phonetic

Phonetics
Phonetics (from the Greek: φωνή, phōnē, "sound, voice", pronounced /fɵˈnɛtɨks/) 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), and their physiological production, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status.
Phonetics was studied as early as 2500 years ago in ancient India, with Pāṇini's account of the place and manner of articulation of consonants in his 5th century BC treatise on Sanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today order their consonants according to Pāṇini's classification.
Phonetics, the study of the sounds of human speech, is one area of specialization within the field of linguistics. Unlike semantics, which deals with the meaning of words, phonetics is focused exclusively on the properties of speech sounds and their production.
About Phonetics
Within phonetics, there are three main areas of analysis:
Auditory Phonetics: The study of speech perception and how the brain forms perceptual representations of the input it receives during the course of communication
Articulatory Phonetics: The study of the positions and movements of the lips, tongue, vocal tract, and other speech organs
Acoustic Phonetics: The study of the properties of the sound waves and how they are perceived by the inner ear
Although phonetics might seem like a relatively obscure area of study, it has a surprisingly long history. Approximately 2,500 years ago, ancient Indian grammarian Panini documented the articulation of consonants in his treatise on the Sanskrit language.
A working knowledge of phonetics is useful even if you're not planning a career as a linguist. Speech therapists use phonetics to help people suffering from communication disorders learn to improve their spoken language skills. Foreign language teachers often incorporate phonetics as a tool to show their students how speech sounds are similar across different languages. Singers and actors use phonetics when they must replicate the speech styles of various characters in their daily work.
The International Phonetic Alphabet
As you might expect, studying the sounds of spoken language presents many unique challenges. To make it easier to represent speech sounds in written documents, researchers use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Based on the Latin alphabet, the IPA was created by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is unique in that it is independent of any particular language and applicable to all languages.
In 2007, the IPA contained 107 distinct letters with 56 additional diacritics and suprasegmentals in the IPA proper. However, symbols are occasionally added, modified, or removed by the consensus of the International Phonetic Association.
Symbols within the IPA represent the separation of words and syllables, as well as phonemes and intonation. Recording distinctive speech qualities, such as lisping or speaking with a cleft palate, requires the use of extra symbols included in the Extended IPA for disordered speech.


Transcription
Main article: Phonetic transcription
Phonetic transcription is a universal system for transcribing sounds that occur in spoken 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.[2][3] The standardized nature of the IPA enables its users to transcribe accurately and consistently the phones of different languages, dialects, and idiolects.[2][4][5] The IPA is a useful tool not only for the study of phonetics, but also for language teaching, professional acting, and speech pathology.[6]
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 properties of the sound waves, such as their frequency and harmonics.
auditory phonetics is concerned with speech perception: How speech sounds are categorized, recognized, and interpreted by the auditory apparatus and the brain.
Applications
Application of phonetics include:
forensic phonetics: the use of phonetics (the science of speech) for forensic (legal) purposes.
Speech Recognition: the analysis and transcription of recorded speech by a computer system.
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 phonology is grounded in phonetics, it is a distinct area of linguistics, treating sounds and gestural units as abstract units (e.g, phonemes, features, mora, etc.) and accounting for conditioned variation in the form of grammatical rules (e.g., allophonic rules, constraints, derivational rules).[7] Phonology relates to phonetics via the set of distinctive features, which relate the abstract representations of speech units to speech gestures or acoustic representations.
Phonology (from Ancient Greek: φωνή, phōnē, "voice, sound" and λόγος, lógos, "word, speech, subject of discussion") is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. 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 gesture, 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, 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.
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 [pʰ]), 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.
Phonetics
Jump to:
Vowels
Consonants
Diphthongs
Other symbols
By default, phonetics are not displayed in dictionary entries. To enable them, check the 'Display phonetics' box when you perform your search.
Note: The phonetics feature is currently only available within the following dictionaries:
Cambridge Learner's Dictionary
Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary
Cambridge Dictionary of American English
Vowels
Long Vowels

sheep

farm

coo

horse

bird
Short Vowels

ship

head

hat

above

foot

mother (US)

sock (UK)

worm (US)

cup



Consonants
Voiced

book

day

give

very

the

zoo

vision

jump

look

run

yes

we

moon

name

sing
Voiceless

pen

town

cat

fish

think

say

she

cheese
Diphthongs

day

eye

boy

mouth

nose (UK)

nose (US)

ear (UK)

hair (UK)

pure (UK)





Other Symbols






, , can be pronounced either: or , etc.:

= or

linking r is pronounced only before a vowel in British English:

:
four : four apples


main stress

expectation

secondary stress

retell

syllable division

system




Phonetic Alphabets
These are not phonetic alphabets as in those used to guide pronounciation, rather they are a selection of alphabets used, particularly by radio operators, to spell out words.
Brian Kelk has the most comprehensive list available and many of the alphabets listed here come from his collection. I found John Higgins' Silent Alphabet amusing.
Phonetic Alphabets of the World
Letter


PHONETICS:

The Sounds of Language

When you know language you know the sounds of that language, and you know how to combine those sounds into words. When you know English, you know the sounds represented by the letters b, s, and u, and you are able to combine them to form the words bus or sub. Although languages may contain different sound, the sound of all languages of the world together institute a class of sounds that the human vocal tract is designed to make.

According to Crystal (1980:267), phonetics is the science which studies the characteristic of human sound-making, especially those sounds in speech, and provided methods for their description, classification and transcription. Three branches of the subject are generally recognized: (1) articulatory phonetics is the study of the way of speech sounds are made (articulated) by the vocal organs: (2) acoustic phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sounds, as transmitted between mouth and ear: (3) auditory phonetics studies the perceptual response to speak sounds,