Intro to Linguistics Midterm Essay
What is phonetics? Explain what the phonetic alphabet is and provide some examples. What advantage does the phonetic alphabet have over regular spelling? Why do linguists use it? The word phonetics describes the part of linguistics that involves studying how human speech sounds. The phonetic alphabet is designed to be a language-neutral way of expressing these sounds so that it can be applied to all languages, regardless of alphabet. For example, the vowel in the English “sit” can be written as /ɪ/, signifying that it is a short vowel. The vowels in the English “books” can be written ...
