Quotes About Phonetics

and although the W came along in the tenth century, modern Germans still seem to manage perfectly well by using a V instead. Except when the German managing director of Aston Martin tries to say 'vanquish'.

Vowels were something else. He didn't like them and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

Intended to serve as an introduction to both the linguistic and also the practical study of spoken English.

Sometimes I want to suck on a beautiful word. To lick it clean.

Benedict Cumberbatch is not only the best name in show business, it's also the response you get when you ask John Travolta to pronounce Ben Affleck.

Le poète dilate les voyelles.

The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning.

Je choisis des mots simples et concrets... J'essaie de faire des phrases courtes et j'évite les inversions autant que possible. Je ne mets pas un mot très bref à côté d'un mot de plusieurs syllables... Si un mot finit par une consonne, je lui trouve un compagnon qui commence par une voyelle. Et je lis mon texte à voix haute pour entendre comment ça sonne.

The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick.

Aud rhymes with cowed.

The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

tiny babies are capable of very fine auditory discrimination. For example, they can hear the difference between sounds as similar as 'pa' and 'ba'.

when learners focus primarily on meaning, they may not be able to also pay attention to the sounds that make up the words.