SUMMARY OF PHONETICS

DEFINITION OF PHONETICS

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds. Although language is obviously composed of sound, speech sounds came to be the main focus of linguistic investigation only in the 20th century. 19th century linguists were more interested in written rather than spoken language. Only with the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 20th century did linguists recognize the primacy of sound in human language and the secondary, superficial nature of writing. 

THE BRANCHES OF PHONETICS
 
      Phonetics has three branches:

      1) Acoustic phonetics is the study of the physical properties of sounds, the air wave frequencies of which sounds consist. The frequency of vibrations measured in hertz; volume of sound measured in decibels. Instruments used to measure and record speech sounds include the sound spectrograph, which produces readouts called sound spectrograms.

      2) Auditory phonetics is the study of how sounds are perceived by the human ear or recognized by the brain. (Mention Oronyms, Mondegreens.).

      3) Articulatory phonetics is the study of how sounds are produced by the vocal apparatus. Articulatory phonetics will be the main focus of our study. You need to memorize the anatomical features of the vocal tract shown on the back cover of your textbook. In this study also learn about vowel and consonant. vowel has two style of vowels, such as short vowel and long vowel.

  1.      The most common sound for each vowel is its “short” sound:

•  ă, pronounced /æ/ as in apple, pan, or mat,

•  ĕ, pronounced /ɛ/ as in elephant, pen, or met,

•  ĭ, pronounced /ɪ/ as in insect, pin, or mitt,

•  ŏ, pronounced /ɒ/ as in octopus, ostrich, upon, or motto, 

• and ŭ, pronounced /ʌ/ as in umbrella, pun, or mutt.  

 2.  The alphabet sounds (when the vowel “says its name”) are called “long vowels.”

We call them ‘long’ because we hold them longer than the short sounds, but they are completely different sounds-- not a longer version of the same sound.

• Long A (ā ), pronounced /eɪ/ as in ate or mate,

• Long E (ē ), pronounced /iː/ as in eat or meat (or meet or mete-- all pronounced the same),

• Long I (ī), pronounced /aɪ/ as in mite or might,

• Long O (ō), pronounced /oʊ/ as in oats, mote or moat, and

• Long U (ū), pronounced /juː/ in mute. 

That's all about the summary of phonetics, hope it can be useful not only for me but also for everyone who reads this post. Thank you