The material From Lusi's group "VARIABILITY AND DISTINCTIVENESS AND THE FLOW OF SPEECH"

Variability and distinctiveness

We return the example of the english fricative consonan as heard at the beggining of ship or shoe .there are two reason  why it is  difficult  to be precise  about this sound: 

The first reason, made with tongue rather grooved and raised towards the roof of mouth in a setting that is difficult to plot or measure in any useful way.

The second reason, there are substantial variation and word speaker in speech. Because the human have  roof of the mouth different part set of everyone .There from partly of sound speaker in the ways usuality of speech and speech organ like tongue .Like in saying “sh” at tip of the tongue. Next in saying “knives” be such that the one of lip go ahead motion and the lip will be far on the back.

The tongue does not switch between two discrete setting of grooved andungrooved, but may be more or less grooved to a variable degree. A vowel is not simply long or short , but can have aduration anywhere between minimum and maximum values. We do not speak either softly or loudly , but can vary from softest to loudest and so on .

In english we must can different between the “s” of sin and the “sh” of ship. This is a systematic aspect of englishpronounciation to speak English competently, you need to be able to make the difference between sip and ship, sell and shell, masses and mashes, leased and leashed, mess and mesh, and so on.but we not different between in English like “sh” (usually writensz) and a palatalisedsh )altoughtsh written sy, is now heard in words that have been borrowed from languages such as Arabic and Dutch).

If we reflect on these consideration about the nature of distinctiveness in speech, it becomes clear that a phonetic alphabet is actually caught between two ideals. One ideal is the etic idealthat there should be a distinct symbol for every pronounceable sound of every language.

The other ideal is to be as functional and as economic as possible, allowing the alphabet to be emically constrained in otherwords, and we have as few symbols as are necessary to account for distinctive differences within languages. Suppose for instance, that a trained phonetician can hear thirty distinct sibilant consonants but that no language ever distinguishes more than six. Then we need no more than six symbols, on the understanding that the symbols will not have precisely the same value in different languages. Most phonetic transcription work in this functional way, even though they pay lip service to the ideal that there should be a distinct symbol for every distinct sound.

The flow of speech

            This analogy between alphabetic writing andphonetic transcription is really unhelpful. If we want to think about speech on the analogy of a written message, we do better to think of speech as being like very fast running handwriting, the letters flow into each other and a dot doesn’t  always sit directly above the letter  i which it belongs to, and so on.

             Consider, as an example, what can happen in the articulation of the word send. Let’sbegin by assuming – as most transcriptions do – that there are four sounds in succession, namely [s],[ae],[n] and [d]. With moving of the vowel [ae] to the consonant [n], spekers need to make two signifcant changes. One is to raise the tongue and bring the tip into contact with the alveolar ridge. Most speakers will being the vowel may be noticed and even condemned for ‘sounding nasal’.