CHAPTER I
PHONETICS AND PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION
1. When a person is learning to speak a foreign language, he is confronted at the outset by difficulties of two kinds in regard to pronunciation. Firstly he has to learn to form all the speech-sounds occurring in the language; and secondly, when he cau produce the sounds correctly, he must learn to use the right sound in the right place in connected speech.
2. Experience shows that difficulties of the first kind are best overcome by a study of phonetic theory, while difficulties of the second kind are most easily surmounted by the use of phonetic transcription.
3. Phonetics is the science of pronunciation, the science which investigates the mode of formation of speech sounds and their distribution in connected speech.
4. The formation of speech sounds might be studied without having any letters to represent the sounds. The absence of such symbols would, however, render explanations very difficult, Furthermore, the distribution of sounds in connected speech could not possibly be studied at all without some means of symbolizing the sounds under discussion. Symbols to represent sounds are therefore necessary for the language student.
5. Strange to say, there are still some who think that the ordinary letters of the alphabet are suitable for the purpose of symbolizing sounds, and that the student has only to learn the current spelling of a foreign language in order to learn how to use the right sound in the right place. It is easy to show, however, that such an idea is utterly erroneous in regard to most languages, and particularly in regard to English.
6. In the first place English assigns to many of the letters of the alphabet values quite different from those which foreigners are accustomed to associate with them: e.g. the a in gate, the i in find, the u in tune[1], Doubtless these values may be learned without difficulty; but as soon as the foreign student has learned them, he finds innumerable words in which these letters have totally different values:
- ↑ These words are phonetically geit, faind, tjuːn.
