The sound inventory
San Duanmu · 2007
Abstract Speech is, at some level, made of a sequence of sounds (consonants and vowels). For example, there are three sounds (or segments) in the English word miss [mɪs], whose boundaries are easy to identify phonetically. However, sometimes the case is less obvious. For example, is the long vowel [iː] one sound or two? Since it has no internal boundary, it looks like one sound. On the other hand, it is much longer than a short vowel, so it is like two sounds in terms of duration. Similarly, the diphthong [ai] is like two sounds in terms of duration, but it is like one sound for lack of an internal boundary. A sound like [ ph] presents another kind of problem. It is like two sounds because there is a phonetic boundary between [ p] and [h]. In addition, the duration of [ ph] seems to be longer than that of [ p]. However, phonetic studies show that the vowel that follows [ ph] is shorter than the vowel that follows [ p]. As a result, a syllable like [ phai] ‘ send’ in SC is not appreciably longer than a syllable like [ pai] ‘ defeat’ . Therefore, in terms of total syllable duration [ ph] is still like one sound.