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The Sounds of Language - Coggle Diagram
The Sounds of Language
Sounds of all the languages of the world together constitute a class of sounds that the human vocal tract is designed to make
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Sound segments
To describe speech sounds, it is necessary to know what an individual sound is, and how each sound differs from all others.
When we know the language we hear the individual sounds in our “mind’s ear” and are able to make sense of them, unlike the sign painter in the cartoon.
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The lack of breaks between spoken words and individual sounds often makes us think that speakers of foreign languages run their words together, unaware that we do too.
Everyone who knows a language knows how to segment sentences into words, and words into sounds.
The Phonetic Alphabet
Orthography, or alphabetic spelling, doesn't represent the sounds of a language
Phonetics is a science. We must devise a way for the same sound to be spelled with the same letter every time, and for any letter to stand for the same sound every time.
Spelling reformers failed to change our spelling habits, and it took phoneticians to invent an alphabet that absolutely guaranteed a one sound-one symbol correspondence
In 1888 members of the International Phonetic Association developed a phonetic alphabet to symbolize the sounds of all languages.
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The inventors of this International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, knew that a phonetic alphabet should include just enough symbols to represent the fundamental sounds of all languages.