Phonetics
is the study of human sound in general without saying what function which
sounds may have in a particular language. The term ‘phonetics’ is,
however, often used with reference to one languagewhen the emphasis is on the
pronounciation of this language. For instance, a book on the phonetics of
Irish would be about how to pronounce Irish correctly and not
neccessarily about the function which the sound may have in the phonologycal
system of the language.
It is customary to divide the field of phonetics into three branches as follows
.
1.
Articulatory
phonetics
(emission of sound)
2.
Acoustic
phonetics
(tranmission of sound)
3.
Auditive
phonetics
(reception of sound)
Phone this is the smallest unit of human sound which is
recognisable but not classified . yhe delimiters used are square brackets ,
example : p, i, t, all three of which are found in peat. Phones are
unclassified in that nothing is said of their function in the sound system of a
language. They are thus different from all phones.
Phoneme the smallest unit of language which
distinguishes meaning organisational unit of phonology is termed a phoneme .
the brackets used are slashes , example from english are : /k/, /u:/, /l/, as
seen in the word cool
/ku:l/. Both consonants and vowels are phonemes, for instance /i:/, /u:/, /au/
