The sounds of speech and the systems behind them.
9 topics · 16 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Phonetics 1 - Consonants: Crash Course Linguistics #8
CrashCourse · 2020
Introduces the consonants of the International Phonetic Alphabet by how the vocal tract produces each one, rather than by the letters English…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
An Outline of English Phonetics
Daniel Jones · 1918
Describes the sounds of English by the precise position and movement of the vocal organs, fixing the descriptive vocabulary that phonetic…
Primary sources and full treatments.
A Primer of Phonetics
Henry Sweet · 1890
Sets out speech sounds by how the vocal organs produce them rather than by spelling, establishing the articulatory description that later phonetic…
+12 more at this level
12 of 16 works
CrashCourse
Introduces the consonants of the International Phonetic Alphabet by how the vocal tract produces each one, rather than by the letters English spelling already uses.
link checked 17 Sept 2026CrashCourse
Shows that the same physical sound can count as a distinct phoneme in one language and a meaningless variant in another, so phonology studies mental categories, not raw sound.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Daniel Jones
Describes the sounds of English by the precise position and movement of the vocal organs, fixing the descriptive vocabulary that phonetic transcription still uses.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Henry Sweet
Sets out speech sounds by how the vocal organs produce them rather than by spelling, establishing the articulatory description that later phonetic alphabets are built on.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edward Sapir
Argues that speakers organise sounds into a small system of mental categories rather than perceiving raw acoustic detail, laying the groundwork for the phoneme as a psychological rather than a purely physical unit.
Kenneth L. Pike
Argues that speech sounds should be classified and described by the articulatory gestures that produce them, and builds a technique for describing any language's sound system on that basis rather than on any one language's phonetic habits.
Gordon E. Peterson & Harold L. Barney
Measures formant frequencies across many speakers to show that vowel identity is not fixed acoustic values but a region in formant space, and that listeners categorise vowels relative to a speaker's whole vowel system.
William R. Leben
Argues tone must be represented on its own autonomous tier separate from vowels and consonants, because tones can spread, shift and survive the deletion of the segment that first carried them.
John A. Goldsmith
Splits phonological representation into independent tiers, segments and tone among them, so a tone can survive the deletion of the syllable it was first attached to — something a linear rule system could not explain.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Daniel Kahn
Argues that a range of English phonological rules cannot be stated without the syllable as a unit, and introduces ambisyllabicity to explain segments that behave as though they belong to two syllables at once.
link checked 17 Sept 2026D. Robert Ladd
Argues that intonation is not a paralinguistic add-on to a sentence but carries its own compositional meaning, built from a small inventory of contrastive tunes.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Janet B. Pierrehumbert
Argues English intonation contours are built by concatenating a small inventory of high and low pitch accents and boundary tones rather than drawn from a fixed catalogue of whole tunes, giving intonation a combinatorial phonology of its own.