a short vowel combined with either (for which the authors use the symbol ), or (plus for rhotic accents), each thus comprising two phonemes. Using this system, the word bite would be transcribed , bout as , bar as and bra as . One attraction that the authors claim for this analysis is that it regularizes the distribution of the consonants , , and (as well as in non-rhotic accents), which would otherwise not be found in syllable-final position. suggest nine simple vowel phonemes to allow them to represent all the accents of American and British English they surveyed, symbolized (front vowels); (central vowels); and (back vowels). The analysis from came out of a desire to build an "overall system" to accommodate all English dialects, with dialectal distinctions arising from differences in the ordering of phonological rules, as well as in the presence or absence of such rules. Another category of biphonemic analyses of English treats long vowels and diphthongs as conjunctions of two vowels. Such analyses, as found in or for example, are less concerned with dialectal variation. In , for example, there are seven basic vowels and these may be doubled (geminated) to represent long vowels, as shown in the table below: Some of the short vowels may also be combined with ( bay, buy, boy), with ( , beau) or with ( peer, pair, poor). The vowel inventory of English RP in MacCarthy's system therefore totals only seven phonemes. Analyses such as these could also posit six vowel phonemes, if the vowel of the final syllable in comma is considered to be an unstressed allophone of that of strut. These seven vowels might be symbolized , , , , , and . Six or seven vowels is a figure that would put English much closer to the average number of vowel phonemes in other languages. A radically different approach to the English vowel system was proposed by Chomsky and Halle. Their Sound Pattern of English proposed that English has lax and tense vowel phonemes which are operated on by a complex set of phonological rules to transform underlying phonological forms into surface phonetic representations. This generative analysis is not easily comparable with conventional analyses, but the total number of vowel phonemes proposed falls well short of the figure of 20 often claimed as the number of English vowel phonemes. See also Australian English phonology English orthography English