A.

Definition

The origin of speech refers to the more general problem of the origin of language
and the context of the physiological development of the human speech organs such as the
tongue, lips, and vocal organ used to produce phonological units in all human languages.

The study of human speech sounds is known as phonetics. It is a system of symbols

that is used to represent of the sounds in English. A person who specializes in phonetics is
known as phonetician.

The science of phonetics attempts to describe all of the sounds used in all language
in the world. Acoustic phonetics focuses on the physical properties of sounds, auditory
phonetics is concerned with how listeners perceive these sounds, and articulatory phonetics
is the study of how the vocal tract produces the sounds of language.

The phonetic Alphabet

Orthography, or alphabetic spelling, does not represent the sounds of a language

in a consistent way. To be scientific, we must devise any letter to stand for the same sound
every time.

To see the ordinary spelling with our Roman alphabet is woefully inadequate for
the task, consider sentences such as:
“Did he believe that Caesar could see the people seize the seas?
The silly amoeba stole the key to the machine”.
The same sound is represented variously by e, ie, ae, ee, eo, ei, ea. Y, oe, ey, and i.

Some letters have no sound in certain words (so-called silent letters):

Mnemonic autumn
Pterodactyl write
Psychology sword
Bough lamb
 Or conversely, there may be no letter to represent sounds that occur. In many
words, the letter u represents a y sounds followed by a u sound:
Cute (sounds like kyute; compare: coot)
Fume (sounds like fyume; compare: fool)
Use (sounds like yuse; compare: Uzbekistan)

Articulary phonetics
Articulatory phonetics means when the speech sounds are produced by pushing
lung air through the vocal cords up the throar, and into mouth or nose, and finally out of
the body. A brief anatomy lesson is in order. The opening between the vocal cords is the
glottis and is located in the voice box or larynx, pronounced “lair rinks”. The tubular part
of the throat above the larynx is the pharynx. What sensible people call “the mouth,”
linguists call the oral cavity to distinguish it from the nasal cavity, which is the nose and
the plumbing that connects it to the throat, plus your sinuses. Finally there are toungue and
the lips, both of which are capable of rapid movement and shape changing. All of these
together comprise the vocal tract. Differing vocal tract shapes result in the differing sounds
of language.
The sounds of languages fall into two classes: consonant and vowel.

Consonants
A consonant is a speech sound that is not a vowel. It also refers to letters of the
alphabet that represent those sounds: Z, B, T, G, and H are all consonants.

Vowels
A vowel is a particular kind of speech sound made by changing the shape of the
upper vocal tract, or the area in the mouth above the tongue. In English it is important to
know that there is a difference between aa vowel sound and a letter in the alphabet. In
English there are five vowel letters in the alphabet, but there are many more vowel sounds.
The sounds of English are written with letters in the English alphabet, as either
vowels or consonants. These letters are vowels in English: A, I, U, E, O, and sometimes Y.
 Diphthongs
In the terms of length, diphthongs are similar to the long vowels described above.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember about all the diphthongs is that the first part
is much longer and stronger than the second part; For example, most of the diphthongs ai
(as in the words “eye”, “i”) consits of the a vowel, and only in about the last quarter of the
diphthong does the glide to i become noticeable. As the glide to i happens, the loudness of
the sound decreases. As a result, the i part is shorter and quiter. Foreign learners should,
therefore, always remember that the last part of English diphthongs mut not be made too
strongly.

Triphthongs
The most complex Englis sounds of the vowel type are the triphthongs. They can
be rather difficult to pronounce, and very difficult to recognise. A triphthong is a glide
from one vowel to another and then to a third, all produced rapidly and without
interruption. For example, a careful pronounciation of the word “hour” begins with a
vowel quality similar to a goes on to a glide towards the back close rounded area (for
which we use the symbol Ʊ), then ends with a mid-sentral vowel (schwa, ǝ). We use the
symbol aƱǝ to represent the pronounciation of “hour”, but this is not always an accurate
representation of the pronounciation.

Phonemes
A phoneme is a unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another in a
particular language. In linguistics, phonemes that are usually estabilished by the use of
minimal pairs, such as kill vs kiss or pat vs bat are written between slashes: /p/. To show
pronounciation more precisally, linguists use square brackets: [ph]. For example, in most
dialects of English, the sound patterns /sin/ (sin) and /siȠ/ (sing) are two seperate words
that are distinguished by the substitution of one phoneme, /n/ for another phoneme, /Ƞ/ .
 Symbol
A symbol is a mark, sign or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as
representing an idea, object, or relationship. International phonetic alphabet (IPA) symbols
are composed of one or more elements of two basic types, letters and diacritics.

Fricatives
Fricatives are consonants with the characteristic that air escapes through a narrow
passage and makes a hissing sound. Most languages have fricative, the most commonly
found being something like s. Fricatives are continuant consonts, which means that you
can continue making them without interruption as long as you have enough air in your
lungs.

Affricates
That tᶴ, dӡ are the only two affricate phonemes in English. As with the plosives
and most of the fricatives, we have a fortis/ lenis pair, and the voicing characteristics are
the same as for these consonats. tᶴ is slightly aspirated in the position p, t, k are aspirated,
but not strongly enough for it to be necessary for foreign learners to give much attention to
it.

Nasals
Nearly all nasal consonants are nasal occlusives, in which air escapes through the
nose but not through the mouth, as it is blocked (occluded) by the lips or tongue. Most
nasals are voiced and in fact, the nasal sounds [n] and [m] are among the most common
sounds cross-linguistically. Voiceless nasals occur in a few languages such as burmese,
welsh, icelandic, and guarani. For example “finger” fiȠgǝ and “singer” siȠǝ.