Freedom of Expression

Taken together, Gussenhoven and Kenstowicz paint of a picture of expression that is freeing, devoid of rule and contingent mostly on actual practice. In our excerpt of Kenstowicz, the idea of an invariant core for a phoneme is well dismantled. Even from our discussion in class, it was clear that the actual actualization of our concept of the phoneme [t] is incredibly varied. We call the sound produced by "stem" a [t], as well as the silence produced in the middle of the word center a [t]. There is no underlying sound or speech pattern that actually ties together these two sounds. As mentioned in our article, the written phoneme gives us an "ideal sound" to try to create as we speak. It helps us as we take the sounds that we have learned through general living, and transcribe them onto the page.

The international Phoneme Association's symbol table affirms this variance by simply surpassing the alphabet's of a particular language to signify sounds, and by creating their own. In order to truly capture different utterances, a choice was made to not look at written language, but to study sound. The resulting symbol table is robust, and reliant heavily on the way humans actually speak. Gussenhoven's systematic coverage of the sounds made by humans made it even more clear that we as people don't speak in accordance with prescribed sounds- we hear, and we use our "organs of speech" to create different sounds.

These two papers offer a chance to think of expression as a free and natural thing. There is no longer a "right" way of pronouncing a t, nor a fundamentally "right" way of pronouncing a word like "water". Because there are different ways of pronouncing every phoneme that makes up the word "water," there is no fundamental ideal. Instead, we use our context to develop an idea of how the word is to sound, and then use the written letters as a guide for remembering the word and distinguishing it from others. My cousins in Ghana who almost never pronounce r's at the ends of words (but always pronounce t's in words like water) are not more or less correct than I am when I skip my middle "t's" and pronounce my r's). Our way of saying a word like water is quite different, and that is okay. There is then freedom to speak words as feels natural to us in our varying contexts and environments.