Before we enter a discussion of phonetics, let me give you a few reasons why it is useful for language teachers to study phonetics. There will always be differences in articulation and acoustics between the sounds of two languages. Phonetics provides you with the capability to understand and record differences and similarities between the sounds of languages. It will also enable you to analyze deviations from the sounds of your target language (e.g., English for ESL teachers) and to appreciate the range of possible sounds in languages (even though we will only explore English sounds in this course). For the recording of sounds independent of the language used, phonetics provides a set of symbols, called the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA for short. Teachers of English especially appreciate the IPA because it provides a unique symbol for each sound of English unlike the English spelling system. To demonstrate how much spelling and pronunciation deviate from each other in English, read the poem below out loud! I believe it makes the point about the usefulness of the IPA much better than any argument I could present. Enjoy! (And don't feel embarrassed if you have to look up a few pronunciations. I had to look up at least two as I recall.)
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
on hiccough, thorough, slough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart,
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five,
And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.
Did you ever wonder why we spell some words in English in ways which bear no resemblance to the way they are pronounced, for example:
(1) laugh sigh sight enough nigh night rough thigh height tough high right cough sleigh light Remember Bernard Shaw's word ghoti with the gh from laugh, the o from women and the ti from nation and pronounced 'fish'? Would you believe after that, that the distribution of the two pronunciations of gh in English is amazingly regular? See if you can figure out the rule. The gh was originally pronounced like the ch in Scottish loch 'lake' or German lachen 'laugh' (like you're clearing your throat). In phonetic script, the symbolic alphabet for accurately representing sounds rather than letters, the sound is symbolized as [x] (where the brackets indicate that we are using phonetic script, not the regular alphabet). The preceding u represented lip-rounding (watch yourself pronounce the sound [u] in the mirror--what happens to your lips) which was pronounced simultaneously with gh. When the gh disappeared because it is so softly pronounced, lip-rounding changed to lip-biting (check where your teeth are when you pronounce [v] or [f]. So gh ended up pronounced [f] because of the disappearance of a softly pronounced consonant and a shift of lip activity. However, gh did not develop into [f] everywhere. To detect the word position in which it did, compare the following examples with those in (1) above.
(2) bought sought caught daughter fought ought taught slaughter In fact, the original sound [x] represented by gh in English is the same as the [x] sound in Germanic languages from which English and other Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Flemish, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian) historically developed. Take a look at the following words from German, where the sound is usually represented by ch. The sound goes back to an even older stage when it was pronounced k. To see this, compare the Germanic words in English with related words borrowed from Latin. The stems in the Latin words were originally the same stems in Indo-European as those in the Germanic words. By the way, the change of k to German ch followed the same Grimm's Law that gave us Germanic f from Indo-European p and th from t.
(3) ENGLISH GERMAN LATIN eight acht octopus [oktopus] fight fechten infect [infekt] right Recht rectify [rektify] high hoch
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Thanks to Robert Beard for this enjoyable page! I have left the page intact for a flavor of what else he has in store. The page demonstrates nicely why English spelling and pronunciation deviate so much: spelling is based on an older stage of the English language.
The above demonstrates one of the reason why we might want to use phonetic symbols. The IPA allows us to represent and then talk about the sounds behind English spellings. In class, I also show a short clip from an "I Love Lucy" episode in which Ricky tries to read a poem and keeps stumbling over words that end in "ough". Unfortunately I haven't found a way to send you that clip yet, but instead let me give you a short text to make up for this lack of video; it is claimed that the ough combination can be pronounced in nine different ways:
A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.Happy hunting for pronunciations! I have only found seven for sure.
We will practice using IPA symbols later in this lesson. For now, look over the list of symbols on pp. 35 and 36 once again to familiarize yourself with them. There isn't much I can do to help you get to know these symbols except provide opportunities for practice. We will therefore conduct a few practicing exercises below.
But first, let's talk about phonetics as the field that engages in the study of speech sounds. There are three sub-areas within phonetics. One of them, called articulatory phonetics, focuses on the articulation or production of speech sounds with the help of speech organs. Another subarea, acoustic phonetics, investigates the measurable, physical characteristics of speech sounds. Some of the characteristics measured are frequency, amplitude, or duration of sounds. The third subarea, auditory phonetics, is concerned with the perception of sounds. We know the least about this area of phonetics, but one example is the perception of hissing sounds or sibilants, such as the sounds often represented by the letters s, z, sh, or ch. We all know that when someone whispers these hissing sounds really stand out. They appear to be louder. The reason for this perceived loudness can be traced back to the shape of our ears. The length of the ear canal allows the air column in our ears to resonate particularly well with the frequency of hissing sounds. This will be the only example of auditory phonetics in this course, however. We will also not spend any time on acoustic phonetics because I did not find this area as useful in my own language learning to warrant spending time on it in an introductory course. But the book devotes two subfiles to this area, and I encourage you to read them if you would like to know more about the acoustics of speech sounds.
To continue with the next part of this lesson, Lesson 8.2: Articulatory Phonetics - Consonants, please click here.
Updated last: 3/9/01 ©
Andreas Schramm and Hamline University