The grapheme <a> is used as a symbol for the phoneme /a/ when it is pronounced as the low front unrounded form of the vowel, as in the Scottish pronunciation of “back.” In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) it is called Cardinal vowel number 4. The grapheme that looks like a handwritten version <ɑ>, Cardinal […]
Category: Jeff Aronson’s Words
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . The story of ough
Violet Elizabeth’s “croth-word puthle,” composed for William to solve in Richmal Crompton’s William—In Trouble (picture further below), contains two three lettered words crossing at the centre letters. The first clue is “Wot you hav dropps of” and the answer, of course, is “COF.” Violet Elizabeth can’t have been the only child to have been troubled […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Medical logos
“Grapheme” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “The class of letters and other visual symbols that represent a phoneme or cluster of phonemes” and “in a given writing system of a given language, a feature of written expression that cannot be analysed into smaller meaningful units.” The dictionary gives an excellent example: the […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word … Phonetic alphabets
So, there are phonemes and graphemes. A phoneme is a basic indivisible unit of sound, the linguistic atom. A grapheme is a symbol that represents a phoneme. Each grapheme in any well-defined system represents a single phoneme. However, there are several different systems, and a grapheme can represent several different phonemes, depending on the system […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word … Join the Q
Just like the grapheme /x/, which I discussed last time, the grapheme /q/ is among the symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that do not represent the sounds of the English letters they resemble. Followed by a u in English and pronounced kw, it is instead used in IPA to represent the voiceless velar […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . The X factor
There are symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that do not represent the sounds of letters they look like. Among these is the grapheme /x/, which does not represent any of the sounds of the letter ex, but instead represents the sound of a voiceless velar fricative, as in an obsolete English word for […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . It’s all Gweek to me
The BMJ‘s readers, even those who have not studied Greek as a language, ancient or modern, will probably be familiar with most, if not all, of the letters in its alphabet, so widespread are they in scientific terminology. Among medical uses, we have α-adrenoceptors; β-interferon; γ globulin; δ opioid receptors; ε-aminocaproic acid; DNA polymerase η; […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . þink about ðis
In each of the following pairs of generic drug names one is the International Nonproprietary Name (INN) and the other is not: • beclomethasone/beclometasone • betamethasone/betametasone • chlorthalidone/chlortalidone • ethacrynic acid/etacrynic acid • indomethacin/indometacin Before you read on, decide which you think is the INN in each case. […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Grimm’s law
In 1998, The BMJ—which had previously been able to publish only one third of all letters received, and then only weeks or months after the articles to which they referred—took advantage of the advent of electronic publishing to publish pretty much everything immediately on the web, which they likened to a garden. Letters were called […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Nose-ography
While editing the forthcoming edition of Meyler’s Side Effects of Drugs: The International Encyclopedia of Adverse Drug Reactions and Interactions, I came across a suspected teratogenic effect of high dose oral contraceptives (no longer used)—multiple bony defects with pretibial dimples. Dimples are mentioned in many entries in Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), a comprehensive source […]