PHONETICS - the study of speech sounds

Look through all of phonetic materials in your packet now.

Three Branches of phonetics

Acoustic phonetics - physical properties of speech sounds

acoustic formants - separate sound components

hertz - measure frequency (pitch)

decibels - measure volume (loudness)

sound spectrograph (instrument)

sound spectrograms  (readout)

AUDITORY PHONETICS - how the ear (brain) perceives speech

oronyms - parsing mistakes

It's a doggy-dog world                       (<-dog eat dog)

spittin' image of someone     (<-spirit and image)

mondegreens - oronymical song lyrics 

ARTICULATORY PHONETICS - how speech sounds are made

phone - a speech sound

phonetic feature-components of a phone, smallest unit in lang.

Nikolai Trubetskoi - discovered the phonetic feature

Roman Jakobson - theory that a small number of phonetic features combine to make all speech sounds in all languages

natural class - sounds sharing at least one phonetic feature

IPA -INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET  [ ] - phonetic transcription

orthography - spelling rules    

orthoepy - pronouncing rules

English uses 26 letters but has an irregular orthography

1. One English letter may convey more than one different sound:      

   GH  -  rough (GH => F)       ghost  (GH => G)      night (GH => Ø)

     wind (is blowing)                       wind (the clock)

2. The same sound may be represented by different letters

     F-sound:      phone (PH)      fish (F)       enough (GH)

3. Spelling is sometimes completely unpredictable:

            SEQUIM             PUYALLUP                 SPOKANE

4. Dialects:   HOUSE in Texas, Florida, Canada, etc.

5. Other languages have different sounds and different writing systems