Phonetics
/fəˈnɛtɪks/noun
The study of speech sounds: how they are produced, carried through air, and heard.
The Greek roots
Literally: “having to do with the voice”
The story of the word
φωνητικός in Greek meant having a voice, able to speak. The science took the name in the 1840s, when scholars started describing sounds by what the tongue, lips and larynx do rather than by how the word is spelled. The International Phonetic Association followed in 1886, founded by language teachers in Paris who wanted pupils to hear a sound before meeting a letter, and its alphabet remains the standard way to write a sound instead of a word.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1840s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
One term of phonetics ruined his ability to hear his own accent as normal.
The transcription is narrow, so it records aspiration and length as well.