Quotes About Phonetics

Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features.

Instead of following one another the sounds overlap; a sound which is acoustically perceived as coming after another one can be articulated simultaneously with the latter or even in part before it.

I'm aware now over the last 5 or 10 years that when you do an accent, you really have to kind of get down to the nitty gritty and go into the phonetics of it, if necessary. Find out not just the sounds but the rhythms and the music - or lack thereof - in a particular accent.

The Englishman loves to roll his tongue around the word, 'extraordinary'. It so pleases him that he is reluctant to finish the sound which goes on into harmonics and overtones. The North American publisher is likewise inclined.

The best scheme of Phonetics is a stiff uncertain thing.

One of the drawbacks of English is you can't spell things by hearing them.

Saying certain letters without moving my mouth is tough... like B, P and W, you know.

I could sing in English before I could understand it because I phonetically learned it from the musicals.

Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.

We have this wonderful language and we don't appreciate it. That's old-fashioned me, but when I went to school, everyone had elocution lessons, not to sound posh but so you could be understood.

I think, for the English accent, we don't say our Rs, contrary to a standard American accent.

Hazel wanted Mrs. Willett to help her with the spelling of teeth, but Mrs. Willett was, like many reading teachers, a believer in the primal importance of do-it-yourself phonetics, which supposedly built self-esteem and independent thinking habits—even when a kid was obviously eager to know what the real spelling was.

Examples of elision in Mexican Spanish abound—pa' instead of para (for), apá instead of papá (father), SanTana instead of Santa Ana, pos instead of pues (well), and my supposed gaffe.

According to some researchers, hominids prior to Homo sapiens could not, for instance, produce the vowel i {ee}. But ultimately, this does not say very much, since by all accounts, et es perfectle pesseble to have a thoroughle respectable language wethout the vowel i.

Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.

Our method of speaking is interrupted, hard-edged... a lot of consonants and noises.

It was written all in O, or nearly so, and all the O's are gone, said Andrea. When coat is cat, and boat is bat, and goatherd looks like gathered, and booth is both, since both are bth, the reader's eye is bothered. And power is power, and zero zer, and, worst of all, a hero's her. The old man sighed as he said it. Anoon is ann, and moan is man. Andrea smiled as she said it. And shoe, Andreus said, is she. Ah, woe, the old man said, is we.

signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively.

If you've been puzzled by the name !Kung Bushman, the exclamation mark is not an expression of premature astonishment; it's just how linguists denote a click.)

At the same time, Dad was working on a book arguing the case for phonetic spelling. He called it 'A Ghoti out of Water.' Ghoti, he liked to point out, could be pronounced like fish. The gh had the f sound in enough, the o had the short i sound in women, and ti had the sh sound in nation.

In English-language speech, we spend five times as much time producing vowels as consonants. In singing, that ratio can hit two hundred to one.

To him, English was still a mudslide of runny, slushy sounds that did not exist in his mother tongue—r, th, sh, and some particularly gelatinous vowels. Frawder thur prueless rare shur per thurst. Mirtler freckling thow. Gold freys yawder far cration. Crewl fry rackler friend thur. No shemling keal rearand for fear under shall an frick. Folger rich shermane furl hearst when pearsh thurlow larshes your morse claws. Clushes ream glown roven thurm shalter shirt.