A language is a multilevel system that is divided into simple and complex subsystems or levels. Phonetics is the lowest level of a language, as it studies its one-sided units - sounds, phonemes, supersegmental units, stress and intonation. Its name comes from the Greek word, which means sound, voice, noise, speech. Also, phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies a given level of language and everything related to it: speech sounds, their combinations and positional changes, the production of sounds by the speaker and their perception by the listener, as well as the features of the sound shell of the language in general and the sound structure and pronunciation features of each individual language.
Components of phonetics:
- General and private. General phonetics studies the laws of the structure of the sound shell in principle, regardless of the particular language. Private phonetics is the phonetics of individual languages.
- Historical and modern. Historical phonetics is the study of what phonetic laws operated in the language at different times, and what influences have been preserved in the language until now. Modern phonetics studies the state of a given level of language at the moment.
- Theoretical and experimental.
Phonetics is not only the level of the language and the section of linguistics: this is also the name of the sound shell of the language. In this sense, it is studied in the following aspects:
1. Acoustic. This is a look at the sound shell of the language from the position of the listener. In this aspect, what a person hears when perceiving speech information is investigated. The acoustic aspect describes the qualities of sound: it has a certain pitch, vibration frequency, timbre and other physical properties.
2. Articulatory. The object of study here is the sound from the position of the speaker, that is, the work of the organs of speech in the production of each sound.
Phonetics considers sounds in three aspects:
- Physical. It includes the material characteristics of sound.
- Articulatory (anatomical and physiological). It includes anatomical and physiological features of speech, articulatory properties of sounds, structural features of the speech apparatus, classification of vowels and consonants in different languages.
- Phonological (social). At this level, there is a connection between sound and human consciousness. The basic unit of this level is the phoneme, which is the type of sound that is stored in the mind, as well as the connection between the material sound and this stereotype.
Despite the fact that the articulation apparatus of all peoples is arranged in the same way, different languages differ significantly from each other already at the phonetic level. For example, English phonetics, unlike Russian, does not know the stunning of voiced consonants before deaf ones, and moreover: forit is a semantic sign. Also in English, as in some others, long and short vowels are distinguished, which in Russian do not carry a semantic load. And Spanish phonetics manages both without weakening unstressed vowels, and without softening consonants before vowels and and e. However, there is no sound y in Spanish.
