Basic concepts

A language is a form of social behaviour in which sounds, gestures, visual marks, organised into complex structures, are used to exchange meanings between people in communication events. The science concerned with language is linguistics.

Speech is the realisation of a language by means of sounds for the purpose of communication, and phonetics is the science concerned with speech sounds. Gesture (including posture and communicative position) is an accompanying visual communication system, but a closer look shows that gesture, converted converted into sound, also underlies the processes of speech production, so many aspects of phonetics can be generalised to the study of communication in general.

Many techniques have been invented during the past 3000 years for encoding speech and its content in various ways. The most important technique is writing, the realisation of language with visual marks, of which there are many varieties: speech sound based (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic alphabets), syllable based (Japanese), word based (Chinese). in the visual mode.

This introduction is concerned with

1. the content of phonetics and related areas of linguistics (phonology), in particular
   • the way in which speech sounds are physically produced, transmitted and perceived, the field of phonetics,
   • the way in which speech sounds are organised in specific languages and in language in general, the field of phonology;
2. the methods of phonetics, including the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and the analysis of sounds with computer software.

In the definitions given above, many details need to be filled in. What is meant by social behaviour, sound events, visual marks, complex structures, meanings, communication event, for instance? The initial definition of a subject, such as linguistics or phonetics, is given in terms of such concepts, which initially are intuitively understandable, even though they are still in need of clarification.

But the difference between scientific discourse about language - or indeed any topic - and everyday, common-sense discourse about the same subject lies in the use of agreed, well-defined, explicit scientific methods to record, describe and explain the subject matter.

So in order to work out further scientific details about the subject, the scientific methods of this subject need to be used. Without scientific methods - for instance, the use of telescopes, microscopes, measuring instruments, computers - many aspects of the subject would remain undetected, and effectively they would not even exist.