Three blogs in one day? Wow this is sure a change from this summer when it was more like 1 blog in three months. Anyways, I couldn't resist a third blog when I thought of this title so here it goes; a blog about my phonetics class.
Phonetics in Linguistics is the study of the production of speech sounds and how to describe them. We study things like what makes vowels and consonants, how various parts of the vocal tract make sounds, how our pitch and stress affect pronunciation; things like that. One of the most interesting parts of the class is that you get to hear a wide variety of sounds from a wide variety of languages. You also get an insight into your own dialect. For example I speak a Seattle dialect and in class got to demonstrate how my pronunciation of words like "egg", "leg" and "bag" are different than the Standard American English dialect.
One of the funniest parts of that class is that each time you hear a new sound or about the position of your tongue in a particular sound you hear about half the class attempting the new sounds. Today we had a Mandarin speaker in the class prnounce a word with a voiceless velar fricative. That is the like the CH in the Scottish Loch or the J in Spanish for those of you who aren't Phoneticians. Following I could hear a lot of people making that sound. Either we were in a Phonetics class or everyone there had hairballs.
Well that's the last one for the day. Hope you've all enjoyed your triple dose of Braunsey Blog...and maybe someday I can persuade my sister to contribute...
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1 comment:
Jean-Jacques and Natasha seem to have the velar fricative down pat. Who knew they were such talented linguists?
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