As the Gussenhoven reading introduced the IPA and the richness of its entire symbolic system, I couldn’t help but think about how special it is to have a true phonetic alphabet that covers all sounds that we use to speak, in all languages hitherto discovered. It struck me as a stunning achievement, one that reminds us that our similarities as human beings far outweigh any cultural or ideological differences.
At the same time, I was thinking about how limited an exclusively phonetic approach is. I’m a native Spanish speaker and a trained English speaker. I’m therefore intimately familiar with how small a mispronunciation needs to be in order for a word or sentence to sound “off”. I appreciated that the Kenstowicz reading gave me terminology to talk about this in a more systematic way: allophones and their relation to phonemes, “collective phonetic illusions”. It was very interesting to me that these illusions also run in the other direction: that in some occasions, we might judge phonetically different sounds to be identical -- I wouldn't have thought of that before Thursday's class.
I am very interested in how we might not operate exclusively by the rules of phonetics, and by what other information we consider when interpreting speech. It seems to me that the IPA is very precise and probably doesn't miss too many nuances in terms of sound. It just appears to be the case that, as we spoke about in the first class, phonetics is only one piece of the puzzle that is speech production and comprehension.
At the same time, I was thinking about how limited an exclusively phonetic approach is. I’m a native Spanish speaker and a trained English speaker. I’m therefore intimately familiar with how small a mispronunciation needs to be in order for a word or sentence to sound “off”. I appreciated that the Kenstowicz reading gave me terminology to talk about this in a more systematic way: allophones and their relation to phonemes, “collective phonetic illusions”. It was very interesting to me that these illusions also run in the other direction: that in some occasions, we might judge phonetically different sounds to be identical -- I wouldn't have thought of that before Thursday's class.
I am very interested in how we might not operate exclusively by the rules of phonetics, and by what other information we consider when interpreting speech. It seems to me that the IPA is very precise and probably doesn't miss too many nuances in terms of sound. It just appears to be the case that, as we spoke about in the first class, phonetics is only one piece of the puzzle that is speech production and comprehension.
I agree - it's interesting to see how other rules like IPA helps formulate how we pronounce language specific sounds. In addition, I also speak a second language and can empathize with the plight of collective phonetic illusions.
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