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Hello dear first year students and welcome to the course of phonetics presented by Mr Aounali Walid and Mrs Bougofa Zeyneb the main goal of teaching English phonetics and phonology is to improve students' pronunciation as you know English pronunciation difficult because there is no consistency between what is written and what is spoken this is why most students make mistakes when they speak English sometimes they pronounce words like when they are spoken in French
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especially when the words are not familiar, this is why we teach phonetics in order to improve students' pronunciation through introducing the IPA or the international phonetic alphabet in order to get the correct alphabet pronunciation of words without finding any difficulty in pronunciation. Let's get started what do you know about phonetics? I think that you have an idea about phonetics since in your secondary school you have seen phonetic symbols in your textbooks.
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most of those symbols are not taught for students in the course of phonetics we are going to teach them in details in order to improve your pronunciation transcription is representing sounds as they are spoken we do not use the usual alphabet but we have another alphabet for presenting those sounds which is called the international phonetic alphabet So, in the first semester you have introduction to phonetics in which we are going to define phonetics and phonology then we are going to make
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a clear difference between phonetics and phonology afterwards, we are going to talk about the branches of phonetics, which are articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics and auditory phonetics then we are going to show the importance of phonetics for first-year students in order to improve their pronunciation in the second lecture which is about speech mechanism and speech production we will introduce process of producing sounds in our speech mechanism then we will introduce speech organs
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in the vocal tract above the diaphragm all the speech organs that contribute in the production of language sounds starting from the lungs then we have the mouth cavity and the nasal cavity inside the mouth we have the teeth, the upper teeth, lower teeth, the upper lip and the lower lip and the different parts of the tongue then we have the nasal cavity. After that, we will deal with the articulation of English vowel sounds in details. We start by defining the vowel sounds
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then we are going to show the categories of vowels then we have the vowel chart, description of and the articulation of each vowel in details with illustrations and pronunciation of those sounds with IPA transcription, afterwards, we go to another category of vowels which is diphthongs, we describe diphthongs then we show the different categories of diphthongs that we have closing diphthongs, centering diphthongs, then we move to the triphthongs which are another category of diphthongs
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plus a schwa at the end and their pronunciation with practical exercises based on production from students and IPA transcription to show in details how can we describe vowels and pronounce them using authentic materials from British and American accents. Dear students in order to improve your pronunciation and to master the course of phonetics, you need to consult some books during your first year these selected books provide a comprehensive overview and the practical introduction to
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English phonetics and phonology they are suitable for students without a prior knowledge about the subject matter of phonetics you'll find the main concepts of phonetics and illustrations of English pronunciation with a clear and straightforward manner, these essential books provide a good introduction to phonetics with different exercises and suggestions for further readings and many audio examples on the companion CD-roms. The first book is entitled English phonetics and phonology, a
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practical course by Peter Roach in this book you'll find all the details about English phonetics starting from the production of English sounds to long vowels, diphthongs and triphthongs voicing and consonants phonemes and symbols of English stress and intonation. So, you need this book during your first and second year. The second book that you need is entitled Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary by Daniel Jones 18th edition, in this dictionary, you will find almost
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every English word with its pronunciation in American and British accents. The other book is entitled Gimson's Pronunciation of English by Alan Cruttenden, you will find everything that concerns English phonetics and its pronunciation. Hello everyone and welcome to this introductory lecture in phonetics I think everybody's heard about phonetics but hardly anyone knows about it, to begin with, phonetics is a branch of linguistics so as you can see, we have another keyword which is linguistics
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thus, before anything else I would like to give a brief breakdown of linguistics linguistics is the scientific study of language it aims at providing a valid analysis of language structure. Linguistics can be divided or it can be categorized into macrolinguistics and microlinguistics unlike the macrolinguistics that does not examine the acquisition or the use of language microlinguistics, on the other hand, examines the significance and application of language in daily-life
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language would appear of a set of subsystems referred to as levels of language such as phonology which deals with sounds morphology and syntax focuses on words and sentences semantics deals with meaning and language use in pragmatics apart from dividing language into various tiers one can refer also to the most important areas in linguistics to illustrate this point, we have a two dimensional wheel diagram where we can see levels and areas of linguistics in the middle of this wheel there is
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phonetics followed by phonology and around the central phonological hub comes syntax succeeded by semantics and then pragmatics phonology syntax and semantics are the pepper and salt of linguistics together they constitute the grammar of a language these subsystems are referred to as levels of language as we have already mentioned the second dimension, however, gives a rough impression on the areas of linguistics including applied linguistics computational linguistics anthropological linguistics
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sociolinguistics & stylistics and so on and so forth... I'm trying to avoid giving extraneous details since you will have all these in your linguistics course with you to round the top off I want to go back to the beginning where I first mentioned phonetics the study of pronunciation consists of two fields namely, phonetics and phonology phonetics is concerned with a branch of the human speech sounds in phonetics will refer to individual sounds as though names are sounds
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we never use the word letters, each phoneme is normally meaningless in isolation it becomes meaningful only when combined with other phonemes for example sounds like /f/, /d/ mean nothing separately if you take the phoneme /f/ and write it on the board and ask your students what does this mean does it have a meaning at all. They will of course respond by saying 'No' the same goes with the phoneme /d/ but if you take these two sounds and put them in a word they will change
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and get a meaning for example the word 'frog' and the word 'dog' These two words became meaningful. So, when phonemes were combined together in various ways give a meaning Okay, the field of phonetics is multi-layered, it consists of three sub-disciplines according to the production, transmission and perception of sounds for the production we advert to as the articulatory phonetics and this branch affiliation aims at describing the production of speech sounds by speech organs, we can say speech
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organs or articulators, these articulators are the tongue teeth nose lips etc... transmission, on the other hand, is interpolated to as acoustic phonetics. Acoustic phonetics deals with what happens in the air between the listener and the speaker i.e the sound waves in the air. Okay, the last branch is auditory phonetics as its name implies auditory phonetics investigates the perception and the identification of speech sounds by the listener in other words, how sounds
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are transmitted from the ear to the brain and how the brain interprets the information coming from the air. I hope, I made myself clear in this part. I repeat phonetics is the study of human speech sounds it has three different branches: articulatory describes how speech organs or articulators produce the human speech sounds, the acoustic phonetics deals with the physical properties of speech sounds or sound waves on the air and auditory phonetics or we call perceptual, it investigates the
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perception and the identification of speech sounds by the listener i.e how sounds are transmitted from the ear to the brain and how the brain interprets the information coming from the ear I said earlier that pronunciation consists of two fields phonetics and phonology and I have also given a concise definition of what phonetics is coming next is phonology Phonology comes from the ancient greek 'phone' which means voice or sound, and 'logy' from the word 'logos' that means
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word of speech. What is phonology? Phonology is a branch of linguistics which studies the sound systems of languages the language sounds are organized into sound contrasts which are analyzed in terms of phonemes The branches of phonology: In phonology, we have two branches segmental and suprasegmental, the segmental phonology is based on the segmentation of language into individual speech sounds provided by phonetics it is interested in the function and possible combinations of language sound
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system Suprasegmental phonology is concerned with those features of pronunciation that cannot be segmented because they extend over more than one segment or sound such features include stress rhythm and intonation. This part of the lecture is a bit complex thus referring to Arabic which simplify things for you. A good question is where do you find phonetics in Arabic? We find it in 'ettajweed' التجويـد we have plenty of examples to help you understand phonetics
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such as 'el-idgham' الادغام or what we call in English assimilation take for example the two words من يعمل آو ميعمل من يعمل او ميعمل as one word ميعمل once assimilated we pronounce them
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other words من مال او مٌمٌال
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من مال او ممال the pronunciation changes the meaning is still the same and ِEnglish is the same thing we have the greeting phrase ' good morning' 'good morning' but when assimilated we pronounce it 'goob morning' 'goob morning'
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meaning in the aforementioned examples did not change however, when we switch one phoneme with another the meaning changed like in the words cell and bell or in Arabic 'yodaris & todaris' تدرس يدرس the first phonemes when switched with another phonemes affected the meaning in this case we call them distinctive units or distinctive phonemes، why? because they affected the meaning and the meaning has changed when we changed one phoneme with another. Now, what phonology does
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is studying the relationship between phonemes or sounds when do they affect meaning and we're not in other words when they are distinctive units and when they are non-distinctive units according to 'Richard and Schmidt' phonology is the study or the description of the distinctive sound units which are phonemes of course of a language and their relationship to one another below you will find a handy dandy (helpful) chart to elaborate the differences between phonetics and phonology
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Phonetics is a subfield of descriptive linguistics whereas phonology is an area of theoretical linguistics another point is that phonetics is the basis for phonological analysis while reading this point, I remembered the example of the cake and its ingredients, in fact each time, I try to enrich my knowledge about phonetics and phonology I find this example phonetics is the ingredient and phonology is the cake this is why, we said it is the basis you cannot have a cake without the
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ingredients, another point, phonology is concerned with the abstract grammatical characterization of systems of sounds or signs and phonetics is the study of the physical aspects of sound it analyzes the production of all the human speech sounds of any language whereas phonology analyzes the sound patterns of a particular language the fourth point, phonetics is strictly about audible sounds, what we hear. Okay, the auditory branch if you remember phonology, on the other hand, explores the
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differences between the sounds in a language that changed the meaning differences between the sounds of an utterance notice here we use attracts instead of sentence 5. Phonetics is concerned with the form i.e the physical properties of sounds phonology is concerned with the function the differences and similarities of sounds 6. In phonetics, the smallest sound unit in a given language is referred to as phoneme Okay, individual sound the smallest unit the segment in phonetics
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is referred to as phoneme while in phonology the minimal is referred to as phoneme meaningful sound unit is called a phone or allophone phone or allophone the last point, phonetics phonetics deals with the different realization of language phonemes in phonetic transcription of speech sound using square brackets [...] phonology deals with phonemic transcription for a specific language using the slashes /.../ slashes /.../ sorry in phonemic transcription let me explain this last point more
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we have two types of transcription the phonemic transcription and the phonetic transcription phonetic transcription [...] we use every single detail whatever we pronounce we write it for example the word top [tʰɒp] with the [tʰ] you feel like there is a puff of air top[tʰɒp] this puff of air we put it as a small [ʰ] above the t [tʰ] Okay, so, when you pronounce, you put square brackets and the word within the square brackets take the word for example top you put the [t] sound and the small [ʰ]
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above the [tʰ] while in the phonemic transcription you just transcribe the word top /tɒp/ without [h] any [h] without any aspiration and you use the slashes okay so the phonemic transcription is not detailed. It is the one found in dictionaries the one we are all familiar with while the phonetic transcription is more detailed and we use square brackets instead of slashes. I know, it's a gobbledygook (use of technical terms) for you so let me paraphrase this for you
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in a more simple way, phonetics is concerned with segmental features by segment, I mean individual sounds. Ok, the single sounds are used to build up larger units these segments consist of vowels and consonants this is the easiest way for you to understand. Phonology is concerned with suprasegmental features suprasegmental features phonetics with segmental features individual sounds while phonology is concerned with suprasegmental features. What do I mean by
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suprasegmental features? They are larger units they are not individual sounds they are larger units of speech for example the stress & intonation, rhythm, utterances, phrases and so on and so forth ... Phonology is not limited to single sounds like phonetics it extends over syllables words and phrases. So, if you want to know how to pronounce or produce sounds, you just go to phonetics for example you have the two phonemes /b/ and /p/
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both are bilabial plosives
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but if you want to check how these phonemes change the meaning in the words for example (pray) and (bray). Now, I just go to phonology. Why do we teach pronunciation? or why do we learn pronunciation? You can still have a good command of grammar and lexis but mispronouncing phonemes can be difficult for a speaker from another community from another language community to understand you. According to Gerald Kelly, in his book "How to teach pronunciation" good pronunciation
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inhibits successful communication, he adds when a learner says for example 'soap' in a situation such as restaurant where they should have said 'soup' ? The inaccurate production of a phoneme can lead to misunderstanding on the part of the waitress at least also the inaccurate use of stress can cause problems. Let's consider the word contest "contest (n)' is a word of two syllables if you stress the first syllable then it is a noun by saying for example 'contest'
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contest /'contest/ (n) here means competition and it is known but if you stress the second syllable of the same word we say contest /con'test/ here it is a verb and means oppose, hence, the word stress changes both meaning in the part of speech the same goes with for example 'present (n) and pre'sent (v) 'content (n) and con'tent (v) So Due to the confusing nature of the English spelling it is particularly important to learn English pronunciation in terms of phonemes
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rather than letters of the alphabet it is important to learn English phonetics mainly because there is not always a correspondence between the English spoken and the written form one sound may have many graphical representation and many words are not pronounced as written I will give you this list of words and try to pronounce them and then score yourself! This list of words try to pronounce them You will have one minute for example in English the vowel 'e'
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can be written as 'ea' like in the word 'read' /ri:d/ or we can find the long vowel 'e' as 'ie' as in believe /bi'li:v/ we can find it also as double 'ee' as in sleep /sli:p/ or we can find it as 'ei' as in receive /ri'si:v/ on the other hand, the English sound 'f' may be represented as the letter 'f' or the combination 'ph' like in frame /freɪm/ or photograph or even a 'gh' like in enough one vowel can be pronounced differently for example if you take the letter 'a' it can be produced
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in as 'a' /æ/ like in 'cat' /kæt/ as 'ɑː' as in 'last' /lɑːst/ as /eɪ/ 'a' like in shape or /ɪ/ like in shortage /ˈʃɔːtɪdʒ/ or 'all' /ɔːl/. Now, check your pronunciation in the first word 'chaos' /ˈkeɪɒs/ number two 'ewe' /ju:/ number three 'bough' /bɑʊ/ number four 'thorough' /ˈθʌrə/ number five 'dough' /dəʊ/ number six 'Hughes' /hju:z/ number seven 'simile' /ˈsɪmɪli/ number eight 'Breathe' /bri:ð/ number nine 'Audi' /ˈɑʊdi/ number ten Psalm /sa:m/ if you have scored less than 10 then
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you need to check English pronouncing dictionary each time you come across a new word that you do know its pronunciation Whose pronunciation are we describing? In phonetics, Students might wonder about the model we are describing in phonetics, a standard variety is the form of a language that is generally associated with educated speakers the standard variety of English in the (UK) is called Standard British English Received Pronunciation or (RP) which is used in our lectures, the
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standard variety spoken in the United States is called a General American English (GA) States which is not used in our context in Algeria we teach and learn (RP) as our model to illustrate English phonetics and phonology (RP) is also the accent used in British dictionaries and textbooks. (RP) is the most prestigious accent of English for example it was first called public school pronunciation then renamed as the Received Pronunciation or simply (RP) in the 1920s
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(RP) was initially described by the British phonetician Daniel Jones in the first edition of his English Pronouncing Dictionary in 1917. In England, they often associate RP with Southern British English speakers. RP usually is associated with the monarchy and the Royal people. We come now to the summary of the lecture. In this lecture, we have introduced phonetics basics, the definition, the study of the physical properties of human speech sounds 2. In phonetics, we refer
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to individual sounds as phonemes or sounds never letters. All phonetic transcription is done with phonetic slashes /.../ this one is found in dictionaries the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries 2. We have been through the fields of phonetics or the branches of phonetics the articulatory phonetics which means how sounds are produced? Acoustic phonetics that deals with the physical properties of sound waves that go from the speaker to the listener. The third branch is the auditory phonetics
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how sounds are perceived how sounds are perceived with the ear and interpreted with the brain, the other point that we have seen in the lecture is the system of representation that is the phonetic transcription in 'IPA' transcription one phone usually equals one sound "TIME FOR RESEARCH' Task 1: write a paper about the main features the phonetic studies and the real use in improving English pronunciation.. Task 2: What is the difference between a letter? Task 3:
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In what way are phonetics and phonology? similar or different ''Thank you for your attention"
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