Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2005
Puzzled by Michael Bulley's ‘Consonantal beginnings’, in ET80 (Oct 04) who does admit to some difficulty in discussing initial consonant clusters in English, when he says: ‘The conventions of writing can mislead us about speech.’ While the restoration of the phonetic symbols in the ‘full and proper form’ of the article (ET80) now elucidates some of the puzzles in the previous version (ET79), difficulties remain in maintaining a clear distinction between the sound systems of English and the writing system.