Phonetics

prof.Abdelhamid Fouda 

What do we mean by Phonetics?

Phonetics is the study of sounds. To understand the mechanics of human languages one has to understand the physiology of the humanbody. Letters represent sounds in a rather intricate way. This hasadvantages and disadvantages. 

To represent sounds byletters in anaccurate and uniform way the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)was created.We begin with phonology and phonetics. It is important to understand the difference between phonetics and phonology. Phonetics is the study of actual sounds ofhuman languages, their production and their perception. It is relevant to linguistics for the simple reason that the sounds are the primary physical manifestation oflanguage. Phonology on the other hand is the study of sound systems. The difference is roughly speaking this. There are countless different sounds we can make,but only some count as sounds of a language, say English. Moreover, as far asEnglish is concerned, many perceptibly distinct sounds are not considered different. The letter /p/, for example, can be pronounced in many different ways, withmore emphasis, with more loudness, with different voice onset time, and so on.

From a phonetic point of view, these are all different sounds; from a phonologicalpoint of view there is only one (English) sound, or phoneme: [p].The difference is very important though often enough it is not evident whethera phenomenon is phonetic in nature or phonological. English, for example, hasa basic sound [t]. While from a phonological point of view there is only onephoneme [t], there are infinitely many actual sounds that realize this phoneme.

So, while there are infinitely many different sounds for any given language thereare only finitely many phonemes, and the upper limit is around 120. English has40 (see Table 7). The difference can be illustrated also with music. There is a

continuum of pitches, but the piano has only 88 keys, so you can produce only88 different pitches. The chords of the piano are given, so that the basic soundcolour and pitch cannot be altered. But you can still manipulate the loudness,

for example. Sheet music reflects this state of affairs in the same way as writtenlanguage. The musical sounds are described by discrete signs, the keys. Returningnow to language: the difference between various different realizations of the letter/t/, for example, are negligible in English and often enough we cannot even tellthe difference between them. Still, if we recorded the sounds and mapped themout in a spectrogram we could actually see the difference. (Spectrograms are one table 1: The letter /x/ in various languages.

Language Value

Albanian [d❩]

Basque [x]

English [gz]

French [gz]

German [ks]

Portuguese [❙]

Spanish [ç]

Pinyin of Mandarin [❈]

important instrument in phonetics because they visualize sounds so that you cansee what you often even cannot hear.) Other languages cut the sound continuumin a different way. Not all realizations of /t/ in English sound good in French,for example. Basically, French speakers pronounce /t/ without aspiration. Thismeans that if we think of the sounds as forming a ‘space’ the so-called basicsounds of a language occupy some region of that space. These regions vary fromone language to another.

Languages are written in alphabets, and many use the Latin alphabet. It turnsout that not only is the Latin alphabet not always suitable for other languages,orthographies are often not a reliable source for pronunciation. English is a case

in point. To illustrate the problems, let us look at the following tables (taken from[Coulmas, 2003]). 

Table 1 concerns the values of the letter /x/ in different languages: As one can see, the correspondence between letters and sounds is not at all uniform. On the other hand, even in one and the same language the correspondence can be nonuniform. 

Table 2 lists ways to represent [❅] is English

by letters. Basically any of the vowel letters can represent [❅]. This mismatchhas various reasons, a particular one being language change and dialectal difference. The sounds of a language change slowly over time. If we could hear a

tape recording of English spoken, say, one or two hundred years ago in one andthe same region, we would surely notice a difference. The orthography howevertends to be conservative. The good side about a stable writing system is that wecan (in principle) read older texts even if we do not know how to pronounce them.

Second, languages with strong dialectal variation often fix writing according to table 2: The sound [❅] in English

Letter Example

a about

e believe

i compatible

o oblige

u circus

one of the dialects. Once again this means that documents are understood acrossdialects, even though they are read out differently.I should point out here that there is no unique pronunciation of any letter ina language. More often than not it has quite distinct values. For example, theletter /p/ sounds quite different in /photo/ as it does in /plus/. In fact, the sounddescribed by /ph/ is the same as the one normally described by /f/ (for examplein /flood/). The situation is that we nevertheless ascribe a ‘normal’ value to aletter (which we use when pronouncing the letter in isolation or in reciting the

alphabet). This connection is learned in school and is part of the writing system,by which I mean more than just the rendering of words into sequences of letters.

Notice a curious fact here. The letter /b/ is pronounced like /bee/ in English,with a subsequent vowel that is not part of the value of the letter. In Sanskrit, theprimitive consonantal letters represent the consonant plus [a], while the recitation

of the letter is nowadays done without it. For example, the letter for “b” hasvalue [b❅] when used ordinarily, while it is recited [b]. If one does not want apronunciation with schwa, the letter is augmented by a stroke.

In the sequel I shall often refer to the pronunciation of a letter; by that I meanthe standard value assigned to it in reciting the alphabet, however without theadded vowel. This recipe is, I hope, reasonably clear, though it has shortcomings(the recitation of /w/ reveals little of the actual sound value).

The disadvantage for the linguist is that the standard orthographies have to belearned (if you study many different languages this can be a big impediment) andsecond they do not reveal what is nevertheless important: the sound quality. Forthat reason one has agreed on a special alphabet, the so-called International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). In principle this alphabet is designed to give an accurate written transcription of sounds, one that is uniform for all languages. Since the

IPA is an international standard, it is vital that one understands how it works (andcan read or write using it). The complete set of symbols is rather complex, but

luckily one does not have to know all of it.