Day 3

Phonology.

Phonetics deals with the sounds we make. Phonology deals with the underlying mental idea we have of these sounds, and how they're put together. Whereas phonetics deals with phones, phonology deals with phonemes, which are written /laɪk ðɪs/. Notice how it's essentially the same as the broad phonetic transcription I gave? That's because the symbols we give to phonemes, unlike those we give to phones, are broadly arbitrary (as long as they're consistent!); it makes sense to link them with the most common realisation (actual pronunciation) of those phonemes. This doesn't have to be the case though!

Let's take two speakers, C and S. C has (close to) an RP accent, and says (crudely), <like this>. S has a particular accent which alters that /ð/ and says (again crudely) <like dis>.

C: /laɪk ðɪs/ >> [laɪk.ðɪs]
S: /laɪk ðɪs/ >>[laɪk.d̪ɪs]

Crucually, they both have the same underlying representation and understand one another - it is just the realisation that changes.

There's another few crucial differences. Phonology touches on morphology, so we often represent morphology (more on that tomorrow) in the transcription, whereas in phonetics we represent syllables instead.

<he liked this> >> /hiː laɪk-d ðɪs/ >> [hiː.laɪkt.ðɪs]

Phonology comprises lots of interesting things, like phonotactics (how sounds are allowed to fit together), and rewrite rules (how you get from the underlying to surface structures), but you have the crucial concepts together now. Next up: Morphology

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.