Language is a multi-level system that is 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, super-segment units, stress and intonation. Its name comes from the Greek word, which means sound, voice, noise, speech. Also, phonetics is a section of linguistics in which this level of language is studied 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 system 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 a study of which 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 the level of language and the section of linguistics: the sound shell of a language is also called that. 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 perspective of the listener. In this aspect, what one hears when perceiving speech information is examined. The acoustic aspect describes the quality of sound: it has a certain pitch,
vibration frequency, timbre and other physical properties.
2. Articulating. The object of study here is 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 the anatomical and physiological features of speech, the articulatory properties of sounds, the structural features of the
speech apparatus, the classification of
vowels and consonants in different languages.
- Phonological (social). At this level, the connection of sound with human consciousness appears. The basic unit of this level - the phoneme - is the type of sound that is stored in the mind, as well as the connection of the material sound and this stereotype.
Despite the fact that the articulatory apparatus of all peoples has the same structure, 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 the deaf, and moreover: for it it is a meaningful sign. Also in English, as in some others, long and short vowel sounds are distinguished , which in Russian do not carry a semantic load. And Spanish phonetics can do without weakening unstressed vowels, and without softening the consonants before the vowels and e. However, there is no sound in Spanish.