The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
7. How are the Sounds of a Language Made?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
Peter Ladefoged† [+]
Peter Ladefoged, Professor of Phonetics Emeritus at UCLA, was the world’s foremost linguistic phonetician and one of the most important figures in linguistics in the twentieth century. He published 10 books and 130 scholarly articles on various aspects of the theory and practice of phonetics and the phonetic properties of specific languages. The essay above was one of the last pieces he wrote before his death in early 2006.
Description
There are so many languages and dialects, the vocal apparatus can produce such a wide variety of sounds, and each of us has a different way of speaking our own language. Thus, describing the sounds of the world’s languages is an infinitely challenging task and one of the most fascinating aspects of the study of language.