Phonetics and the IPA: an Overview

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Phonetics and the IPA: Overview 1.0 Overview of Phonetics • Phonetics: the branch of linguistics studying the inventory and structure of speech sounds. • Sound is produced when air is set in motion. Air is set in motion and shaped in form by the SOUND-PRODUCING SYSTEM. • Parts of the sound-producing system: o Lungs: source of the moving air. o Vocal folds: source of sound. A set of muscles inside the larynx (a box-like structure through which air passes). o Vocal tract: three parts of the system that change the shape of the sound. Pharynx: the part of the throat that connects the larynx and oral cavity . Oral cavity: mouth . Nasal cavity: air passages in the nose and connected to the mouth 2.0 Introducing the IPA • Now that we know what the parts of the mouth are, we can come up with an inventory of systems that allows us to record precisely which sounds we are talking about. • IPA = International Phonetic Alphabet. This is the first formalism we will learn. We will use it while studying phonetics: the study of the sounds of human language. o Originally developed in the 1800s by language teachers so they could faithfully represent speech sounds. (1) Principle guiding the development of the IPA: (the bolded ones are key) a. Each symbol corresponds to a single PHONE: a speech sound b. The same symbol corresponds to the same phone in every language. c. Inventory of symbols should stick closely to English, where possible. • IPA symbols are written in square brackets [ ] to distinguish IPA symbols from identical- looking symbols used in other ORTHOGRAPHIES (writing system). • When we represent words in the IPA, we say that we have made a PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION. • We all know how to write words using the English alphabet. Some of us may know how to write other languages as well. Why learn the IPA? o Because the IPA abides by the principles given in (1a,b). Other orthographies do not. They are imperfect systems influenced by history, politics, etc. The IPA is standard. o For most orthographies, you can’t tell how to pronounce a word just by looking at it. With the IPA, you can. Compare English words: through, rough, bough, though, and cough. Each of these words has the string of letters ough, but this string is pronounced differently in each word. o The IPA contains symbols that remain constant for all languages (although we’ll just be learning a small subset of the IPA symbols, namely those that are most relevant for English and related languages). A central goal of linguistics is to discover how all human languages have fundamental similarities with each other. Despite there being over 6000 languages, the number of sounds used by these languages is finite. Having a single shared method of writing down sounds (the IPA) underscores this similarity between languages. • This version of the IPA may be slightly different from the version you have learned in other classes (like classes about communication disorders). You’ll want to know this one for the class. .

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