Phonetics

Phonetics may be defined as the science of speech. It is concerned with all aspects of the production, transmission, and perception of the sounds of language. According to one’s view of the scope of the term “linguistics,” phonetics may be regarded as an independent discipline alongside linguistics, or alternatively as a component within it, though the second interpretation may imply a narrowing of subject matter to only those aspects considered directly relevant for linguistic analysis and theory. The terms “speech science(s)” or “phonetic science(s)” encountered in book titles or in the names of academic programs and departments are equivalents to phonetics in its wider sense, used to insist on the broad remit and scientific basis of the discipline. The word “phonetic” and its derivatives began to be used in English in the 1840s, and although significant insights in the science of speech can be traced across a range of cultural traditions (and back through history into Antiquity) the modern form of the subject is largely a 19th-century European creation. Contributions from British pioneers A. J. Ellis (b. 1814–d. 1890) and A. M. Bell (b. 1819–d. 1905) were especially important, and the subsequent establishment of phonetics as the basis of linguistic science as a whole can be attributed particularly to the influence of Henry Sweet (b. 1845–d. 1912) and Eduard Sievers (b. 1850–d. 1932). The dominant comparative-historical linguistics of their day has since been overtaken by several changes of paradigm, though phonetics has retained its position as what Sweet called “the indispensable foundation” of language study. Since the mid-19th century, therefore, phonetics has had a continuous and cumulative history as an interdisciplinary field sited at the three-way intersection of biomedical science (at first, mainly physiology), physical science (in the early days, chiefly acoustics), and linguistic science. Each of those areas has undergone radical diversification and development, with the result that the total field of phonetics is now huge. Any attempt at a bibliography must therefore be highly selective.