THE EMERGENCE OF PHONETICS
All these developments resulted in the emergence of a new branch within linguistics which was concerned with the study of the phonological component of language—phonology. Phonology is the study of all aspects of the sounds and sound system of a language. It includes two major sub-branches: (a) phonetics, and (b) phonemics.
Phonetics is the field of language study concerned with the physical properties of sounds, and it has three subfields:
(a) articulatory phonetics (i.e., the study of how the human vocal organ produces sound)
(b) acoustic phonetics (i.e., the study of the sound waves produced by the human vocal apparatus)
(c) auditory phonetics (i.e., the examination of how speech sounds are perceived by the human ear)
Phonemics, in contrast, is not concerned with the physical properties of sounds. Rather, it focuses on how sounds function in a particular language. The following example illustrates the difference between phonetics and phonology. In the English language, when the sound /k/ (usually spelled c) occurs at the beginning of a word, as in the word cut, it is pronounced with aspiration (a puff of breath). However, when this sound occurs at the end of a word, as in tuck, there is no aspiration. Phonetically, the aspirated [kh] and unaspirated [k] are different sounds, but in English these different sounds never distinguish one word from another or bring about differences in meaning, and English speakers are usually unaware of the phonetic difference until it is pointed out to them. Thus English makes no phonological distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated /k/. The Hindi language, however, uses this sound difference to distinguish words such as kal (meaning time), which has an unaspirated /k/, and khal (meaning skin), in which /kh/ represents the aspirated [kh]. Therefore, in Hindi the distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated /k/ is both phonetic and phonological—phonemic (i.e., any difference in pronunciations which brings about a difference in meaning is said to be phonemic). The following chapters will provide an in-depth discussion of both phonetics (i.e., auditory, acoustic, and articulatory phonetics) and phonemics.
