ABSTRACT
A very important distinction, which must be borne in mind continually by the reader, is the dierence between sounds and letters. Sounds are units of speech (pronunciation), while letters are units of orthography (writing or spelling). It is also important in writing about language to make a distinction between letters and sounds, letters being written as italics (e.g. a, b, c) and sounds as special symbols enclosed in square brackets (e.g. [a], [b], [B]). e series of special symbols used to represent sounds in this book is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is the system most commonly used in European publications. However, in the early 20th century, the Revista de filología española (RFE) developed its own system which has been tenaciously adopted in Spanish linguistic atlases and dialect studies (though with some idiosyncratic modication by individual researchers, usually with the aim of reecting greater phonetic detail), and we shall indeed see (Chapter 6) that for the description of Spanish varieties, the RFE system does have advantages. In Tables 2.1-2.3, the principal symbols in both these systems are given (RFE equivalents for some of the sounds which are specic to English are given in brackets). e terminology used in describing these sounds will be explained in 2.1.1-2.1.4.
