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Page 1: The Sounds of Language

Transcription Analysis
- Familiar words in English can be challenging: tough, bough, cough, and dough all have different pronunciations.
- A playful poem introduces more complicated words and their pronunciations, such as hiccough, thorough, lough, and through.
- Warning against confusing words like heard (sounds like bird) with bead; dead (like bed, not deed); and meat with threat.
- Example of a mispronunciation: "seagh" spelled by a restaurant manager, emphasizing the confusion between sounds and letter representations.

Phonetic Alphabet
- Spoken English does not match written English in spelling and sound.
- The phonetic alphabet provides a system for representing sounds consistently.
- Focuses on articulatory phonetics, the study of how speech sounds are produced.
  - Other phonetics areas include:
    - Acoustic Phonetics: physical properties of speech sounds.
    - Auditory Phonetics: perception of speech sounds.
Voiced vs. Voiceless Sounds
- Speech sounds are produced by airflow from lungs through trachea to the larynx.
  1. Voiceless: Vocal folds apart, air passes through freely.
  2. Voiced: Vocal folds together, creating vibrations as air passes.
- Vibration can be felt at the Adam's apple when pronouncing Z (voiced) vs. S (voiceless).

Place of Articulation
- Sounds produced through constriction in the oral cavity with tongue and mouth.
- Important terms for describing sounds:
  - Bilabials: produced with both lips (e.g., pat, bat).
  - Labiodentals: produced with upper teeth and lower lip (e.g., fat).
  - Dentals: tongue tip behind upper front teeth (e.g., thin).
  - Alveolars: front part of the tongue on alveolar ridge (e.g., top).

Consonant Breakdown
- Detailed classification of consonant sounds:
  - Bilabials: [p], [b], [m].
  - Labiodentals: [f], [v].
  - Dentals: [θ] (voiceless, thin); [ð] (voiced, then).
  - Alveolars: [t], [d], [s], [z], [n].
    - Examples of voiced & voiceless contrasts in endings (bus vs. buzz).

Palatals: sounds with the tongue on the hard palate (e.g., [ʃ] in shout, [ʧ] in child).
Velars: back of the tongue with the velum (e.g., [k] in car, [g] in go).
- Voiced velar [ŋ] appears in words like sing.

Glottals: produced in the glottis without tongue/mouth involvement, e.g., [h] in house.
Consonant Sounds Chart:
- Summarizes voiced and voiceless sounds, manner of articulation in phonetics.

Describing Sounds:
- Stops: sounds produced by stopping airflow (e.g., [p], [t], [k]).
- Fricatives: sounds created by narrow openings (e.g., [f], [s]).
- Affricates: stop followed by fricative (e.g., [ʧ], [ʤ]).
- Nasals: airflow through nasal cavity (e.g., [m], [n], [ŋ]).
- Liquids: voiced sounds like [l], [r].
- Glides: sounds produced with a gliding motion [w], [j].

Glottal Stops and Flaps
- Glottal Stop: represented [ʔ], occurs occasionally in pronunciations.
- Flaps: produced by quick tongue taps (e.g., in butter, American English example).

Vowels vs. Consonants:
- Vowels produced with free airflow, all typically voiced.
Classification: high vs. low position in the mouth, front vs. back position.

Diphthongs: gliding vowel sounds, such as [aɪ] and [aʊ].
- Movement between two vowel positions.

Variation Observed: between accents, may even involve personal pronunciation quirks.

Questions outlined to understand and practice phonetics and phonology fundamentals.

Several tasks outlined for applying phonetics to new or unusual terms, analyzing sounds.