Letters and phonemes

This. not for the first time, started life as an update but got bigger. I'm aware that my less-than-serious  reference to a "tetraphthong" ...

<apologia subject="dubious neologism?">
(a vowel sound having twice as many contributing vowel sounds as a diphthong has; I'm not sure if this is a word with a track record, but it is now)
</apologia>

...in my discussion of the word Kyiv here  may  have  seemed to suggest that I hold the naïve view that written letters must always represent phonemes – that Kyiv's yi must represent two sounds just because there are two letters there. This would be easy to argue against. My  When Vowels Get Together ...

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Depending on your platform, you may need to instal an e-book reader (Google has a free one, where "free" has the usual online meaning: "terms and conditions apply..."; but in order to read this you've already put your neck in Google's cyber-noose. 😉)
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...gave thousands of counter-examples in the case  of English, and I have no reason to think that something similar should not apply to Ukrainian.

In the Foreword to my unfinished sequel to that book I wrote

 <pre-script>

My justification for this [glossing over the distinction between letters and phonemes] is based on the history of language development. Sounds always precede letters (except in special cases such as acronyms). People don't feel the need to write until they have speech sounds to represent. Sometimes, the link between letters and phonemes remains firm (as in Castilian Spanish, which has a fairly reliable correspondence between letters and phonemes – nearly one-to-one, with a few exceptions). But in English this link is shakier.

The link is still there, though, when you consider the history of spellings. The common silent "gh" for example was originally an attempt to represent the sound /χ/ as in the Scottish "loch" or the German "Bach". In parts of Scotland, indeed, "night" is pronounced /nɪχt/ (as "night" was, at one time, in English); and in Northern Ireland a lake is a "lough", with (uniquely, among British English words – along with the Scottish "loch") the final consonant /χ/.

In some cases letters have no phonemic value – as is often the case with silent letters. There are various reasons for this. Two examples will give a hint of the (often meddlesome) justifications:

• The "b" in "debt" (Chaucer was writing "dette" in the fifteenth century, but later scholars imposed the "-bt" spelling in deference [some would say craven deference] to the Latin debitum.)
• The Greek "ρ" with a spiritus fortis (also known as a "rough breathing") persuaded scholars to take the word "rime" (as used by Coleridge, for example) and insist that it should be spelt with an initial "rh".

In other cases a "silent letter" spelling was imposed by false analogy with another word with a silent letter that had once had a phonemic value. For example both "should" and "would" had one of these "real" silent letters (the words were sceolde and wolde, the past tenses of sculan and willan). But the past tense of another word that came to be used as a modal verb (like "would" and "should") was a word that Chaucer, for example, had spelt "koude" – with no phonemic "justification" for a silent l. So, basing their suggestion on a false analogy, language "experts", (thinking "modal verbs that end /ʊd/ should share the spelling '-ould' "), introduced the spelling "could". (I wonder if the irony was intentional in Dr Johnson's definition of lexicographer as "a harmless drudge"; some would say that the harm that lexicographers have done has sometimes been a major contribution to the complexities of English spelling.)

But quite often (I would guess more often than not, excepting Magic E spellings [where the presence of the e makes its presence felt, audibly, although it itself is not sounded]) the presence of a silent written letter does have some force with reference either to pronunciation – at some stage in the development of the language – or to etymology.

So while it would be wrong to say that written letters in English correspond to phonemes, quite often they make some reference to a real sound produced at some time in the chequered history of English (though, on reflection, a chequerboard seems an inappropriately regular image; a fiendishly irregular patchwork quilt, with the colours bleeding into each other seemingly randomly, would be nearer the mark).

</pre-script>

I have no idea about  the details of Ukrainian, or to what extent written letters correspond with actual speech sounds in  that language. I'm simply saying that the spelling "Kyiv" suggests to me that there is something going on between the /k/ and the /f/...

<parenthesis>
(I think that's what the written v represents – based on info gleaned from a recent Newscast, at some time in the last two weeks [but I find the whole sorry tale too depressing to do the necessary legwork (earwork?}
</parenthesis>

... that is more than just a simple /i:/ sound. 

(In that parenthesis I nearly put "sometime", which reminded me of this notice:

Seen somewhere Oriental (where it seems slut-shaming is the norm. 😉) 

). Bye for now

b

Update: 2020.03.10.14.15 – Added <inline-ps />