Simplified Standard Sound Symbols (S4)

OK, I’ll admit it, I was not sure about the difference between “phonetic” and “phonemic”. I decided to ask Jane Setter, my old phonetics tutor at University College London who…

Just added links to Free Stuff (yay!) and Paid Stuff (boo!) to my blog (www.S4phonetics.com). Have a look.

I didn’t write this, Professor John Wells did. I just cut it from here and pasted it below. My point is that phonics may be very useful for teaching children who already…

Speech consists of syllables, spoken one after another. As the eminent phonetician Jack Windsor Lewis states: “Every syllable must have a vowel or syllabic consonant.” In the context of S4, syllabic…

In English speech, words are distinguished by the sounds used to represent them. This is evidenced by what are called “minimal pairs”, e.g. “ship” and “sheep”. Research shows that, if…

S4 is just a practical superstructure built on a solid IPA foundation. In accordance with the Occam’s razor principle, it is designed to be the simplest possible way of writing…

S4 text is always written in blue, so that it can immediately be recognized as such. A single vowel symbol indicates a vowel that is short, and a double one indicates a…