No, they were pointing out that, even though English doesn’t use a separate symbol for each phonemic vowel sound, there are 20 distinct vowel phonemes in the language.
If we gave each its own letter, there would be 20 lettered vowels in English. Which would probably make English easier to learn.
This is why “bay,” “bat,” and “bar” have completely different vowel sounds even though it’s the same letter. And you just have to “know” the difference because there is no separate vowel to distinguish them.
No, they were pointing out that, even though English doesn’t use a separate symbol for each phonemic vowel sound, there are 20 distinct vowel phonemes in the language.
If we gave each its own letter, there would be 20 lettered vowels in English. Which would probably make English easier to learn.
This is why “bay,” “bat,” and “bar” have completely different vowel sounds even though it’s the same letter. And you just have to “know” the difference because there is no separate vowel to distinguish them.