NOT EVERYONE SOUNDS ALIKE

NOT EVERYONE SOUNDS ALIKE

It’s easy for one to become narrowly focused with respect to what the world’s languages
have to offer the unsuspecting learner, especially since native speakers “play” with no more
than thirty-five to forty-five sounds in their own language .

English as night is from day; their basic sentence structure, instead of being
subject/verb/object (SVO), can be VSO. A very few are object-initial languages, OSV. A
number inflect their verbs in such a complex way as to make them among the world’s most
difficult to learn for beginners. And on and on go the differences.


phonology
While phonetics is the study of the ways in which speech sounds are produced,
phonology is the study of (1) how the speech sounds of a language
are used in that language to distinguish meaningful units (such as word)
from each other, and (2) how sounds are patterned in a language. Consequently,
the study of phonology requires us to take meaning into consideration,
while phonetics does not. In this section we explore phonology and
the basic unit of phonological analysis, the phoneme.allophones



word in each pair is a little longer than the vowel in the first.
Now determine the similarities and differences between the consonants
after the vowels in each word pair. You should find that the consonant in the
first word is the voiceless version of the consonant in the second word.
Turning our attention again to the vowels in each word pair: how are
they related? We hope you said that they were very similar vowels, specifically,
short and long versions of the same vowel.
You should now be able to determine a very general rule of English.
When are vowels lengthened and when are they not lengthened?
Your answer should be something along the lines of: English vowels are
lengthened when they occur before a voiced consonant; otherwise they are not
lengthened.
So far we’ve seen [{] and [{:], [u] and [u:], [o] and [o:], [i] and [i:], and
[e] and [e:]; in each case the longer vowel occurs before a voiced consonant.
We’ve also noted that the vowels are otherwise virtually identical—they differ
only in length. So it makes good sense to regard these pairs of vowel
sounds as slightly different pronunciations of the same vowel, and that
whether the vowel is lengthened or not depends on whether the consonant
that follows it is voiced or not.
Importantly, the long and short pairs of vowels do not contrast with
each other: English contains no pairs of words that are identical except that
where one contains a short version of a vowel, the other contains the longer
version of the same vowel. Consequently, the long and short versions of

vowels do not represent separate phonemes.
Let’s now turn our attention to some consonants. For example, English
speakers pronounce the [t] in toll differently from that in stole. The [t] of toll
is breathier than the [t] of stole. The former is said to be aspirated, and the
latter unaspirated. We represent the aspirated [t] as [th], with the diacritic
[h] indicating aspiration. We represent the unaspirated [t] as [t] with no diacritic.
The important point here is that English speakers do not signal any
difference in meaning with the difference between [th] and [t]. They treat
the two sounds as variant ways of pronouncing the “the same sound.” Substituting
one of these sounds for the other would not affect the meaning of
a word, but it would create an odd and perhaps non-native pronunciation of
the word. No pair of English words is distinguished solely by the difference
between [t] and [th]. You can satisfy yourself that this is so by trying to find
a minimal pair of English words differentiated solely by the fact that where
one has an aspirated consonant the other has an unaspirated version of that
same consonant. (Don’t spend too long trying!)
Let’s now look at a different pair of English sounds. If we replace the
[t] in [rt] (rot) with [d], then we get the sequence of sounds [rd] (rod),
which, of course, is quite distinct in meaning from rot. Clearly, English
speakers treat the difference between [d] and [t] differently from the way
they treat the difference between [th] and [t] and between longer and shorter
versions of vowels. In the case of [t] and [d], the difference can signal a
difference in meaning; in the other cases it cannot. Differences in sound
that signal differences in meaning are said to be phonemic, distinctive, or
contrastive. Differences in sound that do not signal meaning differences
are non‑distinctive or non‑contrastive. One objective of phonology is to
identify which sound differences are contrastive and which are not. As we
have seen, the contrastive sound units are called phonemes.
Phonemes and allophones
A good way to think about a phoneme is as a group of phonetically similar
sounds that are treated as members of the same sound category. Because the
members of a sound category are treated as “the same sound” in a language,
they cannot be used for communicating differences in meaning. English
speakers treat [th] and [t] as belonging to the same sound category, so they
cannot be used to distinguish one word from another. Different phonemes
are different categories of sounds and the differences among these categories
can signal differences in meaning. English speakers treat [t] and [d] as
belonging to
phonemes
You might reasonably have assumed that whenever speakers distinguish between
a pair of sounds, they will use that difference to distinguish between
words. For example, we know that English speakers distinguish between [s]
and [z], and we use this difference to signal the difference between the words
sip and zip. We will say that [s] and [z] contrast with each other in English.
In fact, all of the sounds we have described so far contrast with each other in
English and so are used by English speakers to distinguish words from each
other. You can test this out by taking any pair of sounds (as we took [s] and
[z]) and creating a pair of words (like sip and zip) which are identical, except
that where one has one sound, the other has the other sound, just as where
sip has [s], zip has [z]. Pairs of words like this are called minimal pairs,
and are used to demonstrate that pairs of sounds are used in a language to
distinguish words from each other. Sound units that distinguish words from
each other are called phonemes.