In the third issue of Word Ways, Solomon W. Golomb proposed this little marvel, “the periodic table of the alphabet,” an attempt to organize the letters (and their most typical sounds) by row and column:
As someone who’s spent about a year and a half in speech therapy, I’ve gotten very familiar with how speech sounds are made. The terminology has changed since 1968, but it’s still interesting that Golomb managed to find some meaning in the alphabet’s seemingly arbitrary structure. Except for J and M, which have to switch their positions, each letter of the alphabet falls neatly into the category assigned to it.
Golomb takes the same approach as old-time physicists working from the periodic table and proposes that his ninth slot must be occupied by a missing letter, teth, which is indeed the ninth letter in the Hebrew alphabet, where it sits between two letters that roughly parallel h and i.
He also allows for the possibility of another “sibilant” letter to place above J, and I can easily imagine one called shesh, which would represent the “sh” sound as teth represents “th.” That’d bring the total number of letters to 28.
Here’s the tables the IPA uses today, one for English consonants and one for English vowels. (The international sounds are more complicated, but we’ll get there.)
The glottal stop ʔ is found in pauses between vowel sounds like “uh-oh,” as well as certain “t”-vowel-“n” words like “certain.” It’s worth an exploration of its own…some other time.
To make the rest of this as simple as possible: “ŋ” is the “ng” sound repeated in “banging”; ɾ and ɹ are both aspects of “r”; θ and ð are “th” sounds, voiceless (as in “thing”) and voiced (as in “father”); ʃ and ʒ are “sh” and “zh” sounds, as in “fishin’” and “vision” respectively; they join up with consonants to form tʃ and dʒ, the sounds English usually signifies with “ch” and “j.” The sound labeled “j” in the IPA table is the consonant “y,” as in “year” and “you.” And yes, there are two w’s in the table, because the “w” sound fills both roles. All the other consonants are pretty much what you’d expect.
As for vowels…
Of the vowel sounds seen here, almost none are intuitively obvious if you haven’t done some work with linguistics. You could probably guess “o” is as in “bowl,” but I doubt you’d expect “i” to be as in “beet” or “u” to be as in “smooth.”
Still, the bigger question Golomb might ask is, Why so many empty spaces? Part of the answer is that we’re limiting ourselves to English, but the non-English versions of these tables still aren’t as filled-out or coherent in shape as you might expect:
I’m sure a full-time linguist could give us a more detailed explanation, but I doubt Golomb’s cheeky comparison to chemical elements really holds up here. (He also theorized a sixth row for his periodic chart, adding that once that row’s properties had been predicted, “we are confident that these new, heavier, and probably unstable letters will be discovered individually, by diIigent experimental search.”)
The best answer I can give is—we’re made of meat. It’s a miracle we’ve evolved our lips and tongue and throat to produce such a variety of sounds, but our vocals are no more perfect than the rest of us. A “bilabial fricative,” for instance, would require pressed-together lips to vibrate as smoothly and reliably as more internal mouth organs do when making “f,” “v,” “s,” and “z” sounds.
And to those high expectations, I can only say, pffft.
Next: 128 patterns for seven-letter words.