Speaker A
In this video, we're going to start phonetics.
Intro to phonetics covering types, IPA transcription, sound production, and sound classes for linguistic study.
Key Takeaways
- Phonetics studies the physical and biological aspects of speech sounds.
- The IPA provides a consistent way to transcribe sounds across all languages.
- Sound production involves airflow and vocal fold vibration controlled by the lungs and larynx.
- Letters in English do not reliably represent sounds, necessitating phonetic transcription.
- Consonants and vowels can be categorized by manner, place of articulation, and voicing.
Summary
- Introduction to phonetics including acoustic and articulatory phonetics.
- Explanation of acoustic phonetics using spectrogram analysis of the Japanese word 'Minato'.
- Articulatory phonetics focuses on biological sound production involving lungs, larynx, oral and nasal cavities.
- Importance of one symbol representing one sound for accurate transcription.
- Examples of English vowel and consonant sounds that differ despite similar spelling.
- Introduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as a universal system for sound transcription.
- Overview of consonant manners of articulation like plosives, nasals, fricatives, and places of articulation like bilabial and velar.
- Explanation of voicing differences in consonants using pairs like 't' and 'd'.
- Introduction to vowel classification based on tongue height and position (front, central, back).
- Mention of advanced topics like clicks, implosives, ejectives, and suprasegmentals reserved for future courses.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
So, we're going to go over the types of phonetics, the basics of transcriptions, as well as different sound classes that we have to give you a general overview of what we're going to do in the next two videos.
Speaker A
The first thing I want to talk about are the different types of phonetics, one type is acoustic phonetics, and acoustic phonetics would investigate the physical properties of sounds.
Speaker A
So what I have here below is a picture of what is called a spectrogram, and this is a speaker, I'm presuming Japanese, saying the word Minato.
Speaker A
And there's some interesting things we can see here in the spectrogram that when you're first learning linguistics, you obviously wouldn't notice, but as you progress and as you take courses, you'd be able to see some things.
Speaker A
So for instance, I can see clear syllables here, Minato, I can see a syllable break at this point.
Speaker A
I can see a syllable break probably around here.
Speaker A
And then I see this gap where there's nothing going on.
Speaker A
Now, because I know a little bit about how sounds work, I'm guessing this is a t.
Speaker A
And I'm also guessing that this end part is going to be our vowel.
Speaker A
So of course, you look at this and you think, how do you get any of this information out of this spectrogram?
Speaker A
Well, it comes with experience.
Speaker A
And in order to get the experience to look at this, we can't just dive into acoustic phonetics.
Speaker A
What we have to do first is we have to go over something called articulatory phonetics.
Speaker A
And that is what this intro course is going to focus on.
Speaker A
And this investigates how sounds are made biologically.
Speaker A
So before we look at computer programs and how our sounds are coming out in terms of frequencies and formants, it's good to know the biological processes and biological goings that are helping you produce individual sounds.
Speaker A
And there's two main sources of information that we need to talk about for sound production.
Speaker A
The first one is the lungs.
Speaker A
Well, the lungs are going to provide air for speech.
Speaker A
Now, the lungs aren't involved in every speech sound.
Speaker A
But if you're an English speaker, you will always use your lungs to produce speech.
Speaker A
So, for instance, if I want to make the sound, I need to take air out of my lungs.
Speaker A
If I'm a language that has clicks like, then I don't need air for my lungs.
Speaker A
But in English, we need air from our lungs.
Speaker A
The second one that we need is a larynx.
Speaker A
And this will provide vibrations.
Speaker A
So what do I mean here?
Speaker A
I mean like the difference between a p and a b.
Speaker A
If you make a p sound and you put your fingers around your throat here, p.
Speaker A
Well, you won't feel any vibrations.
Speaker A
But if you make b, b.
Speaker A
You'll feel some vibrations.
Speaker A
Another good pair of sounds would be something like an S and a Z.
Speaker A
So, you don't feel any vibrations.
Speaker A
But with, you feel some vibrations in your throat.
Speaker A
So the larynx is providing those vibrations for your sounds.
Speaker A
You'll also see on this diagram some other things.
Speaker A
So for instance, the vibrations occur here in the larynx.
Speaker A
Below the larynx, of course, is the lungs.
Speaker A
But above all that, you have the oral cavity and the nasal cavity.
Speaker A
So, you can have air that goes through your nose like so, or you can have air that goes through your mouth.
Speaker A
So there's two different ways that air can escape our heads essentially to make sounds.
Speaker A
And we'll talk about all these parts specifically when we go over consonants and vowels.
Speaker A
Now we have a goal in phonetics.
Speaker A
And this is a very important goal.
Speaker A
We want one symbol to make one sound.
Speaker A
And this is a way of training our ears and being able to identify speech sounds.
Speaker A
Now letters are terrible for expressing sounds.
Speaker A
Here I have the word womb and I have the word women.
Speaker A
I underlined this O.
Speaker A
This O makes two completely different sounds.
Speaker A
So in the first one in womb, it makes this oo sound.
Speaker A
And this is a symbol we use for oo.
Speaker A
While in women, women, it makes an i sound.
Speaker A
And that is a symbol we would use for i.
Speaker A
So, these symbols here, if I take a look at oo.
Speaker A
It will always make an oo sound.
Speaker A
If I see this symbol in square brackets, it will always be oo.
Speaker A
If I see this symbol on the right in square brackets, it will always be i.
Speaker A
And this is the goal.
Speaker A
We want to be able to take a word and transcribe the sounds that it makes.
Speaker A
Not the letters that it's spelled with, but the sounds that it makes.
Speaker A
And this second example might surprise you if you haven't heard anything about linguistics or haven't thought about language.
Speaker A
Think about the TH in the words thought and though.
Speaker A
These are two different sounds.
Speaker A
The TH in thought is a different sound from the TH in though.
Speaker A
And the spelling would never let you know that.
Speaker A
But you can hear the difference.
Speaker A
In fact, if we were to transcribe it, in thought could be represented by a theta.
Speaker A
So the sound is the same as an theta.
Speaker A
And that will always make.
Speaker A
So if you make the in thought, you will feel no vibrations in your throat.
Speaker A
But if you make the in though, though, you will feel vibrations in your throat.
Speaker A
And this is represented by a symbol called eth.
Speaker A
So, in transcription, we can figure out what the sound is based on the symbol.
Speaker A
So if it is a TH like in thought, it will have a theta.
Speaker A
If it has a TH as in though, we would have an eth in our transcription.
Speaker A
So this is kind of the goal.
Speaker A
We want to be able to take all the sounds in every language and map them to symbols.
Speaker A
This is essentially called the true alphabetic principle because we want one symbol to make one sound and only one sound.
Speaker A
We don't want these situations where we have O's making two completely different vowels.
Speaker A
Or we have TH's that make different sounds depending on the vibration.
Speaker A
So, how do we do that?
Speaker A
Well, we have this thing called the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Speaker A
And this is super scary at this point.
Speaker A
But what I want to point out here is that this first part up here is the consonants.
Speaker A
And these are the consonants in every language in the world.
Speaker A
These are not just English consonants.
Speaker A
We'll show you just English consonants later.
Speaker A
But on the left side, we have a bunch of words like plosive, nasal, trill, tap, fricative, things like that.
Speaker A
These are called the manner of articulation.
Speaker A
So, this is kind of what's your what's your airflow is doing.
Speaker A
So for instance, in nasal sounds, air would be going through the nose.
Speaker A
In things like fricatives.
Speaker A
Air is really tight, it's really constricted, so like.
Speaker A
There's a little bit of space where air can flow and it makes it a little bit turbulent.
Speaker A
We'll cover all of these when they're relevant.
Speaker A
The top is about the place of articulation.
Speaker A
So for instance, bilabials would mean they're made with your two lips.
Speaker A
So a p and a b and an are made with your two lips.
Speaker A
Compare that to something like a velar sound like k and g or which is made at the back of your mouth.
Speaker A
So these are the different places.
Speaker A
This chart also represents differences in voicing.
Speaker A
So for instance, when you have two sounds side by side like t and d, it just means the one on the left doesn't have your vocal folds vibrating, but on the one on the right, the vocal folds are vibrating.
Speaker A
So we'll look at a chart for just English in the future.
Speaker A
The other thing we're going to worry about in this intro course are the vowels.
Speaker A
And again, these are the vowels in all of the languages.
Speaker A
We're just going to focus on English.
Speaker A
I'll show you a chart for that later.
Speaker A
Uh essentially, this is about the height and position of your tongue.
Speaker A
So, when we say front, central, or back, we talk about how forward the tongue is.
Speaker A
When we talk about close, close mid, open mid, and open, we talk about how high the tongue is.
Speaker A
And we'll just redefine this as high, mid, and low later.
Speaker A
The other stuff like clips, implosives, ejectives, we won't worry about.
Speaker A
In a future course, you may talk about them.
Speaker A
Other symbols, suprasegmentals, things like that, we won't worry about.
Speaker A
So, let's separate sounds into different classes and we're just going to do the very basics.
Speaker A
So, the first sound class is the class of consonants.
Speaker A
And in the class of consonants, these are sounds where the airflow is either completely stopped.
Speaker A
It is diverted, so for instance, instead of coming out the mouth, it'll come out through the nose.
Speaker A
Or it is impeded.
Speaker A
So when I say impeded, I mean you have this really tight constriction like in a sound like where that air is really impeded.
Speaker A
But you can still get airflow out.
Speaker A
So, an example of stopped would be in a word like pill, pill.
Speaker A
Before you can make that p sound, you have to get airflow right behind your two lips.
Speaker A
And you have to hold it there for a little bit.
Speaker A
And then that p is made when the air is released.
Speaker A
When we say impeded, again, we mean that, that friction that you have in your mouth.
Speaker A
Diverted, we have two cases of diversion.
Speaker A
One is where air goes through your nose, so the nasal cavity, like in mat.
Speaker A
You can make with your mouth completely closed because your air is going through your nose.
Speaker A
In a word like light, this is a little different.
Speaker A
Light.
Speaker A
The air is different here because the air is going through the sides of your tongue rather than on top.
Speaker A
So compare something like and.
Speaker A
They're both made in the same place, but has air going on top of your tongue.
Speaker A
And has air going through the sides of your tongue.
Speaker A
So consonants can be either stopped, impeded, or diverted airflow.
Speaker A
With vowels, it is completely the opposite.
Speaker A
Vowels have very free airflow.
Speaker A
Bit, beet, i, a, u, o.
Speaker A
You have a lot of space in your mouth to make these vowels.
Speaker A
And air can flow very freely without any friction at all.
Speaker A
Now glides or also called semi-vowels.
Speaker A
Take some of the properties of vowels, but they have this thing called momentary articulation.
Speaker A
So for instance, in the word yes, yes.
Speaker A
It is very close to the E in beet.
Speaker A
Yes, except there's this momentary articulation where y, y.
Speaker A
The tongue moves up towards the palette and then quickly back down.
Speaker A
Or in a word like watch, watch.
Speaker A
Uh, the tongue in the back is doing something very similar to a K.
Speaker A
Watch, it's going backwards towards the velum.
Speaker A
And your lips are also rounding.
Speaker A
But this articulation is momentary.
Speaker A
It's not static like oo, oo.
Speaker A
You can make oo without moving any part of your mouth.
Speaker A
You just hold oo.
Speaker A
With watch, watch.
Speaker A
You can feel a movement.
Speaker A
Watch.
Speaker A
It's very quick, but there is a movement in your mouth.
Speaker A
Watch.
Speaker A
So the three classes of sounds, we could say are consonants, vowels, and glides.
Speaker A
Consonants on the very left, vowels on the very right.
Speaker A
And then glides are somewhere in between them, some properties of consonants, some properties of vowels.
Speaker A
And that's why we call them a semi-vowel.
Speaker A
So in the next video, we're going to go over all of the consonants in English.
Speaker A
And it is going to be a very rough video that you'll have to look at multiple times.
Speaker A
Uh, but I assure you, we can get through it together.
Speaker A
So if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below and I will get to them as soon as possible.
Topics:phoneticsarticulatory phoneticsacoustic phoneticsInternational Phonetic AlphabetIPAspeech soundssound classesconsonantsvowelslinguistics
![[Phonology] How to Solve a Phonology Problem — Transcript](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/25ls735NzyE/maxresdefault.jpg)
