american english - Is there such a thing as "pangram for phonemes"?


English has a lot of pangrams, which are short sentences that use every letter of the alphabet at least once. This website has several examples. But is there a similar thing that is designed to use (almost) every phoneme of the English language?


I know it would be nearly impossible to come up with something that uses all of them (and it is mostly likely going to be a paragraph, and not a sentence, given the amount of phonemes), but still, my question remains: is there such a thing? (And what is it called?)



Answer



The following three mnemonics (the first devised by my father in the 1940s and the second and third devised by me in the 1970s) almost do the trick requested.



  1. "We will aim them at some high, far bow--joy long told--full soon. (Cue.)"

  2. Puff thought "Sash--choke! Hey!!"

  3. Woman lawyer(ing).


The first contains all of the vowel phonemes (including the diphthongs) of the dialect of English my father spoke, while the second contains all of the voiceless consonants of that same dialect. Each but the last of the consonants in the second mnemonic has a voiced counterpart (b, v, edth [with thanks to AmI for catching my error], d, z, zh, j, g) while the last (h) can be usefully paired with the glottal stop as its "voiced" counterpart. The third mnemonic contains all of the remaining consonants (w, m, n, l, y, r, ng).


Note also that in all three mnemonics the exemplified phonemes appear in order--from front to back--with regard to their place of articulation.


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