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Phonology (The sounds of English (Vowels (English has twelve vowel sounds.…

- - - - We notice this when we watch a feature film with dubbed dialogue, or a TV broadcast where the sound is not synchronized with what we see.
    - - In languages other than English, speakers may also use non-pulmonic sound, such as clicks or glottalic sounds.
      - In the larynx, the vocal folds set up vibrations in the egressive air. The vibrating air passes through further cavities which can modify the sound and finally are articulated by the passive (immobile) articulators – the hard palate, the alveolar ridge and the upper teeth – and the active (mobile) articulators. These are the pharynx, the velum (or soft palate), the jaw and lower teeth, the lips and, above all, the tongue.
        
        The tongue is so important that language scientists identify different regions of it by name, as these are associated with particular sounds.
        
        These are:
        
        • the back – opposite the soft palate
        
        • the centre – opposite the meeting point of hard and soft palate
        
        • the front – opposite the hard palate
        
        • the blade – the tapering area facing the ridge of teeth
        
        • the tip – the extreme end of the tongue
- - - - Here is a link to it.
  - - - These sounds can be identified, but there are some cases where we move from one vowel to another to create an effect that is like neither – and these are diphthongs. We also have some triphthongs – where three vowel sounds come in succession.
        
        These are called vowel guides.
  - - - We should be able to hear that the sound is (physically) different as is the way our speech organs produce it.
      - When we want to show the detail of phonetic variants or allophones we enclose the symbols in square brackets whereas in transcribing sounds from a phonological viewpoint we use slant lines.
- - - - These sounds are organised like this:
        
        Front vowels
        
        • /iː/ - cream, seen (long high front spread vowel)
        • /ɪ /- bit, silly (short high front spread vowel)
        • /ɛ/ - bet, head (short mid front spread vowel); this may also be shown by the symbol /e/
        • /æ/ cat, dad (short low front spread vowel); this may also be shown by /a/
        
        Central vowels
        
        • /ʒː/- burn, firm (long mid central spread vowel); this may also be shown by the symbol /əː/
        • /ə/ - about, clever (short mid central spread vowel); this is sometimes known as schwa, or the neutral vowel sound – it never occurs in a stressed position.
        • /ʌ/ - cut, nut (short low front spread vowel); this vowel is quite uncommon among speakers in the Midlands and further north in Britain
        
        Back vowels
        
        • /uː/ - boob, glue (long high back rounded vowel)
        • /ʊ/ - put, soot (short high back rounded vowel); also shown by /u/
        • /ɔː/ - corn, faun (long mid back rounded vowel) also shown by /oː/
        • /ɒ/- dog, rotten (short low back rounded vowel) also shown by /o/
        • /ɑː/ - hard, far (long low back spread vowel)
  - - - Almost every modern authority says there are eight – but they do not all list the same eight. But Simeon Potter in Our Language says there are nine.
        
        Potter notes that all English diphthongs are falling – that is the first element is stressed more than the second.
  - - - The sound results from three things:
        
        • voicing – causing the vocal cords to vibrate
        • where the articulation happens
        • how the articulation happens – how the airflow is controlled
  - - - We can explain the consonant sounds by the place where the articulation principally occurs or by the kinds of articulation that occurs there.
  - - - Some words have a single syllable – so they are monosyllables or monosyllabic. Others have more than one syllable and are polysyllables or polysyllabic.
        
        Thus splash is a single syllable but it combines three consonants, a vowel, and a final consonant /spl++ʃ/.
      - In real speech the sounds are continuous. In some cases it will be impossible to tell whether a given consonant was ending one syllable of beginning another.
  - - - This is particularly true of sounds, in the sense that some identifiable groups of people share (with some individual variation) a collection of sounds that are not found elsewhere, and these are accents. We think of accents as marking out people by geographical region and, to a less degree, by social class or education.
      - Most human beings adjust their speech to resemble that of those around them.