Language is a multilevel system thatis divided into simple and complex subsystems or levels. Phonetics is the lowest level of the language, as it studies its one-sided units - sounds, phonemes, supersegment units, accentuation and intonation. Its name comes from the Greek word, which means sound, voice, noise, speech. Phonetics is also a division of linguistics, in which this level of language is studied and everything that relates to it: sounds of speech, their combinations and positional changes, the production of sounds by the speaker and their perception by the hearer, as well as the features of the sound shell of the language in general and the sound system and pronunciation features of each individual language.
Components of phonetics:
- Public and private. General phonetics studies the laws of the structure of the sound shell in principle, regardless of the language. Private phonetics is the phonetics of individual languages.
- Historical and modern.Historical phonetics is the study of what phonetic laws acted in the language at different times, and what their influences have been preserved in the language so far. Modern phonetics is studying the state of this level of language at the moment.
- Theoretical and experimental.
Phonetics is not only a level of language and a section of linguistics: the so-called sound envelope of a language is also called. 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, one studies what a person hears when perceiving speech information. The acoustic aspect describes sound qualities: it has a certain height, frequency of oscillations, timbre and other physical properties.
2. Articulatory. The object of research here is sound from the standpoint of the speaker, that is, the work of the speech organs in the production of each sound.
Phonetics considers sounds in three aspects:
- Physical. It refers to the material characteristics of sound.
- Articulatory (anatomical and physiological).It includes the anatomical and physiological features of speech, the articulatory properties of sounds, the features of the structure of the speech apparatus, the 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 - phoneme - is the type of sound that is stored in consciousness, as well as the connection of material sound and this stereotype.
Despite the fact that the articulatory apparatus ofof all nations 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 how to stun voiced consonants in front of deaf people, and moreover: for it it is a semantic distinctive feature. Also in English, as in some others, long and short vowel sounds differ, which in Russian do not carry semantic load. And the Spanish phonetics dispenses both without weakening unstressed vowels, and without softening the consonant sounds before the vowels and e. However, there is no sound in Spanish.
