Phonetics (from the Greek Greek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical ancient Greek literature and the New Testament of: φωνή, phōnē, "sound, voice", pronounced /fəˈnetɪks/) is a branch of linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning (semantics and pragmatics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words that comprises the study of the sounds Sound is a travelling wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations of human speech Speech is the vocalized form of human communication. It is based upon the syntactic combination of lexicals and names that are drawn from very large vocabularies. Each spoken word is created out of the phonetic combination of a limited set of vowel and consonant speech sound units. These vocabularies, the syntax which structures them, and their.^[1] It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds (phones A phonetic transcription is enclosed within square brackets, rather than the slashes of a phonemic transcription): their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status. Phonology Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system. When describing the formal area of study, the term typically describes linguistic analysis either beneath the, on the other hand, is concerned with abstract, grammatical characterization of systems of sounds.

History

Phonetics was studied as early as 2500 years ago in ancient India The Indian subcontinent, also Indian Subcontinent and other terms, is a region of the Asian continent on the Indian tectonic plate south of the Himalayas, forming a land mass which extends southward into the Indian Ocean, with Pāṇini's account of the place In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation of a consonant is the point of contact where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an active (moving) articulator (typically some part of the tongue) and a passive (stationary) articulator (typically some part of the roof of the mouth). Along with the manner of articulation and and manner of articulation In linguistics , manner of articulation describes how the tongue, lips, jaw, and other speech organs are involved in making a sound make contact. Often the concept is only used for the production of consonants. For any place of articulation, there may be several manners, and therefore several homorganic consonants of consonants in his 5th century BC This century saw the beginning of a period of philosophical brilliance among Western civilizations, particularly the Greeks which would continue all the way through the 4th century until the time of Alexander the Great. Ancient Greek philosophy developed during the 5th century BC, setting the foundation for Western ideology. In Athens and treatise on Sanskrit Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism and Buddhism[note 1]. Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand. Sanskrit has been declared a classical language by the Government of India. The major Indic alphabets The Brahmic or Indic scripts are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia, and parts of Central and East Asia, and are descended from the Brāhmī script of the ancient Indian subcontinent. They are used by languages of several linguistic families: Indo-European, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Mongolic, today order their consonants according to Pāṇini's classification. The Ancient Greeks Ancient Greece is the civilization belonging to the period of Greek history lasting from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to 146 BC and the Roman conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth. At the center of this time period is Classical Greece, which flourished during the 5th to 4th centuries BC, at first under Athenian are credited as the first to base a writing system on a phonetic alphabet. Modern phonetics began with Alexander Melville Bell Alexander Melville Bell was a researcher of physiological phonetics and was the author of numerous works on orthoepy and elocution. He was the father of Alexander Graham Bell, whose Visible Speech Visible speech is the writing system used by Alexander Melville Bell, who was known internationally as a teacher of speech and proper elocution and an author of books on the subject. The system is composed of symbols that show the position and movement of the throat, tongue, and lips as they produce the sounds of language, and it is a type of (1867) introduced a system of precise notation for writing down speech sounds.^[2]

Subfields

Phonetics as a research discipline has three main branches:

• articulatory phonetics The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics. In studying articulation, phoneticians explain how humans produce speech sounds via the interaction of different physiological structures is concerned with the articulation of speech: The position, shape, and movement of articulators or speech organs Speech organs produce the many sounds needed for language. Organs used include the lips, teeth, tongue, alveolar ridge, hard palate, velum , uvula and glottis, such as the lips, tongue, and vocal folds The vocal folds, also known commonly as vocal cords, are composed of twin infoldings of mucous membrane stretched horizontally across the larynx. They vibrate, modulating the flow of air being expelled from the lungs during phonation.
• acoustic phonetics Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics which deals with acoustic aspects of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates properties like the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental frequency, or other properties of its frequency spectrum, and the relationship of these properties to other branches of phonetics , is concerned with acoustics Acoustics is the interdisciplinary science that deals with the study of all mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician while someone working in the field of acoustics technology may be called an acoustical or audio engineer of speech: The spectro-temporal properties of the sound waves Sound is a travelling wave which is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations produced by speech, such as their frequency Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency. The period is the duration of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency. Loosely speaking, 1 year is the period of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, and the Earth's rotation on its axis has, amplitude Amplitude is the magnitude of change in the oscillating variable with each oscillation within an oscillating system. For example, sound waves in air are oscillations in atmospheric pressure and their amplitudes are proportional to the change in pressure during one oscillation. If a variable undergoes regular oscillations, and a graph of the system, and harmonic structure In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches, or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic line, or the "horizontal" aspect.
• auditory phonetics Auditory phonetics is a branch of phonetics concerned with the hearing of speech sounds and with speech perception is concerned with speech perception Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonetics and phonology in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology. Research in speech perception seeks to understand how human listeners recognize: The perception In philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. The word "perception" comes from the Latin words perceptio, percipio, and means "receiving, collecting, action of taking possession, apprehension with the mind or senses.", categorization Categorization is the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Categorization implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose. Ideally, a category illuminates a relationship between the subjects and objects of knowledge. Categorization is fundamental in language,, and recognition of speech sounds and the role of the auditory system The folds of cartilage surrounding the ear canal are called the pinna. Sound waves are reflected and attenuated when they hit the pinna, and these changes provide additional information that will help the brain determine the direction from which the sounds came and the brain The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate, and most invertebrate, animals. Some primitive animals such as jellyfish and starfish have a decentralized nervous system without a brain, while sponges lack any nervous system at all. In vertebrates, the brain is located in the head, protected by the skull and close to the primary in same.

Transcription

Phonetic transcription Phonetic transcription is the visual system of symbolization of the sounds occurring in spoken human language. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet (such as the International Phonetic Alphabet) is a system for transcribing sounds that occur in spoken language Spoken language is a form of communication in which words derived from a large vocabulary together with a diverse variety of names are uttered through or with the mouth. All words are made up from a limited set of vowels and consonants. The spoken words they make are stringed into syntactically organized sentences and phrases. The vocabulary and or signed language. The most widely known system of phonetic transcription, the International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet [note 1] is a system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet, devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech pathologists and therapists, singers, (IPA), uses a one-to-one mapping between phones and written symbols.^[3][4] The standardized nature of the IPA enables its users to transcribe accurately and consistently the phones of different languages, dialects The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class. A dialect that is associated, and idiolects In linguistics, an idiolect is a variety of a language unique to an individual. It is manifested by patterns of vocabulary or idiom selection , grammar, or pronunciations that are unique to the individual. Every individual's language production is in some sense unique. Linguists disagree about exactly what is shared, in terms of the underlying.^[3][5][6] The IPA is a useful tool not only for the study of phonetics, but also for language teaching, professional acting, and speech pathology Human communication includes speech , language (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics), both receptive and expressive language (including reading and writing), and non-verbal communication such as facial expression, posture and gesture. Swallowing problems managed under speech therapy are problems in the oral and pharyngeal stages.^[7]

Applications

Application of phonetics include:

• forensic phonetics Forensic linguistics is a field of applied linguistics involving the relationship between language, the law, and crime: the use of phonetics (the science of speech) for forensic (legal) purposes.
• Speech Recognition Speech recognition converts spoken words to text. The term "voice recognition" is sometimes used to refer to speech recognition where the recognition system is trained to a particular speaker - as is the case for most desktop recognition software, hence there is an element of speaker recognition, which attempts to identify the person: the analysis and transcription of recorded speech by a computer system.

Relation to phonology

In contrast to phonetics, phonology Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system. When describing the formal area of study, the term typically describes linguistic analysis either beneath the is the study of how sounds and gestures pattern in and across languages, relating such concerns with other levels and aspects of language. Phonetics deals with the articulatory and acoustic properties of speech sounds, how they are produced, and how they are perceived. As part of this investigation, phoneticians may concern themselves with the physical properties of meaningful sound contrasts or the social meaning encoded in the speech signal (e.g. gender Gender is the wide set of characteristics that are seen to distinguish between male and female. It can extend from sex to social role or gender identity. As a word, "gender" has more than one valid definition. In ordinary speech, it is used interchangeably with "sex" to denote the condition of being male or female. In the, sexuality, ethnicity An ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, consisting of a common language, a common culture (often including a shared religion) and a tradition of common ancestry (corresponding to a history of endogamy), etc.). However, a substantial portion of research in phonetics is not concerned with the meaningful elements in the speech signal.

While it is widely agreed that phonology is grounded in phonetics, phonology is a distinct branch of linguistics, concerned with sounds and gestures as abstract units (e.g., features, phonemes In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances, mora Mora is a unit of sound used in phonology that determines syllable weight (which in turn determines stress or timing) in some languages. As with many technical linguistics terms, the exact definition of mora varies. Perhaps the most succinct working definition was provided by the American linguist James D. McCawley in 1968: a mora is “Something, syllables A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants), etc.) and their conditioned variation (via, e.g., allophonic rules An allophonic rule is a phonological rule that says which allophone realizes a phoneme in a given phonemic environment. In other words, an allophonic rule is a rule that converts the phonemes in a phonemic transcription into the allophones of the corresponding phonetic transcription. Every language has a set of allophonic rules, constraints, or derivational rules A phonological rule is a formal way of expressing a systematic phonological or morphophonological process or diachronic sound change in language. Phonological rules are commonly used in generative phonology as a notation to capture sound-related operations and computations the human brain performs when producing or comprehending spoken language).^[8] Phonology relates to phonetics via the set of distinctive features In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonological structure that may be analyzed in phonological theory, which map the abstract representations of speech units to articulatory gestures, acoustic signals, and/or perceptual representations.^[9][10][11]

See also

• Index of phonetics articles
• International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet [note 1] is a system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet, devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech pathologists and therapists, singers,
• Speech processing Speech processing is the study of speech signals and the processing methods of these signals
• Acoustics
• Biometric word list
• Phonetics departments at universities
• X-SAMPA
• ICAO spelling alphabet
• Buckeye Corpus

Notes

1. ^ O'Grady (2005) p.15
2. ^ Alexander Melville Bell 1819-1905 . University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
3. ^ ^{a b} O'Grady (2005) p.17
4. ^ International Phonetic Association (1999) Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. Cambridge University Press.
5. ^ Ladefoged, Peter (1975) A Course in Phonetics. Orlando: Harcourt Brace. 5th ed. Boston: Thomson/Wadsworth 2006.
6. ^ Ladefoged, Peter & Ian Maddieson (1996) The Sounds of the World’s Languages. Oxford: Blackwell.
7. ^ Ladefoged, Peter (1975) A Course in Phonetics. Orlando: Harcourt Brace. 5th ed. Boston: Thomson/Wadsworth 2006.
8. ^ Kingston, John. 2007. The Phonetics-Phonology Interface, in The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology (ed. Paul DeLacy), Cambridge University Press.
9. ^ Halle, Morris. 1983. On Distinctive Features and their articulatory implementation, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, p. 91 - 105
10. ^ Jakobson, Roman, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. 1976. Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: The Distinctive Features and their Correlates, MIT Press.
11. ^ Hall, T. Allen. 2001. Phonological representations and phonetic implementation of distinctive features, Mouton de Gruyter.

References

• O'Grady, William, et al. (2005). Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction (5th ed.). Bedford/St. Martin's. ISBN 0312419368.

External links

• IPA Trainer Online application to practice phonetics.
• Translate English texts into IPA phonetics with PhoTransEdit.
• the Web Site of the Phonetic Sciences Laboratory of the Université de Montréal.
• The International Society of Phonetic Sciences (ISPhS)
• A little encyclopedia of phonetics, Peter Roach, Professor of Phonetics, University of Reading, UK. (pdf)
• The sounds and sound patterns of language U Penn
• UCLA lab data
• UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive
• EGG and Voice Quality (electroglottography, phonation, etc.)
• IPA handbook
• IPA-SAM Phonetic Fonts
• Speech Analysis Tutorial
• Lecture materials in German on phonetics & phonology, university of Erfurt
• Real-time MRI video of the articulation of speech sounds, from the USC Speech Articulation and kNowledge (SPAN) Group
• Beginner's course in phonetics, with some exercises
• Praat - Phonetic analysis software
• SID- Speech Internet Dictionary
• Extensive collection of phonetics resources on the Web (University of North Carolina)
• Phonetics and Phonology (University of Osnabrueck)

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