Tuesday 6 December 2011

Day 2

So, phonetics. The crisp, oniony centre of our linguistic onion.

Let's take a bite.

Let's start really unsophisticated, and assume that orthography (which we write in angle brackets <like this>) consistently relates to our phonetics. Sadly, we'll get ourselves into trouble pretty fast. <ghoti> is not pronounced the same as <fish> - even though <cough>, <women>, and <nation> might lead us to believe it is.

If we get a bit more sophisticated we can look at what the tongue is doing and listen carefully to the sounds made. We have a special alphabet called the IPA which we write in square brackets [laɪk.ðɪs]. We transcribe into the IPA based on three criteria - place of articulation (where the sound is made), manner of articulation (how the sound is made) and voicing (whether or not it's 'buzzy', for want of a better description). [t] as in <tin>, for example, is alveolar (produced by pressing the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, plosive (produced by creating lots of pressure behind the tongue then letting it go all at once) and unvoiced (made without 'buzzing' in the larynx or throat). This is broad phonetic transcription.

At another layer of sophistication, we have narrow phonetic transcription. Here we get specific. [t] as in <tin> isn't quite like [t] as in <hat> - there's a little puff of air called aspiration after it. So we write it as [tʰ] instead.

Finally, we move from impressionistic phonetics like that to quantitative phonetics. Here we measure things like pitch and intensity or look at the precise position of the tongue; but we won't be going very far into that for now.

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