Phonetics and phonology

Although our species has the scientific name Homo sapiens, ‘thinking human’, it has often been suggested that an even more appropriate name would be Homo loquens, or ‘speaking human’. Many species have soundbased signaling systems, and can communicate with other members of the same species on various topics of mutual interest, like approaching danger or where the next meal is coming from. Most humans (leaving aside for now native users of sign languages) also use sounds for linguistic signaling; but the structure of the human vocal organs allows a particularly wide range of sounds to be used, and they are also put together in an extraordinarily sophisticated way.

There are two sub disciplines in linguistics which deal with sound, namely phonetics and phonology, which is to provide an outline of the sounds of various English accents and how those sounds combine and pattern together, we will need aspects of both. Phonetics provides objective ways of describing and analyzing the range of sounds humans use in their languages. More specifically, articulatory phonetics identifies precisely which speech organs and muscles are involved in producing the different sounds of the world’s languages. Those sounds are then transmitted from the speaker to the hearer, and acoustic and auditory phonetics focus on the physics of speech as it travels through the air in the form of sound waves, and the effect those waves have on a hearer’s ears and brain. It follows that phonetics has strong associations with anatomy, physiology, physics and neurology.

However, although knowing what sounds we can in principle make and use is part of understanding what makes us human, each person grows up learning and speaking only a particular human language or languages, and each language only makes use of a subset of the full range of possible, producible and distinguishable sounds. When we turn to the characteristics of the English sound system that make it specifically English, and different from French or Welsh or Quechua, we move into the domain of phonology, which is the language-specific selection and organization of sounds to signal meanings. Phonologists are interested in the sound patterns of particular languages, and in what speakers and hearers need to know, and children need to learn, to be speakers of those languages: in that sense, it is close to psychology.

Our phonological knowledge is not something we can necessarily access and talk about in detail: we often have intuitions about language without knowing where they come from, or exactly how to express them. But the knowledge is certainly there. For instance, speakers of English will tend to agree that the word snil is a possible but non-existent word, whereas *fnil is not possible (as the asterisk conventionally shows). In the usual linguistic terms, snil is an accidental gap in the vocabulary, while *fnil is a systematic gap, which results from the rules of the English sound system.

However, English speakers are not consciously aware of those rules, and are highly unlikely to tell a linguist asking about those words that the absence of *fnil reflects the unacceptability of word-initial consonant sequences, or clusters, with [fn-] in English: the more likely answer is that snil ‘sounds all right’ (and if you’re lucky, your informant will produce similar words like sniff or snip to back up her argument), but that *fnil ‘just sounds wrong’. It is the job of the phonologist to express generalizations of this sort in precise terms: after all, just because knowledge is not conscious, this does not mean it is unreal, unimportant or not worth understanding. When you run downstairs, you don’t consciously think ‘left gluteus maximus, left foot, right arm; right gluteus maximus, right foot, left arm’ on each pair of steps. In fact, you’re unlikely to make any conscious decisions at all, below the level of wanting to go downstairs in the first place; and relatively few people will know the names of the muscles involved. In fact, becoming consciously aware of the individual activities involved is quite likely to disrupt the overall process: think about what you’re doing, and you finish the descent nose-first. All of this is very reminiscent of our everyday use of spoken language. We decide to speak, and what about, but the nuts and bolts of speech production are beyond our conscious reach; and thinking deliberately about what we are saying, and how we are saying it, is likely to cause self-consciousness and hesitation, interrupting the flow of fluent speech rather than improving matters. Both language and mobility (crawling, walking, running downstairs) emerge in developing children by similar combinations of mental and physical maturation, internal abilities, and input from the outside world. As we go along, what we have learned becomes easy, fluent and automatic; we only become dimly aware of what complexity lies behind our actions when we realize we have made a speech error, or see and hear a child struggling to say a word or take a step. Phonologists, like anatomists and physiologists, aim to help us understand the nature of that underlying complexity, and to describe fully and formally what we know in a particular domain, but don’t know we know.

The relationship between phonetics and phonology is a complex one, but we might initially approach phonology as narrowed-down phonetics. Quite small babies, in the babbling phase, produce the whole range of possible human sounds, including some which they never hear from parents or siblings: a baby in an English-speaking environment will spontaneously make consonants which are not found in any European language, but are to be found closest to home in an African language, say, or one from the Caucasus. However, that child will then narrow down her range of sounds from the full human complement to only those found in the language(s) she is hearing and learning, and will claim, when later trying to learn at school another language with a different sound inventory, that she cannot possibly produce unfamiliar sounds she made perfectly naturally when only a few months old. Or within a language, subtle mechanical analysis of speech reveals that every utterance of the same word, even by the same speaker, will be a tiny fraction different from every other; yet hearers who share that language will effortlessly identify the same word in each case. In this sense, phonetics supplies an embarrassment of riches, providing much more information than speakers seem to use or need: all those speakers, and every utterance different! Phonology, on the other hand, involves a reduction to the essential information, to what speakers and hearers think they are saying and hearing. The perspective shifts from more units to fewer, from huge variety to relative invariance, from absolutely concrete to relatively abstract; like comparing the particular rose I can see from my window, or roses generally in all their variety (old-fashioned, bushy, briar; scented or not; red, yellow, shocking pink), to The Rose, an almost ideal and abstract category to which we can assign the many different actual variants. A white dog-rose, a huge overblown pink cabbage rose, and a new, genetically engineered variety can all be roses with no contradiction involved. In linguistic terms, it’s not just that I say tomahto and you say tomayto; it’s that I say tomahto and tomahto and tomahto, and the three utterances are subtly different, but we both think I said the same thing three times.