Revisiting Muhammad Abdul Hai and W.J. Ball’s ‘The Sound Structures of English and Bengali’: A Critical Overview of the Consonant Inventory

This paper aims to review a section of the book titled ‘The Sound Structures of English and Bengali’ authored by Muhammad Abdul Hai and W.J. Ball. The book is focused on teaching English pronunciation to Bangla speakers, with a view to exploring the sound structure of both languages. By contrasting the sound structure of English and Bangla, it is intended to assist Bangla speaking students in developing their spoken English skills. According to the authors, a comparative study will enable students to discern between the similarities and dissimilarities between speech patterns, which will then ameliorate confusion and misinterpretation therein. The book limits the analysis to the Received Pronunciation (RP) model of English and is meant for students without prior exposure to an English-speaking environment, with a comparison of the sounds of Standard Colloquial Bengali (SCB) of the time without taking into account the dialectal variation beyond SCB. Hence the current critique is also limited to the sound system of SCB and aims to expand further in future work. The authors wrote the book with the intention that it would serve as a useful resource for teachers, and therefore it does not delve into phonetic theory, and instead emphasises the value of practice and a teacher-centered learning environment. An exploratory comparative investigation of Bangla and English vowels, consonants and intonation patterns is included in the contents. Due to constraints of time and space, this paper focuses primarily on the contrastive analysis of consonants of SCB and RP, with a review and reanalysis therein of plosives, fricatives, nasals, affricates, laterals, approximants, as well as consonant clusters, and a comparison of similarities and dissimilarities in the inventory of shared sounds. It compounds on the information presented by the authors by postulating comparative approximations of sound pairings from both languages that can minimise the phonetic distance in learning articulation at no expense to intelligibility or comprehension, from the perspective of facilitating the learning of English by deviating from the RP model of English as proposed by Ferguson (1962) in his review of said book.