1. Sound [] by /

Repetitio

Questio :: What is speech ?

 

 

 

 

Speech is intention-encoding sound produced by human vocal tract or its artificial Ersatz.

Anatomy of human vocal tract

Exercicio :: Sound production

Look into mirror (or use https://udk.ai/facemesh/ ) and ...

pronounce continuous AAAA , EEEE , IIII and OOOO waves

put a finger in front of Your lips; start voicng a vowel sound; while doing so, make Your lips touch Your finger; what do You notice

pronounce PA PA PA and BA BA BA

pronounce MA MA MA

pronounce TA TA TA and DA DA DA

pronounce NA NA NA

pronounce FA FA FA and VA VA VA

...in all cases, try to answer questions: what is similar ? what is different ?

International Phonetic Alphabet

Phone vs. Phoneme

One of the most fundamental dichotomy in linguistics is the phone / phoneme dichotomy:

a phone is any distinct speech sound regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words

a phoneme is a speech sound in a given language that, if swapped with another phoneme, could change one word to another

Phones are absolute and are not specific to any language, but phonemes can be discussed only in reference to specific languages.

Minimal pairs

Minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element.

word 1 word 2 IPA 1 IPA 2 note
pin bin /pɪn/ /bɪn/ initial consonant
rot lot /rɒt/ /lɒt/
thigh thy /θaɪ/ /ðaɪ/
seal zeal /siːl/ /ziːl/
bin bean /bɪn/ /biːn/ vowel
pen pan /pɛn/ /pæn/
cook kook /kʊk/ /kuːk/
hat had /hæt/ /hæd/ final consonant
mean meme /miːn/ /miːm/

Sanskrit

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.

(Third discourse of Wiliam Jones before the Asiatic Society, 1786)

पाणि

Pāṇini (Devanagari: पाणिनि, pronounced [paːɳɪnɪ]) was a Sanskrit philologist, grammarian, and revered scholar in ancient India variously dated between the 6th and 4th century BCE. Since the discovery and publication of his work Aṣṭādhyāyī by European scholars in the nineteenth century, Pāṇini has been considered the "first descriptive linguist", and even labelled as “the father of linguistics”.

Eat this: पाणिनि's brain encoded Mind whose grammar-induction faculties preceded faculties of all other minds which followed in upcoming 2500 years.

Shiva sutra


Shiva sutras contain potentially the most concise, easily learnable definition  of basic morphophonologically-relevant equivalence classes (e.g. aL -> class of all sounds; aC -> class of all vowels) of vedic sanskrit.