Phonetics and phonology – the sounds of speech

2.1    Orientation

2.1.1    Sounds and letters: The need for a phonetic alphabet

Clearly, before embarking on the serious study of speech sounds, we have to get rid of the complexities caused by the spelling system, which – in English as in most other languages with a long writing tradition – is the result of a historical evolution and often rather arbitrary when seen from a synchronic perspective. The problem was recognised by the pioneer phoneticians (a word derived from the Greek word for “sound” and describing linguists studying speech sounds) of the 19th century. To put the study of speech sounds on a firm footing, the International Phonetic Association (IPA), founded in 1886 and thus one of the oldest professional associations in linguistics, developed a phonetic alphabet designed to enable linguists to unambiguously transcribe the sounds of all human languages. Used in this sense, to transcribe means not just to write but to really represent the spoken language on the written or printed page.

In this diagram, [i] figures as a “close and front” vowel because it is articulated in the front of the mouth and with the front part of the tongue close to the palate. The vowel [ɑ], by contrast, is a “back and open” vowel because it is articulated at the back of the mouth, with the tongue lowered (more on these physiological details below).

To facilitate comprehension of this complex diagram, these are the consonants needed for the transcription of Standard British English. In addition to the IPA categories, the following Table also lists affricates, which occur when a plosive consonant, e.g. [t], merges with the fricative, e.g. [ʃ], produced in the same place of articulation.

The terms appearing in the horizontal axis of the IPA chart (s. Fig. 2.3) – from “bilabial” to “glottal” – refer to the place of articulation, the terms appearing in the vertical axis – from “plosive” to “lateral approximant” – refer to the manner of articulation. They will be explained further below. The term pulmonic means that an air-stream exhaled from the lungs is involved in their production. This is the statistically normal case in all languages, and most languages in the world have only pulmonic consonants. (The best-known examples of non-pulmonic consonants are the click sounds of the South African Khoisan languages, for which the air-stream is started by a downward movement of the tongue. They have been popularised by South African singer Miriam Makeba’s “Click Song,” available from several web-sources, for example YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6 aNZ8qwKDrE).

Beginning students are frequently overwhelmed by the complexity of the phonetic alphabet and fail to see the relevance of this degree of detail for their studies. However, the connection to everyday life is real enough. Just pronounce the German word viel and use this pronunciation for the English word feel. You will immediately hear that it does not sound right, and the reason is simply that in German we have a clear or “palatal” [l], whereas in English in this position the [ƚ] is dark or velar.

2.1.2    Sounds as sounds, and sounds as elements of linguistic systems: From phonetics to phonology

• articulatory (how are they formed in the mouth, the glottis and the nasal cavity?)

• acoustic (what are they like when measured while travelling through the air?), and

• auditory (how are they perceived by the listener?)

In phonetics, sounds are described for their own sake and in their own terms. Factors such as meaning and grammar are not relevant.

From among the three perspectives named in the above paragraph, it is the articulatory one that provides the most useful starting point. Figure 2.4 below represents the parts of the human body that play a role in the production of sounds.