Introduction and Instruction
The following exercises all have to do with two branches of linguistics called phonetics and phonology. Please read through the informational text below carefully. This will help you to answer the ensuing questions correctly.
Phonetics, Phonology and Minimal Pairs
Phonetics (Greek: phone = voice/sound) and phonology are branches of linguistics. Both phonetics and phonology are concerned with sounds.
The difference between phonetics and phonology:
Phonetics is the study of sounds as far as their physical production, perception and characteristics etc. are concerned.
Phonology, by contrast, is concerned with the way sounds function within a given language.
Even without being trained in linguistics, one is aware that there are all sorts of different sounds:
Of course, speaking makes a sound. But so does whistling, for example, or a flying aeroplane, a crying baby, or even the wind rustling through leaves. Linguists, however, are not concerned with just any kind of sound but concentrate on speech sounds.
When linguists speak about speech sounds they usually refer to them either as phones or as phonemes (they may also refer to allophones, but we’re not going to bother about those here!).
The difference between phone and phoneme:
Phone: a phone is the physical realisation of a speech sound.
Phoneme: a phoneme is the smallest meaning-distinguishing unit (German: kleinste bedeutungsunterscheidende Einheit).
In a sense, the phoneme is the ‚idea‘ behind the sound; the phone is the (audible) representation of it.
