English Phonetics – an introduction
The English AlphabetThe English alphabet has 26 letters. Each letter has a lower and upper case form. The letters A, E, I, O, U are vowels.ABCDEFGHIJKLMabcdefghijklm[ei][bi:][si:][di:][i:][ef][i:][ei][ai][ei][kei][el][em]NOPQRSTUVWXYZnopqrstuvwxyz[en][ou][pi:][kju:][a:][es][ti:][ju:][vi:][dblju:][eks][wai][zed] or [AmE zi:]Phonetics and PhonologyPhonetics (from the Greek word phone = sound/voice) is a fundamental branch of Linguistics and itself has three different aspects:Articulatory Phonetics – describes how vowels and consonants are produced or “articulated” in various parts of the mouth and throat;Acoustic Phonetics – a study of how speech sounds are transmitted: when sound travels through the air from the speaker’s mouth to the hearer’s ear it does so in the form of vibrations in the air;Auditory Phonetics – a study of how speech sounds are perceived: looks at the way in which the hearer’s brain decodes the sound waves back into the vowels and consonants originally inten find scholarships for high school students ded by the speaker. The actual sound produced, such as a simple vowel or consonant sound is called phone.Closely associated with Phonetics is another branch of Linguistics known as Phonology. Phonology deals with the way speech sounds behave in particular languages or in languages generally. This focuses on the way languages use differences between sounds in order to convey differences of meaning between words. All theories of phonology hold that spoken language can be broken down into a string of sound units (phonemes). A phoneme is the smallest ?distinctive unit sound’ of a language. It distinguishes one word from another in a given language. This means changing a phoneme in a word, produces another word, that has a different meaning. In the pair of words (minimal pairs) ‘cat’ and ‘bat’, the distinguishing sounds /c/ and /b/ are both phonemes. The phoneme is an abstract term (a speech sound as it exists in the mind of the speaker) and it is specific to a particular language.