A Basic Course in Anthropological Linguistics (Studies in Linguistic ...

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined
with a series of differences of ideas.
Ferdinand de Saussure (1 857-1 91 3)
PRELIMINARY REMARKS
As the comparative grammarians of the nineteenth century went about the
task of examining cognates, it became obvious to them early on that they
could not rely on alphabet symbols to establish sound correspondences
accurately and, thus, to derive true “sound laws” from the method of
comparison. Alphabet characters, they discovered, did not always provide a
consistent guide to the actual pronunciation of the sounds in words. For example,
how would the linguist represent the “f” sound in English, given that it is
written in one of three ways?
the “f” sound in English
with the letterf with the letters ph with the letters gh
fish philosophy enough
The presence of such inconsistencies in alphabet systems is what led the
nineteenth-century linguists to devise a special and standardized system of
notation, known as the International Phonetic Alphabet (PA), in which one
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