Monday, February 6, 2012

F is for Fricatives...

And S is for sibilants, P is for plosives, G is for glottal stops, and B is for bilabial!

All of this jargon is from the phonetics portion of our Language Structures class that we just finished with.  It's pretty interesting stuff, but can be quite difficult to hear the differences in the tons of sounds that are possible in language.  It's also very interesting to note that there are a lot of possibilities of sound and English doesn't use nearly all of them.

So what in the world does phonetics, phonology, morphology, and grammar have to do with we will be doing in the arts?  Sometimes I ask that as well, but it does make sense.  We need to learn these basic linguistic elements so that we can learn a second language more easily and because principles of linguistics will mesh into what we are doing with the arts.  Sometimes we want to be in our artistic bubble, but it's not always that simple.

Check out the video clip of some fun with phonetics.  Thanks Dr. Allen for allowing us to film some your class.

Phonetics Fun!

As a postscript, some folks have asked exactly what a fricative is.  Fricatives are sounds in language in which the airstream is greatly but not completely impeded, creating a hissing or buzzing sound, somewhat like friction, hence the name fricative.  Common examples of a fricative in English are the letters f and v, among others.