Phonetics  Jul 16, 2020

What Is Phonetics?

What Is Phonetics? Phonetics is the science or study of speech sounds and the analysis of the mechanism involved in the production, transmission and reception of such sounds. In simple words, it is the study of the actual sounds that make up the words of a language.

Every language has two forms, the spoken form and the written form having its own characteristics. There are sounds in English that you might not use in your language, and sounds in your language that we might not use in English. In English language, the way we pronounce a word and the way we write it may not necessarily be same.

What Is Phoneme?

Phoneme is the smallest unit of speech sound in a language which can distinguish two words. It is the basic theoretical unit out of which syllables are formed in Phonetics and Linguistics.

For Instance, the words ‘MAN’ and ‘PAN’, differ only in the contrast of the phonemic consonants /m/ and /p/, and ‘PAN’ and ‘PIN’, differ only in the contrast of phonemic vowels /æ/ and /I/.

What Is Phonetic Transcription?

Phonetic Transcription is the visual representation of speech using phonetic alphabets, whether written or printed.

Same letters can be used in different words to represent different sounds. For example, the letter ‘Y’ in the words ‘KY’ and ‘SYRUP’.

Similarly, different combinations of letters can be used to represent the same sound. For example, ‘EE’ in ‘MEET’ and ‘EA’ in ‘MEAT’.

However, a phonetic symbol always represents the same sound, and a sound is always represented by the same symbol.

Types Of Phonetic Transcription?

There are generally two types of Phonetic Transcription, Phonetic transcription proper and Phonemic Transcription.

Let us discuss each one in details:

• Phonetic Transcription Proper: Also known as the Narrow Transcriptions, the Phonetic Transcription draws on the total resources of a phonetic alphabet to mark minute distinctions in sound and places symbols in square brackets. For ex: [t].

It is used especially to represent the usage of individual speakers.

Phonemic Transcription: Also known as the Broad Transcriptions, the Phonemic Transcription. provides a symbol for each Phenome in a text, and places the symbols between obliques. For ex: /t/. Such transcriptions are used to represent an idealized description of the system of a speech community.

Need For Phonetics?

We only have 26 letters in alphabet but modern English uses about 44 different sounds. So when you look at the spelling of a word, it becomes difficult as to how to pronounce it, because same letters can be pronounced differently in different words.

Now let us draw attention to the following words: BUSY, FOUGHT, WORD, QUEUE, LAUGHTER, COWARD, CHAOS. All of these words and many more can be difficult to pronounce because spelling in English and not Phonetic is often inconsistent. So phonetic gets around this by looking at the actual sound that makes up a word and not how it is spelt.

Now let us look into of few these difficult to pronounce words, and spell them out using the Phonetics symbols to see exactly how they are pronounced.

Traditional Spelling

Phonetics

busy /?b?zi/

laughter /?l??ft?(r)/

queue /kju?/

So, you can see how there are many inconsistencies in English between spelling and their pronunciation. Phonetics gives us a way to write words as they are pronounced.