General knowledge for English Phonetics

General knowledge for English Phonetics

Sounds can be divided into two main types :

A vowel is a sound that needs an open air passage in the mouth . The air passage can be modified in terms of shape with different mouth and tongue shapes producing different vowels .

A consonant is formed when the air stream is restricted or stopped at the same point between the vocal cards and the lips .
The central sound ( cat ) is a vowel. The first and the last sounds are consonants.

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Allophone

Allophone : is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds (or phones) or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, [pʰ] (as in pin) and [p] (as in spin) are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language.

The specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context (such allophones are called positional variants), but sometimes allophones occur in free variation.

Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme will usually not change the meaning of a word, although sometimes the result may sound non-native or even unintelligible. Native speakers of a given language usually perceive one phoneme in that language as a single distinctive sound, and are "both unaware of and even shocked by" the allophone variations used to pronounce single phonemes. Complementary and free-variant allophones.

Every time a speech sound is produced for a given phoneme, it will be slightly different from other utterances, even for the same speaker.

This has led to some debate over how real, and how universal, phonemes really are (see phoneme for details).

Only some of the variation is significant (i.e., detectable or perceivable) to speakers.

There are two types of allophones, based on whether a phoneme must be pronounced using a specific allophone in a specific situation, or whether the speaker has freedom to (unconsciously) choose which allophone to use.

When a specific allophone (from a set of allophones that correspond to a phoneme) must be selected in a given context (i.e., using a different allophone for a phoneme will cause confusion or make the speaker sound non- native), the allophones are said to be complementary (i.e., the allophones complement each other, and one is not used in a situation where the usage of another is standard).

In the case of complementary allophones, each allophone is used in a specific phonetic context and may be involved in phonological process.

In other cases, the speaker is able to select freely from free variant allophones, based on personal habit or preference.

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Here we have a text about English phonemes with examples : ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
A phoneme is a single "unit" of sound that has meaning in any language.

There are 44 phonemes in English (in the standard British model), each one representing a different sound a person can make. Since there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, sometimes letter combinations need to be used to make a phoneme. A letter can also represent different phonemes.

 Here is a good example:

chef = /ʃef/
choir = /kwaɪə/
cheese = /tʃi:z/

The "ch" letter combination has three different pronunciations, which are represented by three different phonemes: /ʃ/, /k/ and /tʃ/. Of course, this is confusing when you need to learn new words, but unfortunately, we are stuck with a strange spelling system in English. You really just need to learn the pronunciation of every new word, along with its meaning. Unlike other languages, English spelling is not phonetic.

Sometimes, there is more than one way to pronounce a phoneme. These different pronunciations are called allophones. They are not phonemes, because they do not change the meaning of the word. 

Allophones often show up when people have different accents. One good example is the word "butter". Some native speakers will say [bʌɾə]. Others will say [bʌtə].

You can see here that [t] and [ɾ] are allophones of the same phoneme. Whatever way you say it, the meaning of the word does not change! It's still the yellow stuff made from milk that you put on bread. Because different accents use different allophones, the British and American phonemic charts are a little bit different. Most ESL students do not need to worry too much about allophones. Use whatever one is in your textbook or dictionary, or ask your teacher for some advice.

Types of phoneme:

The two major phoneme categories are vowels and consonants.

Vowels:

Basically, a vowel is any "open" sound where there is no obstruction or "blocking" caused by the teeth, tongue, lips, palate or other articulators.

 In the English alphabet, there are 5 vowels: A, E, I, O, U. But there are many more vowel sounds in the English language. Forexample, the /e/ vowel sound is usually represented by the letter "E". But when you put two "E" letters together, like in "speed" (/spi:d/), you get a long vowel sound: /i:/.

Single vowel:

A single vowel sound is any vowel that is not a diphthong (see below). A single vowel can be short or long.

Short vowels:

This is the list of the short vowels in standard (RP) English:

/ɪ/ as in ship
/ʊ/ as in book
/e/ as in egg
/æ/ as in cat
/ʌ/ as in cup
/ɒ/ as in hot
Schwa - /ə/

The schwa is a special type of short vowel. It is a very "weak" sound that is never stressed. This means you often find the schwa in words with more than one syllable. Here are some examples:
mother: /'mʌðə/
America: /ə'merɪkə/

Long vowels:

In the British English phonemic chart, long vowels are easy to recognise, because they have a colon (":") symbol after them. Some long vowels are basically longer versions of short vowels (like /ɪ/ and /i:/).

Long vowels in English:

/i:/ as in sheep
/u:/ as in boot
/ɜ:/ as in learn
/ɔ:/ as in door
/ɑ:/ as in car

Diphthongs:

A diphthong is a two vowel sounds, one after the other. There is movement or "glide" between the two parts of the sound. For example, to say the /eɪ/ dipthong, like in the word "cake" (/keɪk/) first say /e/, then say /ɪ/ without stopping. Your
mouth will move from the /e/ shape to the /ɪ/ shape. 

This is the "glide".

Diphthongs of English: ɪə/ as in beer
/eɪ/ as in same
/ʊə/ as in tour
/ɔɪ/ as in coin
/əʊ/ as in nose
/eə/ as in hair
/aɪ/ as in fly
/aʊ/ as in house

Consonants:

Consonants are sounds where there is obstruction or "blocking" of the airflow caused by your lips (/m/), teeth (/θ/), tongue (/l/), palate (/ŋ/) or even deep down in your larynx (/h/).

The two major categories of consonants are voiced and unvoiced consonants.
Voiced Consonants Voiced consonants make sound using the vibration of your vocal folds in your larynx - the "voice box".

You can tell if a consonant is voiced in a couple of ways:

1. Put your finger on your throat when you say it.

If you feel vibration, it is voiced.

2. Put your fingers in your ears when you say it.

If you can still "hear" the consonant through the vibrations in your neck and head, it is voiced.

Voiced consonants in English:

/b/ as in ball

/d/ as in dog

/ʤ/ as in joke

/g/ as in good

/v/ as in van

/ð/ as in that

/z/ as in zoo

/ʒ/ as in vision

/m/ as in mouth

/n/ as in no

/ŋ/ as in thing

/l/ as in love

/r/ as in right

/w/ as in why

/j/ as in you

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Unvoiced consonants:

Unvoiced consonants do not use this vibration.

Instead they make sound using the movement of air through your teeth, tongue, lips and other articulators.

Unvoiced consonants in English:

/p/ as in pea

/t/ as in tea

/ʧ/ as in cheap

/k/ as in coffee

/f/ as in fat

/θ/ as in thin

/s/ as in see

/ʃ/ as in she

/h/ as in he

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