Читать книгу Applying Phonetics - Murray J. Munro - Страница 44

One of the main goals of phonetics is to describe how speech segments are produced using the structures of the vocal tract. The sounds of the world's languages can be characterized—at least in a general way—using a relatively small number of descriptive labels. As a starting point, we need to recognize that all languages have sounds falling into the two major categories of SEGMENTS: CONSONANTS and VOWELS. In this chapter, we will survey the inventory of sounds used by speakers of English, with a few digressions along the way to compare regional English varieties. We'll briefly consider some sounds used in other languages as well.