Phonology / Phonetics

 
 
 
The survival of any language depends very much on its everyday use. Daily language use comes in two ways: speech making through vocalization, and writing.

Sound and writing play a major role in the survival and continuity of any given language; sound is the live-giver to speech making, while writing preserves a  language as it under goes continuous cycle of re-birth.  Linguists, scholars have carried out extensive studies on the relationship between sound/speech making, and word formation/writing in languages. The universal outcome from these studies are the concepts of phonology & phonetics, and morpheme.

Phonology, according to Webster Dictionary is the “systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or field of linguistics study.” Phonology, includes, but not limited to: analysis and classification of its phonemes, such as, “syllable structure, stress, accent, intonation, and which sound are distinctive unit within a language; the way sounds function within a given language.”

Phonology is a Greek word from phōnḗ (the voice and sound), and logos (words, speech). Phonology is how word and sound interplay to produce speech, and its relationship with other elements in a structure. Going by this reasoning, SIL International (2004), says phonology is an “inventory of sounds and their features, rules, which specify how sound interact with each other.”

Figure 1: Grammar Hierarchy

Source: Adapted from SIL International (2004), with modifications by this author

To have a full grasp of phonology, we must first understand what phonetics means- Webster Dictionary defines phonetics as “the system of speech sound of a language or group of languages, or the study and systematic classification of the sounds made in spoken utterances,…constituting an alteration of ordinary spelling that better represents the spoken, that employs only characters of the regular alphabet, and that is used in a context of conventional spelling.”  The same Dictionary defines, phonology as the “science of speech sounds, including the history and theory of sound changes in a language or in two or more related language, the phonetics and phonemics of a language at a particular time.”

From these two definitions, one reaches the conclusion that phonetics is concerned with physical properties of speech sounds, which includes different “physiological production, acoustics properties, auditory perception and neuro-physiological status,” on the other hand, phonology addresses abstract properties of “grammatical characterization of systems of sounds” Wikipedia.  Further more, phonetics focuses  on the analyses, production of human speech, regardless  of what the language is; while  phonology  centers on sound patterns of a specific  language which helps “determine which phonetic sounds are significant, and explaining how these sounds are interpreted  by native speakers” SIL International (2004).  What this suggests is, without phonetics, it will be difficult to analyze phonology, which in turn will make the analyses of morphology, syntax and language orthography absolutely impossible.

Yoruba phonetics is quite interesting, at first reducing hundreds of million words into a readable and writeable material was by no means less challenging. The first step, by Yoruba linguists was to identifying the Consonant-Vowel-Object (CVO), which Yoruba belongs; It is a three-syllable structure of consonant and vowel (CV), vowel alone (V), and the syllabic nasal (N); the second step was to identify the role of Human-Vocal-Track (HVT) and the third step, the place of nose (nasal) in speech making with the accompanied sound, dictated mostly by both the place and manner of articulation.

From numerous studies, findings show that Yoruba and English share some common phonetic  features, probably, because of common source of letters; these features are: