The Alphabet and Sounds of Usa English: Truespel Book 4

By Thomas E. Zurinskas

This book is an in-dept analysis of the letter/sound correspondence of USA English. It combines two databases, one from the Times of London which counts the frequency of words in the newspaper, and the other from the truespel database of phonetic spelling of USA English. Together they combine to count letter and sound correspondence for frequency analysis. Each of the 26 letters of the alphabet is examined and lists are made of a letters most frequent position in words, top ten words containing the letter, and sounds spelled by the letter. Each of the 40 sounds are analyzed similarly. The analysis represents once and for all how the sounds of USA English are spelled as spoken (spoken word dialog being the same as newspaper text) and how often and in what way the letters of the alphabet portray those sounds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781467029537

Thomas E. Zurinskas

Thomas E. Zurinskas is the creator of truespel, the worlds first pronunciation guide spelling for USA English.His experience is as a technical editor, human factors specialist, database specialist, and quality assurance specialist with the Federal Aviation Administration.His HF design background led him to create a user-friendly phonetic system for USA English.Using voicings from popular talking dictionaries, he respelled the English language in USA accent.This created a database enabling this unique capability for investigating how the sounds of USA English are spelled in traditional spelling (he calls tradspel).He has written two a truespel pronunciation guide of USA English (truespel book two) and a beginners dictionary using VOA definitions (truespel book three), both at Authorhouse.com.He has applied truespel to other languages and compared them to USA English in terms of sound frequencies.Current efforts are detailed at truespel.com, where it can be seen that the whole internet can be converted to truespel.He lives with wife, Bonnie, in Greenacres , Florida .

Book preview

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive, Suite 200

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

AuthorHouse™ UK Ltd.

500 Avebury Boulevard

Central Milton Keynes, MK9 2BE

www.authorhouse.co.uk

Phone: [phone]

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

© 2008 Thomas E. Zurinskas. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 5/5/2008

ISBN: 978-1-4208-9549-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-2953-7(ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

USUK%20Logo%20Color.ai

Contents

Abstract:

Acknowledgement:

Introduction

Section 1. Analysis of the 26 Letters of the Alphabet

Section 2. Analysis of The 40 Sounds of USA English

Appendix A

Training and Test on Phonetic Awareness with Truespel

Appendix B.

Survey of How Words Are Pronounced in the USA

About the Author

Abstract:

This book examines the frequency of use of the letters of the alphabet as they appear in the 5,000 most popular newspaper words in USA English. These words total 15.4 million instances, with the most popular word, the, having over 1 million instances. It is estimated that these top 5,000 words represent over 90% of the words in most text; therefore, they are a good basis for investigating primary phonetic patterns that will not substantially change over various texts. This book examines English text from the point of view of usage frequency of each letter of the alphabet in terms of popularity for the sounds they spell. This is of interest to English teachers as it shows which spellings are primary for which sounds. The tables in this book give: 1.) a frequency ranking of the 26 letters of the alphabet, 2.) the top 10 words containing those letters, 3.) the most popular locations in a word where the letter appears (beginning, middle, or end), and 4.) a ranking in popularity of sounds represented by each letter. This is repeated for the 40 sounds (phonemes) of USA English. By virtue of these capabilities, truespel sets a new usefulness standard for phonetic spelling. It is designed to replace the current pronunciation guide spelling in our dictionaries. A free web- based converter from traditional text to truespel is available at truespel.com. A web page converter is also there, showing that global phonetic spelling of USA English is just a few clicks away.

Acknowledgement:

I’d like to thank my wife, Bonnie, for her support and patience with me. I’d also like to thank Joe Davidson, interguru.com, for his work on his truespel converter. Thanks also to Dominic Sardone for developing the truespel web site at truespel.com and Collins Cobuild for data.

Introduction

Introduction

This book presents data answering many questions about the relationship of sounds and letters in USA English, such as: How often are the letters of the alphabet used in written text, and what sounds are associated to them in various combinations? Also, how frequently are the sounds of English repeated given that some words are used more than others? To do this analysis two things are needed: 1. a count of the frequency of use of words in typical text, and 2. a phonetic conversion for associating that frequency to sounds (phonemes) in words so sounds can be counted. Both these criteria are recently met, so that a thorough analysis of the relationship of the alphabet to USA English can be made. For more information on the truespel phonetic system see the Appendix A or truespel.com.

The database of the most popular words of English is contributed by the Times of London representing a count of the top 5,000 words printed in their newspaper. Each word has beside it the number of instances it appears in a set number of pages, enabling a ranking. The total number of instances for the 5,000 words is 15.4 million instances, or an average of 3,000 instances or appearance in the newspaper per word. But that is misleading. The data are very skewed. The data show that the most popular 100 words make up over 50% of the total instances. That is why a phonetic representation of the frequency of sounds in normal USA English text (or speech) needs to take into consideration word frequency of use.

The table below breaks down the most popular 5,000 newspaper words into 100-word increments. As can be seen from the table, the most popular 100 words make up 57.6% of the words in this sample. Each new word at the bottom of the sample (200-word increments) adds only a small fraction to the total. Thus, it is estimated that these top 5,000 words of English make up over 90% of any text, and thus represent spoken USA English well (if newspaper text can be considered typical spoken English). Note that although the Times of London is British, spelling for this study is converted to USA English.

The table below shows that the first 100 words (2%) of the 5,000 most popular words of English account for over 57% of all instances. The second 100 most popular words adds 8.1%. So, the top 200 most popular words in English make up almost 2/3s of the words we use in conversation and writing.

Accumulated Instances per Word in 100-Word Increments up to 5,000 most popular words.

Note that the instances are fewer for the additional words added to the sample. In fact, it’s estimated that expanding the sample size to the next 5,000 words in popularity would only increase the instances by 5.4%, which would be a lot of work to analyze for little return. Most likely, the additional words would retain the spelling patterns of the previous 5k words. So it was deemed that the 5k was robust enough to be descriptive of USA English as a whole. It’s estimated that the 5k most popular words represent about 90% of the words in any random sample of newspaper text or spoken conversation.

The Alphabet and Order of Popularity of Letters

Let’s examine how many times the letters of the alphabet appear in our 5k sample. This should, once and for all, establish the order of popularity of the letters of USA English, from most to least popular. Because the data show the number of times (instances) words appear, we can analyze the data to determine the number of times each letter appears. This was done in the table below. The letters are sorted in popularity showing that e is most popular letter in the USA English language and z least. There is quite a difference between them, with e being 387 times more popular than z.

The table below shows that there are 7,938,896 letter e’s in 6,483,688 word instances (some have more than one letter e.) Dividing the letter e count by total count of letters shows that the letter e makes up almost 13% of the letters of newspaper text.

The ranking of popularity of letters of the alphabet in USA English

The term letter instance is the number of times a letter is in a word times the number of times the word is counted in the sample. For instance, the word the is the most popular word in the database. It has a count of 1,081,654 instances in the newspaper database. Thus, letters t, h, and e each have that amount of instances for just that one word. If e were twice in the word (say for thee), it would be doubled. There are 62,753,509 total letters for 15,392,580 words in the sample. The average number of letters per word is only about 4. This is understandable because the most popular words are smallest.