Can anyone create a new letter in the English alphabet???

Question

Someone told me it's impossible to create a new letter in the English alphabet,because every sound can translate into letter already in the alphabet.

Answer 1

The source that told you that is partly correct. The purpose of the alphabet is to represent specific forms of words (in linguistics, it's called morphology) as well as certain sounds (phonetics and phonology). It isn't necessary to have additional letters because it no longer becomes efficient since you do not need more letters than necessary for the minimal number of sounds and morphemes that are present in the ENGLISH language.

However, the sounds in English are not representative of all the sounds in the world. In all of the languages in the world, there are a considerable number of base phonetic sounds, along with different sounds that can be made with your articulators. You're just not aware of them because they aren't existent in English.

Answer 2

The official English alphabet will not be getting any new letters. Linguists have created their own phonetic letter additions to the familiar letters in the English alphabet to better capture the range of sounds when English is spoken in real life.

Whoever told you that every sound is already captured by a letter in the standard English alphabet doesn't know what they're talking about.

Answer 3

Several people have had a go at creating a phonetic (fonetik) alphabet for English, where each phoneme (sound - more or less) is represented by 1 letter; but if we adopeted this, we'd lose all the history of the words. For example, eight and plate would be spelled eit and pleit.

Answer 4

There are hundreds of sounds which aren't present in English. There is no way to write the Spanish pronounciation of J, glortteral stops present in hundreds of languages, the tonal sounds used in Vietnamese, the click sounds which some African languages use. It's just none of these sounds are of any use to English speakers. If we did encounter a word which needed these (for instance if we didn't have a word, but Arabic did, and it had a glotteral stop in it) then we would pronounce an aproximation of the word.

English used to have other letters, æ (now written ae), þ - called thorn (pronounced as th in thing), ð - called eth (pronounced th in that)

Answer 5

Well...

We don't use the "english alphabet"....we use the Roman one...

But, in reality, there have already been a few "additions"...

The V has been separated into U and V and the greek letter Y was added.

There are a few sounds that could be added, in my opinion.......

like something for the zh sound.....as in casual

English linguists don't even accept it as a valid dipthong....so, yes, I think it could use a tuneup. If you got enough people to use it, it would stick.....

Namaste, and happy holidays,

--Tom

Answer 6

Yes, you can take letters from another alphabet to represent sounds from other languages.

Like Japanese

Answer 7

SURE YOU CAN , ILL BET THE PREVIOUS PAOPLE THAT ANSWERED STILL THINK THE WORLD IS FLAT. KEEP IN MIND THAT THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE HAS AN ADDITIONAL 6 LETTERS IN IT.


Defend the poor and fatherless; Do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy; Free them from the hand of the wicked.

Psalm 82:3-4



GOD BLESS

Answer 8

that isn't true. The sound for the hebrew letter "Chet" (the 8th) has no letter with it in the english alphabet.

Answer 9

Nope. Or you could put sounds together. But it would be WAYYY to complicated cause of all the dictionaries or books out there. Ther is no chance of a new letter.

Answer 10

A letter that takes the place of combinations of English letters. There are a lot of letters in Hebrew that would take the place of our letter combinations. For example: sh, ch, ts(pizza), etc.