Phonetics studies speech sounds without regard to meaning or order. It has three subfields: auditory, acoustic, and articulatory. The International Phonetic Alphabet describes over 100 phones. Consonants can be described based on vocal tract use and air obstruction. All speech sounds can be described using this method.
Phonetics is a discipline of linguistics that focuses on the study of sounds used in speech. It is not concerned with the meaning of these sounds, the order in which they are placed, or with any other factor than how they are produced and heard, and their various properties. This discipline is closely related to phonology, which focuses on how sounds are understood in a given language, and semiotics, which looks at the symbols themselves.
There are three major subfields of phonetics, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of the sounds used in speech and communication. Auditory phonetics looks at how people perceive the sounds they hear, acoustic phonetics looks at the waves involved in speech sounds and how they are interpreted by the human ear, and articulatory phonetics looks at how sounds are produced by the human vocal apparatus. This third subfield is where most people begin their study, and it has uses for many people outside the field of linguistics. These include speech therapists, computer speech synthesizers, and people who are simply interested in learning how they make the sounds they make.
The International Phonetic Association has a special alphabet to describe all of the different sounds, or phones, currently thought to be used in human speech. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) has more than 100 distinct telephones listed and marked with a distinct notation. Sounds can be separated into a number of different groups, based on whether or not they use air from the lungs, whether they are voiced or not, the position of the tongue in the mouth, and how the sound is altered. While most of the sounds made by the world’s speakers fall within a fairly narrow band of this spectrum, there are other sounds that are very different, such as the clicks and pops made in some African languages.
Most consonants, called pulmonary consonants, use air from the lungs and can be placed on a grid depending on which parts of the vocal tract are used to articulate the sound of speech and how the air is obstructed as it passes through the mouth. For example, the sound /p/ uses both lips to articulate air, and is therefore known as bilabial. It also consists of a complete stop of the air, known as explosive. The sound /p/, therefore, like the sound /b/, can be described as a bilabial plosive. The sound /b/, because the vocal cord is vibrating as it is said, is called a voiced bilabial stop, while the sound /p/, which has no such vibration, is called an unvoiced bilabial stop.
All consonant sounds used in speech can be described in this way, from the sound /r/ in English, which is called an alveolar trill, for example, to the sound at the beginning of the word “yet”, transcribed in IPA with the je symbol described as a palatal approximant, to the deep Arabic sounds of the pharyngeal fricatives.
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