one phoneme. We may use up to 4 letters to represent a phoneme. look at the examples below:

• gain         /g/    /ai/      /n/     (Here, we are to use two letters to represent phoneme "ai".)
• batch       /b/    /a/      /tch/     (Here, three letters have been used to spell the last sound /phoneme of the word.
• borough   /b /   /r /     /ough / (Four letters we have to use here.)

So, phonemes are the central part of reading and spelling. You must know how to segment a word into its sounds if you want to hear the word's phonemes. You must know how to sound out and blend the phoneme quickly. 

But keep in mind that a phoneme or unit of sound can be spelled in several ways. Therefore, it is not easy to become a fluent speller at a fast speed. It really takes much time to be familiar with alternatives of a phoneme. Think about the alternatives of the phoneme /oe/: goal, soul, grew, hope, toe, dough. This familiarity with these alternatives comes with time, not overnight. 

Grapheme

Representing phonemes through a letter or letters combination is called grapheme. So, it is a system of spelling any sound in a word.

Morpheme

If you want to understand morpheme, you have to understand morphology. Morphology deals with a word's internal structure. Each unit of the internal structure of a word is called a morpheme. Some morphemes can stand alone such as "drink", "walk", "play" etc. But some morphemes are not full words. They sit before or after a word and change the meaning and part of the speech of that word. The morphemes used before a word is called prefix: unhappy, return. The morpheme which changes the part of speech is called a derivational morpheme. And the morpheme used after a word is called suffix: beautiful, kindly, etc. Other morphemes are used to change the number or tense of a word: eats, dogs, played, etc. This type of morpheme is known as inflectional morphemes.  

By the way, let's come back to our discussion. we are trying to understand and pronounce phonemic symbols. You can try to practice using the IPA symbols in the following way:

Now, take some words randomly and pronounce them with the help of a dictionary. 

 

Answer the following questions:  

1.                 How many sounds do 26 letters represent? 

2.                 What are the five vowel letters? 

3.                 Mention at least five speech organs. 

4.                 What does IPA stand for? 

5.                 Can you write some pairs of words and show how one word represents more than one sound? 

6.                 How many phonemes does the word “gain” have? 

7.                 How many letters does the word “gain” have? 

8.                 Try to represent the phoneme /oe/ in a few alternative letters.  

9.                 What is the difference between phoneme and morpheme? 

10.             What is the difference between inflectional and derivational morphemes?  

What are suffixes and prefixes?