Then click here.
Have you ever tried to learn a new language? You know then that some sounds are very difficult to make. Until sounds become habitual for us, they continue to be difficult to make. For example, English speakers find it difficult to combine z and d, as Russian speakers often do. Try to combine the letters zd now.
Native speakers of Engish also have difficulty pronouncing words in Navajo that begin with the sound that English speakers write as ng, even though we have no trouble putting that sound at the end of words such as sing or hitting. Try saying ng on its own. Then visit this site about the Navajo Language complete with sounds and pronunciation.
To study the patterning of sounds, linguists write down speech utterances as sequences of sound. To do this they use the International Phonetic Alphabet which consists of fewer than 100 sound symbols-it can be used for any of the more than 5,000 languages that exist.
What about sounds that can be substituted for each other and not make a difference in meaning? How do you pronounce "butter" - is it with two clear "t" sounds or does it have more of a "d" sound? Does it make a difference in meaning?
Do the 26 letters of the English language correspond to
the total inventory of phonemes in the English language? NO. Because English
has a number of inconsistente features. For example, how do you pronounce
the word "lead"? You first have to know if it is the noun (the
substance) or the adjective.
To hear the variations of lead,
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Click here first. Then click here. |
Other Linguists try to identify how sounds are classified unconsciously by the speakers of the language into phonemes.
The ways in which sounds are grouped together in phonemes
vary from language to language; substituting one phoneme for another can
change the meaning of a word. For example, stop--if you change the "t" to an "l" you have
"slop".