Phonetics The Science of Speech Production

This book provides chapters on the relationship of phonetics to the study of language including dialectal variation, writing systems, articulatory phonetics for vowels and consonants, speech dynamics, suprasegmentals, phonemics and phonotactics, anatomy and physiology of speech, and speech acoustics and perception. Extensive discussions in phonetic transcription are provided. An excellent introductory text, particularly when anatomy must be combined with phonetics. This is designed as a base book on phonetics and the sequence of this book runs in a reader friendly manner.

Ajay This after completing his PG and M. Phil from Ravenshaw College Cuttack, Orissa joined as a lecturer in English in Biraja Women's College, Orissa. He served as a professor for eight years and then completed his Post graduation diploma in Journalism and Mass-Communications and continued to write books on Education, Journalism and English Literature. Now he is residing in Delhi and devoted in writing and editing books. He has attended many International literary symposiums and awarded for his original writing.

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds (phones), and their physiological production, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status.

Phonetics was studied as early as 2500 years ago in ancient India, with Panini's account of the place and manner of articulation of consonants in his 5th century BC treatise on Sanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today order their consonants according to Panini's classification. Phonetic transcription is a universal system for transcribing sounds that occur in spoken language. The most widely known system of phonetic transcription, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), uses a one-to-one mapping between phones and written symbols. The standardized nature of the IPA enables its users to transcribe accurately and consistently the phones of different languages, dialects, and idiolects. The IPA is a useful tool not only for the study of phonetics, but also for language teaching, professional acting, and speech pathology.

Study of speech sounds deals with their articulation (articulatory phonetics), their acoustic properties (acoustic phonetics), and how they combine to make syllables, words, and sentences (linguistic phonetics). The Classical Greeks are credited as the first to base a writing system on a phonetic alphabet. Modern phonetics began with Alexander Melville Bell (1819-1905), whose Visible Speech (1867) introduced a system of precise notation for writing down speech sounds.

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