ABSTRACT
The curious reader may well wonder on seeing this title: what does ‘phonology’ have to do with spelling, and what is phonology anyway? The chapter is geared at answering these two questions. The word phonology is a composite of phon-and -logy (with a linking -o-), themselves ultimately from the Greek φωνή ‘voice, sound’ and λόγοσ ‘speech, discourse, reason’. It indeed deals with sound, but needs careful distinguishing from phonetics, with the suffix -etics simply suggesting matter or subject: phonology, as we will see, goes beyond sound description, into scientific hypothesising. Understanding English spelling in detail requires prior acquaintanceship with the fundamentals of both phonetics and phonology, which this chapter provides. Carney (1994: 9) indeed makes the point:
the published literature on spelling is bedevilled by failure to distinguish between speech and writing, between sounds and phonemes on the one hand and letters on the other. … This is bad practice because it is bound to lead to misunderstanding.
