Linguistics

Front 1

phone:

Back 1

speech sound

Front 2

phonetics:

Back 2

the study of speech sounds; how they are produced in the vocal tract (articulatory phonetics), their physical properties (acoustic phonetics), and how they are perceived (auditory phonetics)

Front 3

phoneme:

Back 3

a class of speech sounds identified by a native speaker as the same sound; a mental entity (or cateogry) related to various allophones by phonological rules: '/t/ -->[th]/___ stressed vowel,' where /t/ is the phoneme and [th] is the allophone of /t/
***The translation of this latter part is: the set of sounds that English speakers think of as being the /t/ sound (but that can be pronounced in several different ways) is pronounced with aspiration (breath) when it comes before a stressed vowel
***This brings up the point that we did not raise in class today, which is that some sound-variation within a phoneme is principled or rule-based and depends on the sounds around it (such as in the example above) and sometimes it is not. The former is known as "complementary distribution" and the latter as "free variation."

Front 4

allophone:

Back 4

one of a set of nondistinctive realizations of the same phoneme
***Here "nondistinctive" means "the difference in sound doesn't cause a difference in meaning." For example if someone says "came", you will hear it as the same word regardless of whether they pronounce it "[k]ame" (for now I'm just focusing on the first sound, not the rest) or "[kh]ame", because in English, [k] and [kh] are allophones
***In Nepali, however, these are two separate phonemes, so the word "[k]am" means work and the word "[kh]am" means envelope. Note that a pair like this (in which all the sounds except one are identical, and the two words have different meanings because of that one sound) is known in linguistics as a "minimal pair"

Front 5

phonology:

Back 5

the study of the sound system of a language; how the particular sounds contrast in each language to form an integrated system for encoding information and how such systems differ from one language to another
***You can think of this as "what counts as the same or a different sound in Language A and what counts as the same or a different sound in Language B"