Phonetics versus Phonology

I've been asked several times already to explain shortly the difference between phonetics and phonology. If you think of it, it's easy. Pronounciation can be always studied and analysed from two different points of view: the phonetic and phonological. Phonetics concerns the way we produce (articulate), transmit and receive speech sounds while phonology concentrates on the general properties displayed by systems of languages. In other words, phonetics studies all possible sounds humans can make and phonology studies only those phonemes (I explain the term phoneme in one of my previous posts "Phones, phonemes and allophones") that bring about the differences of meaning within language.It's a bit as if (and this is a big simplification) you had a girl and first were concerned about her appearance only - this would be phonology but as soon as you find out more about her and her personality, it's phonetics.

To seperate the two approaches, phonetic and phonological, linguists use different kind of brackets when using their written representations - transcriptions. Square brackets [ ] indicate a phonetic point of view (only as sounds articulated in a particular way without taking their role into consideration), whereas slant brackets / / indicate phonological point of view (only as parts of the sound system). Generally, phonetic transcriptions are much more detailed and used when, for instance, describing the regional differences in pronounciation. However, phonemes are often satisfactory enough when presenting transcriptions.

2 comments:

  1. Dzięki za kolejny wpis. Z pewnością przyda mi się on w samodzielnej nauce angielskiego. Za pewien czas mam zamiar zapisać się do szkoły językowej https://lincoln.edu.pl/ na kurs angielskiego, gdzie trzeba już znać ten język na odpowiednim poziomie. W samodzielnej nauce często wykorzystuję materiały edukacyjne z wpisów na blogach językowych.

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  2. Ogólnie jeśli mówimy o nauce języka angielskiego to jest ona ważna i przydaje się znajomość tego języka obcego. Ja również jestem zdania, ze warto już zapisywać na angielski dzieci w wieku przedszkolnym. Bardzo fajnie to zostało opisane na stronie https://czasdzieci.pl/ro_artykuly/id,1533033b.html.

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