Phonetics

Phonetics

As I know , Phonology involves two studies :

m     The study of the production, transmission, and reception of speech. And its known as  “Phonetics”.

m    The study of the sounds and sounds pattern of spesific language, and it’s known as “Phonemics”.

The first explanation is Phonetics. Let we talk about Phonetics. So What is Phonetics??? What is the material that include in Phonetics??

Phonetics is the science of human speech sounds.

To understand the mechanics of human languages one has to understand the physiology of the human body. Letters represent sounds in a rather intricate way. This has advantages and disadvantages. To represent sounds by letters in an accurate and uniform way the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) was created.

It has three  subfields or branches on human speech sound, such as :

•   Articulatory phonetics. This examines the articulatory (vocal) organs and their role in the production of speech sounds.

•   Acoustic phonetics. This deals with the physicalproperties of speech sounds as they travel through the air in the form of sound waves.

•   Auditory phonetics, which examines the way in which human beings perceive speech sounds through the medium of the ear.

In Phonetics, we shall learn about sounds. 

What is sound??

Sounds produced by passing of the air-stream through the various glottal and supraglottal organ of speech.

Sounds can be divided into two main types.

Р                A vowel       is a sound that needs an open air passege in the mouth. The air passage can be modified  in terms of shape with different mouth and tongue shapes producing different vowels.

Р        A consonant   is formed when the air stream is restricted or stopped at some point between the vocal cords and lips .

If we want to say something, we will produce a word, so where is the place  to produce a sound and word??

We know it as “Place of Articulation”

            There are 8 commonest places of articulation, are :

a.    Bilabial = where the lips come together as in the sounds /p/, /b/, and /m/.

                       b. Labiodental = where the lower lip and the upper teeth come together as for the sounds /f/, amd /v/.

                c.   Dental =  where the tip or the balde of the tongue comes in contract with the upper teeth as in pronunciation of the initial sound in ‘thief’ and ‘then’.

            d.   Alveolar = when the tip or balde of the tongue touches the alveolar ridge which is directly behind the upper teeth.

e.  Velar = the back of the tongue approximates to the soft palates.

  f.   Palatal = the front of the tongue approximates to the hard palate.

        g.   Palato-alveolar = the tip of the tongue is closed to the alveolar ridge while the front of tongue is concaveto the roof of the mouth.

`                       h. Glottal =  What you are actually doing to keep the air from expelling out of your lungs by closing your glottis.  

• h/ as in "hi" and "Bahamas".  
• /?/ - This is actually the culprit behind many of the "silent syllables". For example, in the phrase "wha(t) time is it?" the /t/ in "what" is dropped and the vowel sound before it is closed at the glottis.

      Source :

      introduction to linguistics.Loreto Todd.

      Introduction to English Linguistics.  A Companion to the Seminar.László Varga. PDF