Furthermore, Collin and Mees 2003: 103-104 relate the phenomenon of deletion as historical assimilation and elision. On contemporary state, the
assimilation and elision occur in contemporary i.e. present day process. That is, it happens only at one point of phonetic context, and generally, the assimilation or
elision in this extent is optional. Meanwhile, when the so- called “original ideal
form” is elided or disappeared, it becomes fossilized as the form turn out to be fixed. In this sense, they argue that there is a case of a historical assimilation and
elision process. The example is p in cupboard
[ˈkʌbəd] where the original form [ˈkʌpbəd] has died out. The ‘letter silencing’ of English spelling provides
numerous reminders of historical elision like in the words talk, comb, know, could, gnome, whistle, wrong,
and iron.
9. Sounds and Spellings
Sounds and spellings have a mutual relation to spoken language and the written form. It cannot be neglected that they usually have different forms,
especially when dealing with English. Finegan 2004: 83, 434 indicates that there is an ‘untidy relationship’ between sound and spelling occurs in languages,
including English. They can be stated as independent to each other because the language may be corresponded to different writing systems. English, in this case,
has 24 consonant sounds and between 14 and 16 vowels and diphthongs which are only represented by 26 letters of the alphabet.
Furthermore, Akmajian et al. 2001: 71 encode that English orthography or spelling system cannot simply represent speech sounds. There are two main
problems related to this. First is that a single letter of the alphabet often represents more than one sound and oppositely for the second problem is that a single speech
sound may be represented by several different letters or more than one letter diagraph. This inconsistency makes English orthography become inadequate to
represent the current English speech sounds. This lack of consistency can be assumed as an impact of the fact that the English writing system became fixed in
the past although the pronunciation of the words had remained to change since that period. Hence, phonetic transcription turns out to be the aid in order to clarify
the sound which is represented by the symbol letter. By these theories, it can be revealed that English orthography fails to fulfill
the ideal one sound-one graph model. As a consequence, some of English sounds are represented by a combination of letters. Thus, it is vital to differentiate
between the sound of the language and the way it is represented in the writing form. English cannot be recognized by the written form alone. Instead, it has to be
confirmed and verified through the spoken language that is pronounced by the native speaker. Hence, the data of written form alone will not be satisfying. The
list of phonetic symbols that represent the spoken form will show the occurrence of stop deletion that happen in English. The sounds and spellings can be compared
and analyzed to show the stop deletion that occurs in any derived words.
10. The Nature of Phonology and Orthography
