Jj is for Jottings 48. One Letter Doesn’t Always Equal One Sound.
If you have read “Aa is for Alpacas” you will already know this, but just in case you haven’t… the letter x is actually two sounds /ks/. (Remember that the slashes mean the sound rather than the letter name/s.) The other thing you will know is that the two letters qu also consist of two sounds, but not the sounds you might think – /kw/.
There are a couple of other consonant sound-letter link facts that it is helpful to understand when dealing with reading and spelling, and these are not included in the book:-
The opposite of /x/ making two sounds is /sh/ and /th/, in which two letters make one sound. You might think that /ch/ belongs to this group of two letters making one sound, but that is different again. While we treat /ch/ as one sound, it is actually two sounds: /t/ and /sh/ stuck together. Feel it in your mouth as you say it slowly and you will realise that this is so. Alternatively, say /t/ and then /sh/ increasingly quickly with less and less of a gap between the two sounds and you will end up with /ch/. Since the International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for /sh/ is /ʃ/, the International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for /ch/ is /tʃ/.
The voiced version (see previous article on voiced and voiceless consonants) of /ch/ is /j/, which is made up of /d/ and /ʒ/. /ʒ/ is the sound in the middle of “measure”, and is the voiced version of /sh/. The symbol for the sound at the beginning of “jam” in the International Phonetic Alphabet is /dʒ/. So:
- /t,d/ are a voiceless/voiced pair.
- //ʃ,ʒ/ are a voiceless/voiced pair. Therefore,
- /tʃ,dʒ/ (i.e. /ch,j/) are a voiceless/voiced pair.
As you can see, the International Phonetic Alphabet reflects how the sounds are produced. However I will continue to use /sh/,/ch/ and /j/ to make it easier.
It is important to be aware of the facts above when sounding out words and when spelling. The more children can separate words into individual sounds and blend sounds into words, the more skilled they will be as readers and spellers, and this rolls out into other areas of their lives.