Theoretical phonetics. Study guide for second year students. Борискина О.О - 50 стр.

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spoken in the capital, Peking. All Chinese dialects are monosyllabic - which can
itself be almost absurdly limiting - but the Pekingese dialect goes a step further
and demands that all words end in an 'n' or 'ng' sound. As a result, there are so
few phonetic possibilities in Pekingese that each sound must represent on
average seventy words. Just one sound, 'yi', can stand for 215 separate words.
Partly the Chinese get around this by using rising or falling pitches to vary the
sounds fractionally, but even so in some dialects a falling 'i' can still represent
almost forty unrelated words. We use pitch in English to a small extent, as
when we differentiate between 'oh' and 'oh?’ and 'oh!' but essentially we function
by relying on a pleasingly diverse range of sounds.
Almost everyone agrees that English possesses more sounds than almost any
other language, though few agree on just how many sounds that might be. The
British authority Simeon Potter says there are forty-four distinct sounds -
twelve vowels, nine diphthongs (a kind of gliding vowel), and twenty-three
consonants.
        The International Phonetic Alphabet, perhaps the most widely used,
differentiates between fifty-two sounds used in English, divided equally
between consonants and vowels, while the American Heritage Dictionary lists
forty-five for purely English sounds, plus a further half dozen for foreign terms.
Italian, by contrast, uses only about half as many sounds, a mere twenty-seven,
while Hawaiian gets by with just thirteen. So whether the number in English is
forty-four or fifty-two or something in between, it is quite a lot. But having said
that, if you listen carefully, you will find that there are many more than this.
        The combination 'ng', for example, is usually treated as one.
        The English tend to compress and mangle words at simply breathtaking
speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a
minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx -and, by variously pursing
our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a
freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely
differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric
disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of sound. People
don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like
a watercolour left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we
must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we
might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is
suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series
of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of
the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means
we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business
indeed.
And yet we achieve the process effortlessly. We absorb and interpret spoken
sounds more or less instantaneously. If I say to you, 'Which do you like better,
peas or carrots?' it will take you on average less than a second - the length of an
eye blink - to interpret the question, consider the relative merits of the two
vegetables, and formulate a reply. We repeat this process hundreds of times a