Introduction to Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics. The study of human language sound discipline. It mainly studies the mechanism of articulation of language, the characteristics of speech and the law of change in speech. Because its research content is related to the articulation action (physiological phenomenon), the sound characteristics (physical phenomenon) and the sense of hearing (psychological effect), and the different human language collectives have their own phonetic characteristics, so the study of modern phonetics need to have the knowledge of the natural sciences and social sciences as a basis. The word phonetics is derived from the Greek word zzzzzων嬜τ?ν嬜τ?κσs, meaning sound. The scope of research in the early days was relatively wide, including pronunciation or pinyin, phonological systematics and so on, in addition to the study of phonological characteristics. The description and classification of speech sounds in traditional Chinese phonetics also belong to the scope of phonetics. However, since the development of modern scientific phonetics, the classification has become more and more detailed, and the definition has become more and more strict, phonetics refers exclusively to the study of the characteristics of speech itself.

Speech is the object of the study of phonetics, referring to the specific sounds made by humans when they speak, that is, the sound of speech.

The scope of the study of phonetics includes the following three categories:

articulatory phonetics: This subspecialty studies how the organs of articulation (such as the lips, teeth, tongue, and vocal folds) coordinate their movements with one another to produce speech.

acoustic phonetics: This subdiscipline studies the physical phenomena of speech, such as the frequency, duration, and amplitude of sound waves.

auditory phonetics: this subdiscipline studies the perceptual history of speech.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), developed by the International Phonetic Association (IPA), is a phonetic scheme widely used in linguistics to label speech sounds.