Quotes About Phonetics

As you know, there are certain languages that lend themselves very easily to vocal use.

There's a fashion abroad generally to speak the language as badly as possible. I'm of a mind to start a society for the reinstatement of the letter 't' and the banishment of the glottal stop.

Out of the simple consonants of the alphabet and our eleven vowels and diphthongs all possible syllables of a certain sort were constructed, a vowel sound being placed between two consonants.

From a strictly articulatory point of view there is no succession of sounds.

in which great difficulties are found to the present day by Englishmen, whose language presents no certain laws for rendering any given sound into a fixed combination of letters.

In college, I went to school for acting; we had to learn phonetics just to be able to do dialects and all that stuff. I'm somebody who does better just hearing it. I'll just imitate it, and I get it better that way. When I know too much information, I'm not great.

Moving in the conventional direction, phonetics concerns the acoustic dimensions of linguistic sound. Phonology studies the clustering of those acoustic properties into significant cues. Morphology studies the clustering of those cues into meaningful units. Syntax studies the arrangement of those meaningful units into expressive sequences. Semantics studies the composite meaning of those sequences.

We invented words; we'll tell you how they're supposed to sound.

George Bernard Shaw's famous spelling of "fish" as "ghoti"—the first two letters pronounced as the last two in "tough," the middle letter as in "women," and the last two as in "nation.

One of his many interests was a concern to establish just how many vowels and consonants the human vocal tract is capable of producing in the languages of the world. The answer is more than people think. He estimated that there were over eight hundred different consonants and some two hundred different vowels.

His method resembles George Bernard Shaw's way of using the /f/ sound of GH in "tough," the /i/ sound of o in "women," and the /sh/ sound of TI in "nation" to write fish as GHOTI. The scribe also

Whose cruel idea was it for the word "lisp" to have an "s" in it?

The na at the end of banana annoys me as much as it would you if it were bananana.

en el sur de España aún se mantendría, en mayor o menor medida, la distinción entre /b/ y /v/.

La pronunciación de la v como labiodental no ha existido nunca en español.

Por ejemplo, el español actual no admite el grupo [s] + consonante a principio de palabra, por lo que la mayoría de los hispanohablantes que no se hayan formado específicamente en ello pronunciarán el inglés still [st?l] como [es?til], es decir, insertarán una [e] para hacer la combinación de sonidos admisible, igual que es admisible «estar» [es?ta?] (del latín stare [?sta?e]); esto es un fenómeno conocido como prótesis vocálica.

The basic rhymes in English are masculine, which is to say that the last syllable of the line is stressed: 'lane' rhymes with 'pain,' but it also rhymes with 'urbane' since the last syllable of 'urbane' is stressed. 'Lane' does not rhyme with 'methane.'

If you like Anglo-Saxon, I belched. If you fancy Latin, I eructed.

vowel" coming via medieval French from the Latin adjective vocalis, "using the voice.

Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean "boat" or "to sail"—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant "there," not "an owl and a reed." Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the

Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean "boat" or "to sail"—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant "there," not "an owl and a reed." Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the Egyptian word for "there.

'Y' is about the weakest letter of all. 'Y' can't make up its mind if it's a vowel or a consonant, can it?

The sibilant s is the most difficult sound to correct.

There was no "me" in Alchemy. Well, phonetically there was, but that wasn't the point.