Another Short History of Linguistics (5)

We have said that after the alphabetic revolution, the alphabetic language lost two dimensions in writing system; it turned from three dimension into one dimension. And what about pronunciation? Before answer this question we have make clear the symbol that we used in expressing sound. When I talking linguistic issue on some internet forum, I found that until now, most linguists believe that each letter represent a single sound and a word is roughly an assembly of phonetic letters. In fact, human being can utter two kinds of sound; one is CV the other is pure vowel. Sounds like CVC such as ‘let’, ‘lid’, ‘pat’ etc. are but a CV with another lightly uttered CV. Or we may say in the word ‘let’ the main CV is ‘le’ the last ‘t’ is a lightly uttered ‘tƏ’ . We may said a consonant could never be uttered independently. It has to have a vowel to help it. The ancient Greece knew this. The ancient Chinese people knew this too, so in China when a character need to be expressed by letter, they used a system called 切 (cut in). That as most characters were CV and they could not be separate, so why not just left them alone, whenever we need it cut it immediately? That is take the consonant from first character and that the vowel from second character. For instance the CV that is pronounced as发切粗；‘发’(uttered as ‘fa’) 切(means cut) 粗(uttered ad cu) would be uttered as ‘fu’.

As above, the so called consonant is in fact a mixture of the imagination consonant and a vowel. If you don’t think so then try to utter any consonant as long as 3 second see what left? And in the dictionary, letter ‘B’ is given by [bi] and C is [si] etc.

With this arrangement we can talk about the dimension of pronunciation.