Alphaphonetic pronunciation

In linguistics, an alphaphonetic pronunciation is the pronunciation of a alphabetical glyph ("letter") in phonemic orthography with its canonical pronunciation in alphabet language learning, rather than in accord with other morphological variants. It is a concept within phonemic orthography, particularly with the pronunciation of vowels, in which a certain constraint to phonological change is imposed by canonical alphabet pronunciation, and in which the default pronunciation of a vowel influences the pronunciation of particular words.

In languages such as English that have several morphophonemic variants, an "alphaphonemic pronunciation" indicates a letter's pronunciation in accord with the alphabet, rather than in accord with other variants. It is less relevant to languages like Spanish in which the phonemic orthographies are always alphaphonemic, and thus no distinctions are relevant. The latter type of languages May Be said to have "good" or "1:1" grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence.

Overview

For example, the letter "a," in English alphaphonemic pronunciation, is pronounced and not as in Latin-based languages. Hence a word like "amen," which in its original Latin alphaphonemic pronunciation is pronounced ("ah-men"), in English it is often pronounced ("A-men"). In both American and British English, the English alphaphonemic pronunciation is colloquially (if not formally) dominant, while the pronunciation is typically regarded as "Latin" or "Latinized" (which, in context of Protestantism, may carry a certain negative connotation of Roman Catholic culture and influence).

The English alphaphonemic pronunciation of many words can be confusing to non-English speakers. The letter "i" in English words like "light" , "bicycle" , "triad" , "final" , and "spike" are all pronounced alphaphonemically, and thus differ particularly from other orthographies. For example with Latin-based language speakers, a Latin-based pronunciation of "i" is constant, and considers "i" to always indicate or . In Latin orthograpy, the English alphaphonemic "I" is spelled "ai," not "i," thus the Latin orthographic transcription of English pronunciations would be close the IPA examples above, while their native pronunciations of these English words would unintelligible (variations from English digraphs, etc. isolated in [brackets],): "light" , "bicycle" , "triad" , "final" , and "spike" .

In these examples, because English phonemic orthography is highly dynamic, allows for pronunciations not found in Latin, and because English alphaphonemics deviate significantly from Latin, according to a Latin-based language speaker, the English word spellings do not have an intuitive correspondence with their correct English pronunciation.

See also

• Phoneme and phonemics
• Writing system#Learning and Language learning#Writing system
• Allophone
• Morphophonology
• Underlying representation
• Underspecification
• Alphabet pronunciation