English Phonology

Looking for the easiest way to transform your old common photos into something better to look on? There is no need for you to be an expert in that photo editing matters, because nowadays you can have it done just in few clicks of your finger and voila, the wanted results will be shown up. It is Picjoke.com the website that will always be ready to help you finding the best photo effects and get the work done in any seconds.

This is a free website you can explore the pages and try all the fun photo effects available on the pages for your better photo result. You now know where to head for anytime you need to give a nice touch of your blog page with series of funny pics. Just amaze your friends as they look at your pictures and feel the fresh at atmosphere at once.

This site has just broken the rule that it should be skills in doing such works, and whoever you are now be freed for the best picture of yours in every time you entered the site. Get ready for the upcoming new effects to make funny pictures with wider options to explore.

Although our species has the scientific name Homo sapiens, ‘thinkinghuman’, it has often been suggested that an even more appropriate namewould be Homo loquens, or ‘speaking human’. Many species have soundbasedsignalling systems, and can communicate with other members ofthe same species on various topics of mutual interest, like approachingdanger or where the next meal is coming from. Most humans (leavingaside for now native users of sign languages) also use sounds for linguisticsignalling; but the structure of the human vocal organs allows a particularlywide range of sounds to be used, and they are also put togetherin an extraordinarily sophisticated way.

 

There are two subdisciplines in linguistics which deal with sound,namely phonetics and phonology, and to fulfil the aim of this book,which is to provide an outline of the sounds of various English accentsand how those sounds combine and pattern together, we will needaspects of both. Phonetics provides objective ways of describing andanalysing the range of sounds humans use in their languages. Morespecifically, articulatory phonetics identifies precisely which speechorgans and muscles are involved in producing the different sounds of theworld’s languages. Those sounds are then transmitted from the speakerto the hearer, and acoustic and auditory phonetics focus on the physicsof speech as it travels through the air in the form of sound waves, and theeffect those waves have on a hearer’s ears and brain. It follows thatphonetics has strong associations with anatomy, physiology, physics andneurology.

The discussion so far may suggest a rather straightforward dichotomy:phonetics is universal, while phonology is language-specific. But thingsare not quite that simple.

 

First, phonologists also attempt to distinguish those patterns whichare characteristic of a single language and simply reflect its history, fromothers where a more universal motivation is at issue. In the case of theabsence of *fnil, or more generally the absence of word-initial [fn-]clusters, we are dealing with a fact of modern English. It is perfectlypossible to produce this combination of sounds; there are words in manylanguages, including Norwegian fnise ‘giggle’, fnugg ‘speck’, which beginwith just that cluster; and indeed, it was quite normal in earlier periodsof English – sneeze, for example, has the Old English ancestor fne¯san,while Old English fnæd meant ‘hem, edge, fringe’; but it is not part of theinventory of sound combinations which English speakers learn and usetoday. The same goes for other initial clusters, such as [kn-]: this againwas common in Old English, as in cna¯wan ‘to know’, and survives intoModern English spelling, though it is now simply pronounced [n]; again,[kn-] is also perfectly normal in other languages, including German,where we find Knabe ‘boy’, Knie ‘knee’.