C has two sounds, hard before a, o, and u, as in cat, cot, and cut, and soft before e, i, and y, as in cell, city, and cycle.
G has two sounds, hard before a, o, and u, as in gate, gone, and gun, soft before e, i, and y, as in gem, gin, and gyve, although it is sometimes hard before i as in girl.
Ch is sometimes soft as in chair and arch, and sometimes hard as in choir.
Th has two sounds, soft, or surd, as in thin and death, and hard, or sonant, as in then and smooth.
S has two sounds, soft, or surd, as in soft and this, and hard, or sonant, as in has and wise.
We have, therefore, twenty-six letters with which to express fifty or more sounds, not counting the digraphs and diphthongs.
Correct pronunciation depends upon three things, correct sounding of the letters, correct division into syllables, and correct placing of the accent.
A syllable is the smallest separately articulated, or pronounced, element in speech, or one of the parts into which speech is broken. It consists of a vowel alone or accompanied by one or more consonants and separated by them, or by a pause, from a preceding or following vowel. This division of words into syllables is indicated in dictionaries by the use of the hyphen thus: sub-trac-tion, co-or-din-ate. It will be observed that in the first of these examples the vowels are all separated by consonants, while in the second two of them are separated by a pause only.
The English language has the further peculiarity of using l and n as vowels in syllabication, as in middle (mid-dl) and reck-on (reck-n).
The illustrations from this point to the end of this section on [page 16] are not typographic divisions. They concern pronunciation only.