Phonetics and Phonology

César Augusto Lara Sánchez

Corporación Universitaria del Caribe CECAR
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Phonetics and Phonology Course CECAR Virtual

UNIT 1:

Topics.

The following are the topics that will be studied in the first unit of this “Phonetics and
Phonology Course”:

 Phonetics and Phonology Principles.

 The International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA) and Key concepts.

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Phonetics and Phonology Principles.

It is important to know that Phonetics is concerned with how sounds are produced,
transmitted and perceived while Phonology is concerned with how sounds function in
relation to each other in a language. In other words, phonetics is about the sounds of
a language and phonology is about the sound systems of a language. Phonetics is a
descriptive tool necessary to the study of the phonological aspects of a language.

Phonetics and phonology are two branches of linguistics that deal primarily with the
structure of human language sounds. Phonetics focuses on the physical
manifestations of speech sounds and on theories of speech production and perception.
Phonology is concerned with the systems of rules that determine how the sounds of
a language combine and influence one another. Phonology cares about the entire
sound system for a given language. The goal is to formulate a model which explains
not only the sound patterns found in a particular language, but the patterns found in
all languages. Phonetics and phonology are worth studying for several reasons.

The study of the phonetics of a foreign language gives us a much better ability both to
hear and to correct mistakes that we make, and also to teach pronunciation of the
foreign language to others. As phonetics and phonology both deal with sounds, and
as English spelling and English pronunciation are two very different things, it is
important that you keep in mind that we are not interested in letters here, but in
sounds. For instance, English has 20 different vowels, even if these vowels are all
written by different combinations of 6 different letters, "a, e, i, o, u, y". The
orthographic spelling of a word will be given in italics, e.g. please, and the phonetic
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transcription between square brackets [pli:z]. Thus the word ͞please͟ consists of three
consonants, [p, l, z], and one vowel, [i:]. And sounds considered from the
phonological point of view are put between slashes.

As a complementary reading you can visit https://www.quora.com/What-is-

the-difference-between-phonetics-and-phonology and go deeper on this topic.

The International Phonetics Alphabet IPA.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic

notation; it was based primarily on the Latin alphabet. Nowadays the “International
Phonetic Association” placed it as a standardized representation of the sounds of oral
language. The IPA is used by foreign language students and teachers. The IPA is
designed to represent the parts of oral language: phones, phonemes, intonation, and
the separation of words and syllables. English letter t may be transcribed in IPA with a
single letter, [t], or with a letter plus diacritics, [tʰ̺ ], depending on how precise one
wishes to be often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription; thus,
/t/ is less specific than, and could refer to, either [tʰ̺ ] or [t] depending on the context
and language.

Look at this chart and make an idea about the vowel sounds and the IPA symbols:

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The vowel sounds are different from our Spanish sounds for the vowels A, E, I, O, U,
the sounds produced by the vowels have a different structure and also a different way
to be pronounced.

Practice the pronunciation using minimal pairs, it will help you to understand
the pronunciation of each sound. Go to
https://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/minimal-pairs.htm and learn about
“minimal pairs”.

IPA symbols are a complete guide about how to pronounce standard English, but they
are not just a symbol complex to represent the pronunciation of a word, because the
language is a phenomena and it needs to be studied in this way. We are going to
study the diphthongs and the consonants, later when we start the phonetic
phenomena studies, we will understand how they work.

Diphthongs

Consonants

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Here you have an IPA Keyborad to make all your phonetics transcriptions:
https://ilg.usc.es/ipa-chart/keyboard/

Next you will find the list of symbols in order to identify and study them, and also to
have a reference about what sound is represented and the phonetic phenomena
involved.

Consonants

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Vowels

Consonants (Non-Pulmonic)

Other Symbols

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Diacritics

Tones and Word Accents

For a complete explanation of how each symbol of the international phonetics

alphabet sounds watch the following video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzsQkjX4fD8

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Learning Resources
 IPA Vowels pronunciation's Video - MCOA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c97xwLdSsXU&t=21s
 IPA Consonants’ Pronunciation’s Video – MCOA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cU9fqpCqBA&t=3s
 Minimal Pairs – Words with similar Sound. MCOA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcZ2kf1sy7Y
 Reading: Minimal pairs in English - MCOA:
https://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/minimal-pairs.htm
 Reading: Phonetics and Phonology- MCOA:
 http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/phono.htm
 International Phonetics Alphabet Keyboard:
http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/html-ipa-keyboard-v1/keyboard/

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