Patrick Dempsey to star as Harry Quebert in new TV series. 1  Grey's Anatomy showrunner Shonda Rhimes signs multi-year deal with Netflix. 2  Thirteen's Jodie Comer to star in Phoebe Waller-Bridge's new US series Killing Eve. 3  Former Grey's Anatomy star TR Knight is returning to Shondaland.
Phonemes, letters and allophones. A phoneme is a single unit of sound that has meaning in any language. There are 44 phonemes in English (in the standard British model), each one representing a different sound a person can make. Since there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, sometimes letter combinations need to be used to make a phoneme.
As an example for English vowels, the pair l e t + l i t can be used to demonstrate that the phones [É] (in l e t) and [Éª] (in l i t) do in fact represent distinct phonemes /É/ and /Éª/ . An example for English consonants is the minimal pair of  p at +  b at. The following table shows other pairs demonstrating the existence of various distinct phonemes in English.