Phonetics - Brief History

Phonetics

Brief History 

Long ago, around 6th century BCE, some wise people in India started studying how sounds work. They were called Sanskrit grammarians. One of the most famous among them was a guy named Pāṇini. He wrote a grammar book around 350 BCE that's still super important in the study of language today. His book talked about how sounds are made when we speak.

Pāṇini said that when we talk, our vocal cords can either be closed or open. When they're closed, we make tones, and when they're open, we make noise. He had lots of rules about how sounds work, and these rules became the foundation for the study of language.

In Sanskrit, the study of sounds is called Shiksha. There's an old text called the Taittiriya Upanishad from about 1,000 years before today, and it talks about Shiksha. It says Shiksha is all about understanding sounds, how long vowels should be, and how to say consonants correctly. It's like a guide to speaking well.

So, a long time ago, smart people in India started figuring out how sounds in language work, and their ideas are still important today.

In the past, people didn't make many improvements in understanding how speech works after the time of Pāṇini, who was an ancient grammar expert. Only a few Greek and Roman language experts looked into it a bit. For a long time, the focus was on how spoken and written language were different, which is what Pāṇini studied. But later, people started focusing only on how speech sounds physically work.

Around 1800, people got interested in studying speech sounds again. The word "phonetics" started being used in the way we use it today in 1841. With new medical knowledge and tools to record sound and video, researchers could study speech in more detail. During this time, a man named Alexander Melville Bell made a helpful phonetic alphabet called "visible speech." It was useful in teaching deaf children how to speak.

Before we had audio recording equipment, phoneticians had to be very good at recognizing and making speech sounds. They needed to be able to hear and make the different sounds in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). They also had to learn to produce these special vowel sounds that Melville Bell came up with. This helped them understand and write down speech sounds when they did research.

However, in the 1960s, a researcher named Peter Ladefoged found that these special vowel sounds were actually things you hear with your ears, not things you make with your mouth. This challenged the idea that they were a good way to judge other speech sounds.