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English phonetics studies how humans make different sounds when speaking, divided into consonants and vowels. Consonants are categorized by mood, place, and voice, with subcategories for each. Vowels are divided into monophthongs and diphthongs. Stressed syllables are also important for understanding words.
In linguistics, the study of language, phonetics is a particular branch that examines how humans make different sounds when they speak. English phonetics looks at the various sounds used when pronouncing certain letters or words and is typically divided into two pronunciation categories: consonants and vowels. Within each category, there are specific terms that describe exactly how a person manipulates the tongue, vocal cords, lips, and other parts of the mouth and throat to produce the desired sound. The physical body parts used to create these sounds are called articulators.
Consonants in English phonetics are further divided into three distinct pronunciation categories known as mood, place and voice. Mood is how the sound is pronounced, place refers to how a person moves the articulators to produce that sound, and voice looks at whether or not the vocal cords need to vibrate to produce a specific sound. Each consonant category is further divided into subcategories.
Mode subcategories include categories such as stop, nasal, and glide, which describe how the articulators and airflow are manipulated to form a sound. The letter “B” is an example of a stop while the letter “W” is an example of glide. Place includes terms such as bilabial and labiodental, which refer to the contact of the lips and the contact of the lower lip with the upper teeth, respectively. Voice includes only two subcategories: voiced and voiceless. Voiced consonants cause the vocal cords to vibrate while voiceless letters, such as the letter “P,” require no vocal cord vibration to be pronounced.
Vowels in English phonetics consist of fewer categories than consonants due to how fewer vowels exist in the English alphabet. The main categories for pronouncing vowels include monophthongs and diphthongs. Monophthongs refer to the sound of a single vowel and are classified as front, middle or back. These categories refer to the position of the tongue during vowel sound formation. The second category, diphthongs, refers to the pronunciation of two vowels together almost as one sound and is not divided into any subcategory.
As in many other languages, stressed syllables also play a crucial role in English phonetics. Desert and dessert, for example, are two words that are pronounced the same but place stress on different parts of the word. Desert, referring to a hot dry region, puts stress on the front of the word while dessert, a sweet, puts stress on the end of the word. This allows listeners to understand which word the speaker is referring to.
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