Ministry of higher and secondary special education of the republic uzbekistan state world languages university

Acoustic Phonetics studies the acoustic properties of sounds (quantity, timber/voice quality, intensity, the pitch of the voice and temporal factor) in terms of the frequency of vibration and the amplitude of vibration in relation to time. The analysis begins with a microphone, which converts the air movement into corresponding electrical activity. While investigating the acoustic aspect of speech sounds special laboratory equipment is employed: spectrograph, intonograph, sound analyzing & sound synthesizing machines.
Auditory Phonetics is aimed at investigating the hearing process which is the brain activity. Auditory Phonetics and Acoustic Phonetics are very closely connected.
Functional Phonetics presupposes investigating the discriminatory (distinctive) function of speech sounds.
Phonetics can be divided into several types like:
General phonetics. It studies universal positions of sound articulation (for instance, identification of sounds according to the position the differences of labial, tongue and throat consonants, according to the ways of articulation of plosive, fricative and plosive-fricative features), although, general acoustic features of sounds.
Specific phonetics. It investigates above mentioned issues in the samples of certain languages. Specific phonetics researches phonetics in the shapes of historical and modern, synchronic and diachronic, descriptive and experimental sides.
Comparative phonetics investigates vowel and consonant phonemes, their phonetic changes and others in comparative aspect of several genetically related and non-related languages.
Phonology (sometimes called phonemics or phonematics) is the study of how sounds are used in languages to convey meaning. The term of phonology (Greek phone - sound, logos – science) appeared in linguistics in the necessity of differentiating functional (linguistic) sides of speech sounds from the physiological-acoustic (physic) sides in the end of XIX century. It studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables. It deals with the sounds systems of a language by treating phoneme as the point of departure.
With another words, phonetics deals with sounds and phonology deals with phonemes. Or else phonology deals with language sounds and phonetics deals with human speech sounds.
Phonetics and phonology have two levels: segmental and suprasegmental. Segmental phonology studies phonemes realized in various speech sound. So it may be called phonemics. Suprasegmental phonology (prosodics) studies the distinctive features realized in syllables, stress and intonation.
The fundamental concept of phonemics is the phoneme which is the smallest meaningless unit of a language and which forms, distinguishes words and morphemes. The linguistic form and content are described by other branches of linguistics.
At a given time, the set of phonemes in a language is a closed set (like function words and syntactic rules). The set of phonemes changes only over time. English, for instance has lost the phonemes [x] and [∑]. English has also gained phonemes by borrowing foreign words with the sounds [z] and [Z]. Neither of these sounds were phonemes in English until they entered the language in numerous words borrowed from Norman French after 1066. Similarly, the sound [t] was not part of Russian until after the Christianization in 988, when many Greek words containing [f] were borrowed by the Slavs.
The Phonological typology deals with comparison of units of the phonologic lev­el of language. It engages in allocation of phonological differential signs, defining their universality, study of phonological structure of languages, classification of lan­guages based on their phonological features (e.g. tonic and atonic languages), defining phonemic structure of world languages and many others. For a long time the Prague linguistic school was the center of Phonological typology. A certain con­tribution to development of Phonological typology was made by N.S.Trubetskoy who is considered the founder of Typology of Phonological systems.
Phonological typology involves comparing languages according to the number or type of sound they contain. Although there are inevitable problems in dividing the sounds of any language into separate abstract units (phonemes), linguists usually compare languages according to the number of different groups which participate in meaningful sound contrasts (i.e. phonemes) rather than the total number of actual speech sounds. Every language has a fairly small inventory of these sets, or phonemes. Moreover, the number varies from language to language. In comparison, Hawaiian has only 18; Kabardian has over 80; and the Roisan language is reported to have 141 phonemes or mutually contrastive sets of sounds, Abhasian has 60.
The second aspect of phonological typology classifies languages according to the type of sounds present or absent in each language. Some sounds are only rarely found in languages.
Unusual sounds include: the Czech and Slovak voiced sound [h], Arabic pharyngeal. Arabic, English, new-Greek, Bashkirian [ө] and [ә], in Danish [ð] only, Uzbek, Arabic[қ], [ғ], [ҳ].
Unusual omissions also include: labial (nearly completely absent in Cherokee, Tlingit), nasals (absent from several Salish languages), Sibiliants (absent from Hawaiian).
No known language entirely lacks either obstruent or sonorant. No known language entirely lacks either vowels or consonants, although Rotoras has only six consonants, certain Northwest Caucasian languages such as Kabardian have only one vowel.
Languages are also classified into consonantal if the consonants are absolutely more than vowels and non-consonantal if the number of vowels are more, equal or even nearly equal (A. Isachenko; T. Kovalev).
Kramsky developed the theory of A. Isachenko analyzing the number of consonant-vocals in the text, when T.Milevsky analyses number correlation with quality of sounds-Eastern (Atlantic), Western (Pacific Oceanic) and Middle sound type American languages.
The first founders of phonetics were such outstanding linguists as I.A.Badouin de Courtenay, N. Krushevsky, P.Passy, A.Sweet, F.de Saussure and others.
The Prague linguistic school was the center of phonological typology in its time. N.S. Trubetskoy is considered as the founder of typology of phonological system (theory of distinctive features).
There are other well-know linguists such as R. Jacobson, C. G. Fant, M. Halle (spectrographic/acoustic classification), A. Isachenko, T. Kovalev, I. Kramsky, T. Milevsky, C. V. Voegelin, J. C. Pierce (quantitative criterion), A. Martine (suprasegmental typological classification), G. P. Melnikov, V. A. Vasilyev, E. D. Polivanov, A. M. Sherbak and others.
The main achievement in development of phonological typology is phonological universals. E.g. All languages have vowels and consonants. If a language has voiced fricatives, it also has unvoiced fricatives, but not necessarily the other way round.
Phonetics is the isolated and independent level in language hierarchy. It is more investigated science in linguistics.
The following types of phonetics may be distinguished:

1.