Part 1 The importance of phonetic study 1)Phonetics is the science of speech sounds. It deals with the sound system of a language. A language consists of three important elements, namely, speech sounds, vocabulary and grammar. Speech sound is the material form on which word and grammar rely for existence. Divorced from speech sound, word and grammar are non-existent. So the first
Speech sounds seldom occur in isolation. They are nearly always joined together to form words and groups of words. In connected speech, sounds, under the influence of their neighbors,are replaced by other sounds. Sometimes two neighboring sounds influence each other and are replaced by third sound which is different from both the original sounds
The length of a sound is the length of time during which it is held on continuously in a given word or phrase. The principal facts concerning length in English are given in the following rules: 203. Length of vowels 1. English vowels /i:/, /a: / /:/, /u:/, /a: /are longer than the other English vowels in similar context, i.e., when surrounded by the same sounds, and pronounced with the same degree of stress. Thus