Phonetics in a literal sense: 1. Do the letters of the alphabet have a pronunciation?

Starting from the question above I sketch an understanding of Classical Phonetics as fulfilling the task of Euro-American Phonology. A spontaneous reaction to the question in the title might very well be "Yes! Of course letters are pronounced In the reading of texts!" And in a sense this answer is correct. But this sense is not the sense in which I want to question that letters have a pronunciation, so to speak as an intrinsic property. "Pronunciation" is a word with several different meanings. E.g. 1. "He speaks Swedish, all right, but with a strange pronunciation". Here the word refers to a certain person's (a foreigner's?) speech manners. 2. The word "thousandth" has a difficult pronunciation (is difficult to pronounce). – Here it names a phonetic property of a word – the word thousandth. 3. Pronunciation is the subject matter of Phonetics. – Here it refers to a piece of linguistic competence shared by fluent speakers of some language. 4. Arabic has a difficult pronunciation. – In this case we are dealing with a piece of linguistic competence shared by fluent speakers of a certain language, Arabic. Elsewhere I have argued that pronunciation as the subject matter of Phonetics issues out of sense No. 2. above, i.e. the sense in which words have pronunciations as intrinsic properties. To this I must instantly add that the word word is ambiguous as between a. words in the sense of short letter strings of text highlighted by means of punctuation marks such as spaces, i.e., text words; and b. words in the sense of things said e.g. "her last word", "in one word", "have a word with someone", and so on. A word in this last mentioned sense, sense b. is often a complete utterance, which would be represented in writing by a string of text words. So, when I claim that pronunciation as the subject matter of Phonetics, issues out of the pronunciation of individual words, I do of course intend the pronunciation of individual text words, and not words in the general sense of things said! I.e. text words have pronunciations as intrinsic textual-phonetic properties. And since Grammar inventorizes all text words in dictionaries or lexicons, we may also talk (derivatively) about the text words as lexical words in which case the pronunciation of the word in question is taken note of as one among its several grammatical properties. Now, let me return to my original question: DO THE LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET HAVE A PRONUNCIATION? My reasoning up to this point suggests that the answer should be NO. For, what has pronunciation are text words, i.e. certain (short) strings of letters. In that case only certain oneletter words such as "i" as in "i lådan" in the box, "å" as in "å andra sidan, on the other hand, "ö" island; are "single-letters-with-a-pronunciation". Whereas letters such as b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, x, z of the Swedish alphabet do not have pronunciations, while a, e, i, o, u, y, å, ä, ö, all of the Swedish alphabet, apparently do. However, we must also note the fact that every letter of the Swedish alphabet has a name. And these names, being themselves text words, have pronunciations. This is an important historical fact. For, in ancient times one learned to read by means of learning the names of the letters together with a certain technique of collecting letters into syllables. In ancient Greece the letter names had been taken over from the Phoenicians who originally taught the Greeks to read and write. Where the Phoenicians said 'alef, bet, gimel, Speech, Music and Hearing 126 daleth and so on, the Greeks said respectively alpha, beta, gamma delta, etcetera. Here the Greek letter names (alpha, beta...) are not already existing words of the Greek language, but Greek-phonetic renderings of certain lexical words of the semitic language. This means that 'alef, bet, gimel, daleth and so on were the semitic names of certain physical objects viz. ox, house, camel ... , respectively. The historical explanation of these facts is that the Phoenician alphabet had originally been a list of pictograms which pictured, respectively, an ox, a house, a camel ... , and so on. The clever idea behind this semitic script invention is today called the acrophonic principle. The principle on which the correct phonetic uses of the Phoenician letters in reading was aided was this principle. This (modern) word, i.e. acrophonic is constructed out of Greek ácron = edge and phonic from phoné (speech) voice i.e. (approximately) front edge sound. The acrophonic principle is in other words the principle by which the "front edge" sounds in the Phoenician names of the (pictographic) letters are allowed to suggest the speech sound to be produced by the reader in hitting upon the letter in question while reading a succession of letters in a text. When the Greeks took over the Phoenician letters for use in writing Greek, they replaced the Phoenician letter names with like-sounding Greek noises, which then became the (nonsense) names of the Greek letters. To this day all European languages use the first two of these, i.e. alphabet to name the entire list! Furthermore the Greeks made some other changes also, such as discarding some of the Phoenician letters altogether, and introducing some new ones viz. to note vowels, a type of sound which was not noted at all by the Phoenicians (Phoenician 'alif was a consonant, a glottal stop). Two remarks need to be made here: 1. I said that to the reader of Phoenician texts, the pictograms or names of the letters are allowed to suggest the speech sound to be produced by the reader. I.e. the letter merely suggests the sound. It doesn't determine it mechanically. The letters do not denote definite speech sounds in a mechanical-formal sense. And 2. that the use of a letter in reading a text in which it is encountered consists in the human reader's producing a certain speech sound. I.e. what is sometimes called the phonetic value of a certain letter at a certain place in a text, is here understood as the reading-use of that letter at that place. The letter, as it were, gives the reader a visual hint or cue to what he or she should do phonetically! As such it is a phonic or phonetic concept in the sense that a concept is an ability to do something – in this case to recall or produce a certain speech sound. Return again to the initial question as to whether or not the letters of the (Swedish) alphabet have pronunciations. We have already indicated that they do not, but that they have names e.g. a, be, se, de etcetera. We may note that this explains the initially seemingly exceptional status of the Swedish vowels which appeared above as being singled out by the fact that they may figure as one –letterwords. However they have names just like any other letter. And these names should not be confused with one –letterwords! E.g., in Swedish an ö is an island, and has nothing to do with the lettername ö! Here we also encounter a case where the "phonetic suggestiveness" of letter names becomes evident. Thus, in IPA-notation the letter a of the Swedish alphabet would be given as [a]; but in some contexts it should be [a]. The textual context settles which of these two should be chosen. The idea of attempting to give letters exact acoustic-phonetic definitions was introduced into our science by German linguists of the 1870's, notably Eduard Sievers. At this time Physics as personified by Hermann v. Helmholtz was held in high esteem as paradigmatic example of exact science by European linguists, and people like the French abbé Rousselot, and the British linguist Henry Sweet and many others started to employ technical equipment (Kymography etcetera.) for purposes of recording and analyzing speech sounds. It had been found that rather subtle auditoryacoustic pronunciation differences could play a crucial role in the historical development of languages, and therefore an awareness of the importance of paying attention to such minute differences made itself felt. And many people therefore took it for granted that physicalacoustic analysis would answer all linguistic needs. Speech sounds would be definable for linguistic purposes with a precision of a few Hertz! It is well known how this approach fell into disrepute owing to its obsessive preoccupation with linguistically irrelevant phonetic detail. The founder of the so-called Prague school of the TMH-QPSR Vol. 44 Fonetik 2002 127 1920's and –30's the Russian prince N.S. Trubetzkoy actually made linguistic relevance a criterion for linguistic analysis of phonetic distinctions, and made this notion precise by means of a number (8) of formal tests among which ability to differentiate between the pronunciations of text words played a central role. One may note here that the notion of text word presupposes that a system of writing conventions has been introduced with clear rules of word division in texts, but in so far as I know this important fact was glossed over by the Prague school which apparently thought of text words as self-evident units of speech in need of no particular analysis. This is important since it reveals that the Prague school was not entirely aware of its project's character of explication of the principles that ought to underlie the introduction of the classical European system of writing in any language. As such the project naturally reflected the linguistic taste and the general values of the members of the school. In its reform zeal the Prague school renamed phonetics as phonology thereby emphasizing its relevance to linguistics in contrast with the alleged irrelevance of traditional phonetics. This move gave Prague phonology a distinctively ideological tint. Later, generative phonology has followed the trajectory of this ideological movement – in absurdum, in my opinion. If however phonetics is understood as the study of the phonetic uses of the letters of the classical European alphabetic script for the purposes of reading and writing, the task that the Prague school set itself to fulfill can be solved in a manner that is not only less abstruse conceptually, but more natural historically. This however requires an altogether different discussion than those advanced so far by European structuralists and American formalists. And there is not enough space available for it here. Central to such a (future) discussion would be an elucidation of the notion of the uses of a letter in reading and/or writing as the basic concept of phonetics.