More difficult phonics help pls

[Firstconkers]

Would anyone experienced in phonic decoding, pls help me understand and explain to my DC the ough and augh sounds.
There seems to be several sounds for ough? Thought, through, cough, bough etc
In cough and laugh, are the sounds broken down ie gh is f?

I have goggled but don't seem to be able to find a simple and straight forward explaination. Should I just teach as sight words but then what about learning to spell the words. Much appreciated.

/a?/ no tie bar two symbols which you seem to believe is a and u

In the sense that /?/ is the sound that u in put makes, and /a/ is a form of a-sound (albeit not exactly the one that is used in English), yes. In your previous post you said it was one phonetic symbol not two, are you now agreeing it's two?

As I also said the extra notation is often missed out. Check the diphthongs section on wikipedia link here to see how people sometimes notate diphthongs more precisely. In English it's not ambiguous so it's usually missed out.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

Why all the denial? All the sources are saying there are two sounds within the /a?/. The phonetic symbols are saying there are two sounds. You agree the mouth moves. Clearly a continuous sound can be chopped anywhere I want to if I have a recording of it, and the first bit will sound different to the second bit because the mouth is in a different place. So there are two different sounds. You don't appear to be able to hear them, maybe because you're so used to phonemes. I can, and others on the thread have said they can. Why would we make it up?

I'm more than happy to agree that phonemes are useful. And that treating a merged vowel sound within a syllable as a phoneme is useful and sensible.

Why all the denial? because basically what you are mixing two systems and confusing in the process. Phonetic symbols are used to transcribe spoken language and the notation for the same word can be different for different speakers, it can't be compared to phonics which is fixed to our spelling system. Your example of put /'p?t/ or /'p?t/ whereas the spelling of put is fixed regardless.

In your previous post you said it was one phonetic symbol not two, are you now agreeing it's two? No I'm saying that it is a single symbol made up of two parts/symbols indicating that the sound is made by moving the tongue.

Repeatedly telling me I'm confused does not get us any further. Do you find it helps your pupils? How about answering some of my actual questions.

I think maybe you've got confused by the fact I started off substituting Roman letters for the phonetic symbols as I can't typeset them without copy-pasting yours. I do understand the difference.

I've shown you the International Phonetic Alphabet chart in full and there are no diphthong symbols in it. Diphthongs are transcribed using the symbols for the two sounds that make them up.

And you're the one that claimed phonemes existed independent of spelling, not me. I'm just trying to understand how phonemes are defined if they are an actual thing that exists independently of spelling, I always assumed they were just convenient consonant or vowel units for spelling. The references I have been able to find, by the way, confirm that phonemes exist independently of spelling, I'm not debating that is true, just trying to understand how the definition works.

explaining to you that the two systems use similar symbols with different purpose doesnt get us any further either as you seem determined that the symbols of the phonetic code represent the same thing as the Latin alphabet.

If you check I linked to the IPA on Monday but it got us no further!

Of course phonemes exist independently of spelling - phonemes are spoken sounds not written notation. Spoken language existed long before written language.
In English we use the Latin alphabet but for hundereds of years there was no standardised spellings and people were free to represent the sounds of spoken language as they wanted (phonetic spelling). This random method developed into the standardised spellings we know today where speech sounds have a fixed alphabetic code, so we would never spell cat as xyz. Phonics has been around for almost as along as there has been written language and was for centuries the principal method of reading instruction.

When did I ever say the symbols of the phonetic code represented the same thing as the Latin alphabet? I never thought that so if you thought I said that you obviously misunderstood me.

And I checked back through, no you didn't link to the phonetic alphabet you linked to a phonemic chart with phonetic transcriptions. Not the same thing.
This is the official phonetic alphabet, did you look at the link when I linked it before? No double symbols.
www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/IPA_chart_%28C%292005.pdf

And just for fun, here's someone arguing that neither phones nor phonemes exist independent of spelling:
www.cs.indiana.edu/~port/HDphonol/Port.graphical.basis.phones.pdf

Obviously the sounds in the phonemes existed before spelling, within the context of words and sentences. Not so obvious that the subdivision of words in to those particular segments and not any other particular segments exists independent of the way spelling has evolved.

Looks like a mathematical mapping problem to me. Over a finite word space, you could probably find an optimal solution, though given the complexity, you might need some serious processing power. It would make a very interesting PhD thesis, but if it had already been done, I'm fairly sure someone on this thread would have quoted it already.

micksy, I was thinking it's quite mathematical too. Phonemes being an equivalence relation placed on phones or short sequences of phones where native speakers don't differentiate meaning. But then it's complicated by the same phoneme sounding different in different contexts.

What would you be trying to optimise? Minimal number of symbols to differentiate the words?

You would want to minimise the number of letter group/ sound pairings. However, you would also want to minimise the potential sound permutations of novel words (and possibly known words, too, I'm not sure). I think these two parameters would probably have some kind of inverse relationship, but you should be able to give each one a weighting and investigate the various effects of different weightings. For further study you could try to devise some kind of practical test to investigate which variables needed the biggest weighting. You could probably start with a smaller vocabulary to work out the maths of it, and then should be able to work out exactly how complex a task it would be to calculate for a near complete vocabulary. It sounds like a really chunky project that divides up very neatly into manageable bites.

I'm sure the result would be something very much like the current phonics system (unless you was looking to devise an optimal alphabet and spelling system from scratch) but I bet there would be a good few discrepancies as well.

Sounds fun! Maybe the sort of thing Natural Language Processing people might do? I haven't done a literature search, there's a whole field of Linguistics out there not to mention NLP, both of which I don't know a lot about, so I'm more googling for summaries at the moment.

Recommend George Yule The Study of Language

Watching as am sure DD will need to learn this soon.

Yours is the only post in the last 13 months so not much to watch you'd be better starting a new thread