Phonetics Made Easy

Place of Articulation:



1- Bilabial


(Made with the two lips.) Say words
such as 'pie, buy, my' and note how the lips come
together for the first sound in each of these words.
Find a comparable set of words with bilabial sounds at
the end.

2-
Labiodental


(Lower lip and upper front teeth.)
Most people, when saying words such as 'fie, vie', raise
the lower lip until it nearly touches the upper front
teeth.

3- Dental

(Tongue
tip/blade and upper front teeth.) Say the words 'thigh,
thy'. Both these kinds of sounds are normal in English,
and both may be called dental.

4- Alveolar


(Tongue tip/blade and the alveolar
ridge.) Again there are two possibilities in English,
and you should find out which you use. You may pronounce
words such as 'tie, die, nigh, sigh, zeal, lie' using
the tip of the tongue or the blade of the tongue. Feel
how you normally make the alveolar consonants in each of
these words, and then try to make them in the other way.
A good way to appreciate the difference between dental
and alveolar sounds is to say 'ten' and 'tenth' (or 'n'
and 'nth'). Which n is farther back? (Most people make
the one in the first of each of these pairs of words on
the alveolar ridge and the second as a dental sound with
the tongue touching the upper front teeth.)

5- Retroflex


(Tongue tip and the back of the
alveolar ridge.) Many speakers of English do not use
retroflex sounds at all. But for some, retroflex sounds
occur initially in words such as 'rye, row, ray'. Note
the position of the tip of your tongue in these words.
Speakers who pronounce r at the ends of words may also
have retroflex sounds with the tip of the tongue raised
in 'ire, hour, air'.


6- Palato-Alveolar
(or alveo-palatal)


(Tongue blade and the back of the
alveolar ridge.) Say words such as 'shy, she, show'.
During the consonants, the tip of your tongue may be
down behind the lower front teeth, or it may be up near
the alveolar ridge, but the blade of the tongue is
always close to the back part of the alveolar ridge.
Because these sounds are made further back in the mouth
than those in 'sigh, sea, sew', they can also be called
post-alveolar. You should be able to pronounce them with
the tip/blade of the tongue.

7. Palatal


(Front of the tongue and hard
palate.) Say the word 'you' very slowly so that you can
isolate the consonant at the beginning. If you say this
consonant by itself, you should be able to feel that the
front of the tongue is raised toward the hard palate
(but there is no contact between the articulators). Try
to hold the consonant position and breathe inward
through the mouth. You will probably feel the rush of
cold air between the front of the tongue and the hard
palate.

8. Velar


(Back of the tongue and soft palate.)
The consonants that have the farthest back place of
articulation in English are those that occur at the end
of 'hack, hag, hang'. In all these sounds, the back of
the tongue is raised so that it touches the velum. It
should also be mentioned that certain sounds, such as
/w/, may be classified both as bilabial and velar.

9. Glottal




This place of articulation refers to
the vocal cords and, more specifically, to the glottis
(the space between the vocal cords). This kind of
articulation is made when the vocal cords allow a small
space for the air stream to pass between them.


Manner of Articulation:

1. Stop
(Plosive)



(Complete
or full closure of the articulators involved so that the
air stream cannot escape through the mouth before it is
suddenly released causing a small burst). There are two
possible types of stop.

2. Fricative



(Close approximation of two
articulators so that the air stream is partially
obstructed and turbulent airflow is produced.) The
mechanism involved in making these slightly hissing
sounds may be likened to that involved when the wind
whistles around a corner. The consonants in 'fie, vie' (labiodental),
'thigh, thy' (dental), 'sigh, zoo' (alveolar), and 'shy'
(alveo-palatal) are examples of fricative sounds.

3.
Approximant



(An
articulation in which one articulator is close to
another, but without the vocal tract being narrowed to
such an extent that a turbulent air stream is produced.)
In saying the first sound in 'yacht,' the front of the
tongue is raised toward the palatal area of the roof of
the mouth, but it does not come close enough for a
fricative sound to be produced. The consonants in the
word 'we' (approximation between the lips and in the
velar region) and, for some people, in the word 'raw'
(approximation in the alveolar region) are also examples
of approximants. Approximants are sometimes called
glides or semi-vowels.



4.
Lateral
(Approximant)


(Obstruction of the air stream at a
point along the center of the oral tract, with
incomplete closure between one or both sides of the
tongue and the roof of the mouth.) Say the word 'lie'
and note how the tongue touches near the center of the
alveolar ridge. Prolong the initial consonant and note
how, despite the closure formed by the tongue, air flows
out freely, over the side of the tongue.


5. Trill


It might be useful to know the terms
trill (also called roll) and tap (or flap). Tongue-tip
trills occur in some forms of Scottish English in words
like 'rye' and 'raw'. Trills are described as
intermittent sounds because of the repetitive nature of
its production where several contacts are made between
articulators. Taps, in which the tongue makes a single
tap against the alveolar ridge, occur in the middle of a
word such as 'pity' in many forms of American English.

6. Affricate


The production of some sounds
involves more than one of these manners of articulation.
Say the word 'cheap' (which is quite different from
'sheep') and think about how you make the first sound.
At the beginning, the tongue comes up to make contact
with the back part of the alveolar ridge to form a stop
closure (note that the alveo-palatal area rather than
the beginning of the alveolar ridge is the one used).
This contact is the slackened that there is a fricative
at the same place of articulation. This kind of
combination of a stop and a fricative is called an
affricate; in this case an alveo-palatal affricate.






Speech sounds are divided into consonants
and vowels. In the production of vowel sounds,
the articulators do not come very close together as with
consonants, and the passage of the air stream is
relatively unobstructed (a relatively free air passage).
Vowel sounds may be specified in terms of the position
of the highest point of the tongue and the position of
the lips. In other words, vowels can be described in
terms of three factors: (1) the height of the body of
the tongue; (2) the front-back position of the tongue
(the tongue centre is also important); and (3) the
degree of lip rounding.



It is very difficult to become aware of the
position of the tongue in vowels, but you can probably
get some impression of tongue height by observing the
position of your jaw while saying just the vowels in the
four words, 'heed, hid, head, had'.





Vowels and consonants can be thought of as the
segments of which speech is composed. Together they form
the syllables, which go to make up utterances.
Superimposed on the syllables are other features known
as suprasegmentals. These include variations in stress
and pitch. Variations in length are also usually
considered to be suprasegmental features, although they
can affect single segments as well as whole syllables.





Variations in stress are used in English to
distinguish between a noun (or adjective) and a verb, as
in '(an) insult' versus '(to) insult'. Say these words
yourself, and check which syllable has the greater
stress. You should find that in the nouns the stress is
on the first syllable, but in the verbs it is on the
last. Thus, stress can have a grammatical function in
some English words. It can also be used for contrastive
emphasis (as in I want a red pen, not a black one).



In order to understand what we normally
transcribe and what we do not, it is necessary to
understand the basic principles of phonology. Phonology
and phonetics are actually interrelated fields since
both study speech sounds. However, phonology is
concerned with the systems and patterns of sounds that
occur in a language. It studies a language to determine
its distinctive (significant) sounds and to find out
which sounds convey a difference in meaning.



When two sounds differentiate words, they are
said to belong to different phonemes. There must
be a phonemic difference if two words (such as 'white'
and 'right' or 'cat' and 'bat') differ in only a single
sound.



We cannot rely on the spelling to tell us whether
two sounds are members of different phonemes. For
example, if you think about the two words 'key' and
'car', you realize that they both begin with the same
sound, despite the fact that one is spelled with the
letter k and the other with the letter c.




British and American English:



We will consider one form of British English and
one form of American English. The major difference
between the two is that speakers of American English
pronounce [r] sounds in all positions, whereas the
English do not pronounce the /r/ sound if it is followed
by a consonant (e.g. farm, learn, hard…etc) or if it
occurs at the end of the word (if not followed by a
vowel).


Aspiration:



Most people have very little aspiration going on
while the lips are closed during 'pie'. In 'pie', after
the release of the lip closure, there is a moment of
aspiration (a puff of air), a period of voicelessness
after the stop articulation and before the beginning of
the voicing for the following vowel. If you put your
hand in front of your lips while saying 'pie', you can
feel the burst of air that comes out during the period
of voicelessness after the release of the stop.



In a narrow transcription, aspiration may be
indicated by a small raised h, [h]. Accordingly, these
words may be transcribed as [p^haí, t^haí,
k^haít]. You may not be able to feel the burst
of air in 'tie'



Therefore, a phoneme is not a single sound but a
name for a group of sounds. There is a group of k
sounds, t sounds and a group of l sounds that occur in
English. It is as if you had in your mind an ideal k, t
or l, and the ones that were actually produced were
variations of it, which differed in small ways that did
not affect the meaning of English words.


Weak
Forms:



The form in which a word is pronounced when it is
considered in isolation is called its citation form.
At least one syllable is fully stressed and has no
reduc­tion of the vowel quality. But in connected
speech, many changes take place. Some smaller words such
as 'and, to, him' may be considerably altered. They will
usually be completely unstressed, the vowel may be
reduced or may disappear altogether, and one or more of
the consonants may be dropped or altered. Thus 'and' in
its reduced form may be pronounced as [énd] or [én] or
[n]. Try to pronounce it in these three different ways
in a phrase such as bread and butter.


Many words are like 'and' in that
they seldom maintain their citation form in
conversational speech. These words have two different
forms of pronunciation. There is a strong form,
which occurs when the word is stressed, as in sentences
such as I want money and happiness, not money or
happiness.


Intonation:



The intonation of a sentence is the pattern of
pitch changes that occurs. The part of a sentence over
which a particular pattern extends is called an
intona­tional phrase.. The line above the sentence shows
the pitch changes that occurred when this sentence was
produced by a speaker of American English. The
positioning of the individual words above this line
gives an indication of their relative timing.









Summary


1-
In
English, we have 26 letters but 44 sounds (24 consonants
and 20 vowels=12 simple vowels and 8 diphthongs).


2-
All
English sounds are oral (produced by the mouth or more
specifically by the oral cavity), except for three nasal
sounds (produced by the nose or more specifically by the
nasal cavity).


3-
All
vowels are oral and voiced.


4-

Accents of English differ more greatly in the vowels
than in the consonants.


5-
The
palate is divided into the alveolar ridge, the hard
palate and the soft palate.


6-
The
tongue is the most important organ of speech. The tip and blade
of the tongue are the most mobile parts. Behind the
blade is the front of the tongue which is actually the
forward part of the body of the tongue, and it lies
underneath the hard palate when the tongue is at rest.
The remainder of the body of the tongue may be divided
into the center, which is beneath the palate (the hard
and the soft); the back, which is beneath the soft
palate


7-
Human
beings have two vocal cords.

8-
Just
behind the upper teeth is a small protuberance that you
can feel with your tongue tip. This is called the
alveolar ridge. You can also feel that the front part of
the roof of the mouth is formed by a bony, hard and
stationary structure. This is called the hard palate
which is the highest part of the palate, coming between
the alveolar ridge and the beginning of the soft palate
(or the velum).