Language is a multilevel system thatis divided into simple and complex subsystems or levels. Phonetics is the lowest level of the language, as it studies its one-sided units - sounds, phonemes, supersegment units, accentuation and intonation. Its name comes from the Greek word, which means sound, voice, noise, speech. Phonetics is also a division of linguistics, in which this level of language is studied and everything that relates to it: sounds of speech, their combinations and positional changes, the production of sounds by the speaker and their perception by the hearer, as well as the features of the sound shell of the language in general and the sound system and pronunciation features of each individual language.
Components of phonetics:
- Public and private. General phonetics studies the laws of the structure of the sound shell in principle, regardless of the language. Private phonetics is the phonetics of individual languages.
- Historical and modern.Historical phonetics is the study of what phonetic laws acted in the language at different times, and what their influences have been preserved in the language so far. Modern phonetics is studying the state of this level of language at the moment.
- Theoretical and experimental.
Despite the fact that the articulatory apparatus ofof all nations is arranged in the same way, different languages differ significantly from each other already at the phonetic level. For example, English phonetics, unlike Russian, does not know how to stun voiced consonants in front of deaf people, and moreover: for it it is a semantic distinctive feature. Also in English, as in some others, long and short vowel sounds differ, which in Russian do not carry semantic load. And the Spanish phonetics dispenses both without weakening unstressed vowels, and without softening the consonant sounds before the vowels and e. However, there is no sound in Spanish.