Phonology, Phonemic, and Phonetic



PHONOLOGY
                Phonology is the study of speech sounds in language or a language with reference to their distribution and patterning and to tacit rules governing pronunciation, the sound system of a language, and the classification of linguistic sounds.

PHONEMICS
•       Phonemics is the study of the distribution of sound systems in human languages.
•       Phoneme, the variety of phonemics, is the smallest unit of sound which can differentiate one word from another; abstract mental units that represent sounds; encased in /slashes/.
•      There are 44* phonemes in English, 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 an 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/.
                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 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.

PHONETICS
•       Phonetics is the term for the description and classification of speech sounds, particularly how sounds are produced, transmitted and received.
•       It is simply the study of speech sounds, covering all sounds used in all languages, and relying only on the physical characteristics of the sounds without regard to their systemic patterns in various languages.
•       Phones, the unit of phonetics, encased in [square brackets], are universal and are not specific to any language.
•       Thus, we say that there is such a thing as "the phone [p]", because phones are defined universally

PHONETICS TRANSCRIPTION
•       A transcription is a conventional system to represent speech (pronunciation)
•       Various phonetic alphabets have been developed to represent the speech sounds in writing through the use of symbols. Some of these symbols are identical to the Roman letters used in many language alphabets; for example: p and b. Other symbols are based on the Greek alphabet, such as θ to represent the th- sound in thin and thought. Still others have been specially invented; e.g. ð for the th- sound in the and then. The most widely used phonetic transcription is the International Phonetic Alphabet.


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