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Abstract

Phonetics is the study and classification of speech sounds. It is an important branch of linguistics. We are able to segment a continuous stream of speech into distinct parts and recognize the parts in other words. Everyone who knows a language knows how to segment sentences into words and words into sounds. Our linguistic knowledge allows us to ignore nonlinguistic differences in speech and we are capable of making sounds that are not speech sounds in English but are in other languages. For some words even though we write an alphabet in a word we skip them and those are called silent letters. Similarly many other ways are also followed like using a combination of same letter to represent a single sound and etc. Syllabic sounds that can function as the core of a syllable. Phonetics mainly helps us the speaker to pronounce the words clearly using the vocal chords followed by the respiratory system. It includes the speed, pitch, tone language, stress and intonation. Whereas for the listener phonetics focuses on the perception of sounds or the way in which sounds are heard and interpreted. Phonetics describes the sounds using symbols of IPA which is INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET which helps one to study a language especially languages that use letters that are silent or have multiple pronunciations. With phonetic languages, there is a direct relationship between the spelling and the sound. It is important to understand that English is not a phonetic language. That is because we often do not say a word which is spelled the same way as it is written. Three categories of sounds should be recognised at the outset which is phones, phonemes and allophones.

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