Thread by @aoinifh, A few weeks ago someone said that because the alphabet of Te [...]

Aoife Finn

aoinifh

A few weeks ago someone said that because the alphabet of Te Reo Māori didn’t use the letter “f” then it didn’t have “an f sound”

Unfortunately, some people seem be under the misunderstanding that a particular letter is always & inherently fixed to a particular sound...

First, what is “an f sound”? Well, for various reasons, I presume they meant a “voiceless labiodental fricative”

This just means that you put your bottom lip up to your top teeth & breath out air, try it!

The first (obvious) problem is that...

Even their beloved English language uses other letters to represent that “f sound”. I mean, we’ve seen these examples so much

I give you:

“Gh” doing the “f sound” in - Laugh, rough

“Ph” doing the “f sound” in - Phone, sapphire

“Lf” doing the “f sound” in - Half

...

And as ever English isn’t consistent.

The letter “f” in the word “of”, is a definite “v sound” (also known as voiced labiodental fricative

)...

It’s just reallyyyy Anglo-centric & provincial to think that the “f sound” is innately fixed to the letter “f” ‘cause...

You’re just basing your opinion on how one language, i.e. English,(sometimes!) does it. It turns out that the “f sound” is shown by:

φ in Greek (as in φύοη)

פ ף in Hebrew

Ф in Chechen (as in фақс)

Ֆ in Armenian

ف in Arabic

v in Malay (as in vandalisme)

...

And of course, there are many other ways to represent the “f sound” in writing, especially when you look at different writing systems

The human mouth, is capable of making all kinds of sounds & languages all over the world assign different characters to different sounds

...

There’s a lot more to say about the letter “wh” in Māori & the sound(s) attached to it (it’s not always a voiceless labiodental-dental fricative for one thing

) but that’s a thread for another day, I’ve a few more coming soon