Phonetics

Phonetics (from the Greek: , phn, "sound, voice") is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech.[1] It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds (phones): their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status. Phonology, on the other hand, is concerned with abstract, grammatical characterization of systems of sounds.

Basic Information
The study of phonetics is a subject of the multiple layered subject of Linguists that focuses on the sounds that are produced to spoken words. In this field of research there are three basic areas of study. Articulatory phonetics- focuses on the vocal structures of the throat that helps someone produce sounds. Acoustic phonetics- an area that focuses on the physical structures of phonetics (the structures of sounds and their placement to produce words Auditory Phonetics- is the study of phonetics that focuses on the ear and its relationship to speech production and sounds used for communication. All parts of phonetics are inter-connected because the process of human communication is both a system of auditory mechanisms which correspond to each other and are mediated by wavelength, pitch, and the other physical properties of sound.

Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet is used as a global standard for the written application and transcription of a sequence of sounds that produces words. This type of phonetic alphabet is also used to symbolize and label the limitation of each world language through its representation of the unique sound combinations that can be produced for a given language. Each language uses a limited number of humanly possible sounds that are grouped into phonemes. Example of phonetics: in English the speaker does not notice that he always makes a puff of air when he pronounces the p the word pin and never makes the puff with the p in the word spin; for the native speaker the sound is the same. While other language there may be a difference in pronunciation of the letter p can become a determiner between two different words, In English the two sounds are considered variations of a single sound, the phoneme p, and as such are allophones.

The difference between phonetics and phonemes

Phonemes include all significant differences of sound, including features of voicing, place and manner of articulation, accents, and secondary features of nasalization and labialization. Whereas phonetics refers to the study of the production, perception, and physical nature of speech sounds.

Using an Edison phonograph, Ludimar Hermann investigated the spectral properties of vowels and consonants. It was in these papers that the term formant was first introduced. Hermann also played back vowel recordings made with the Edison phonograph at different speeds in order to test Willis' and Wheatstone's theories of vowel production.

Subfields
Phonetics as a research discipline has three main branches: * articulatory phonetics is concerned with the articulation of speech: The position, shape, and movement of articulators or speech organs, such as the lips, tongue, and vocal folds. * acoustic phonetics is concerned with acoustics of speech: The spectro-temporal properties of the sound waves produced by speech, such as their frequency, amplitude, and harmonic structure. * auditory phonetics is concerned with speech perception: the perception, categorization, and recognition of speech sounds and the role of the auditory system and the brain in the same.

Transcription
Main article: Phonetic transcription

Phonetic transcription is a system for transcribing sounds that occur in spoken language or signed language. The most widely known system of phonetic transcription, the International Phonetic Alphabet (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, and idiolects.[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.[5]

Relation to phonology

In contrast to phonetics, phonology 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, sexuality, ethnicity, 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, mora, syllables, etc.) and their conditioned variation (via, e.g., allophonic rules, constraints, or derivational rules).[7] Phonology relates to phonetics via the set of distinctive features, which map the abstract representations of speech units to articulatory gestures, acoustic signals, and/or perceptual representations.

Phonology
Phonology (from Ancient Greek: , phn, "voice, sound" and , lgos, "word, speech, subject of discussion") is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with "the sounds of language".[1] That is, the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use.[2] In more narrow terms, "phonology proper is concerned with the function, behaviour and organization of sounds as linguistic items".[1] 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 word (e.g., syllable, onset and rhyme, phoneme, articulatory gestures, articulatory feature, mora, etc.) or to units at all levels of language that are thought to structure sound for conveying linguistic meaning.

It is viewed as the subfield of linguistics that deals with the sound systems of languages. Whereas phonetics is about the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds of speech,[1][3] phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning. The term "phonology" was used in the linguistics of a greater part of the 20th century as a cover term uniting phonemics and phonetics. Current phonology can interface with disciplines such as psycholinguistics and speech perception, resulting in specific areas like articulatory or laboratory phonology.

Overview
An important part of traditional forms of phonology has been studying which sounds can be grouped into distinctive units within a language; these units are known as phonemes. For example, in English, the [p] sound in pot is aspirated (pronounced [p while the word- and syllable-final [p] in soup is not aspirated ]), (indeed, it might be realized as a glottal stop). However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations (allophones) of the same phonological category, that is, of the phoneme /p/. Traditionally, it would be argued that if a word-initial aspirated [p] were interchanged with the word-final unaspirated [p] in soup, they would still be perceived by native speakers of English as "the same" /p/. (However, speech perception findings now put this theory in doubt.) Although some sort of "sameness" of these two sounds holds in English, it is not universal and may be absent in other languages. For example, in Thai, Hindi, and Quechua, aspiration and non-aspiration differentiates phonemes: that is, there are word pairs that differ only in this feature (there are minimal pairs differing only in aspiration).

In addition to the minimal units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, i.e. replace one another in different forms of the same morpheme (allomorphs), as well as, e.g., syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation.

The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign languages, even though the sub-lexical units are not instantiated as speech sounds. The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones. On the other hand, it must be noted, it is difficult to analyze phonologically a language one does not speak, and most phonological analysis takes place with recourse to phonetic information.

Representing phonemes
The writing systems of some languages are based on the phonemic principle of having one letter (or combination of letters) per phoneme and vice-versa. Ideally, speakers can correctly write whatever they can say, and can correctly read anything that is written. However in English, different spellings can be used for the same phoneme (e.g., rude and food have the same vowel sounds), and the same letter (or combination of letters) can represent different phonemes (e.g., the "th" consonant sounds of thin and this are different). In order to avoid this confusion based on orthography, phonologists represent phonemes by writing them between two slashes: " / / ". On the other hand, reference to variations of phonemes or attempts at representing actual speech sounds are usually enclosed by square brackets: " [ ] ". While the letters between slashes may be based on spelling conventions, the letters between square brackets are usually the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) or some other phonetic transcription system. Additionally, angled brackets " " can be used to isolate the graphemes of an alphabetic writing system.