Phonetics

Phonetics, pronounced foh NEHT ihks or pronounced fuh NEHT ihks, is the science of speech sounds and the symbols by which they are shown in writing and printing. This science is based on a study of all the parts of the body concerned in making and hearing speech. It includes the positions of the parts of the body necessary for producing spoken words, and the effect of air from the lungs as it passes through the larynx, pharynx, vocal cords, nasal passages, and mouth. Phonetics also deals with the physical properties of sound--such as frequency and amplitude--that permit people to hear speech sounds as different from one another. For a discussion of these properties, see Sound (The nature of sound).

An international phonetic alphabet is used to represent speech sounds symbolically. The symbols can be applied to all languages. For examples of the symbols, see the Phonetics article in the print version of The World Book Encyclopedia.

Phonetics and spelling. The phonetic ideal is the term for a language in which every spoken sound is represented by one letter and only one. No language has reached this ideal. German and Spanish add a few marks to letters, because those languages have too few letters to cover all their sounds. Italian has only one silent letter, h, which is used before e and i to make the preceding g or c hard, as in spaghetti. French is among the most complex in this respect. It has many spellings for the same sound; four accent marks; and a cedilla for words like Francois that have an s sound for c.

English spelling was decided on by printers hundreds of years ago, but speech has continued to change. For this reason, English is far from the phonetic ideal. "Though he pulled through a cough and hiccough, he still had a rough night on a bough," contains six different sounds spelled the same. Every vowel has several sounds, as in cake, hat, and arm. A and e have about eight sounds. English-speaking people have tried in some ways to reproduce sounds phonetically. For example, pin and pine, and pinning and pining, mark the difference in the i sounds. But there is no reason for a spelling difference in till and until.

Many people have sought to establish a reformed spelling, to bring spelling closer to sound. However, such a reform would be of doubtful value because pronunciation changes so rapidly.

Contributor: Marianne Cooley, Ph.D., Assistant Prof. of English, Univ. of Houston.

Phonetics

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