Define Phonology and Phonetics

Define Phonology and Phonetics

What a difference a suffix can make; some might say it's the only difference between "phonology" and "phonetics." They would be wrong. They may look, sound, and be similar, but there is a distinct difference between them.

Like most things that end in "-ology," phonology is a field of study. You can break up any word that has "-ology" in it and start grasping what it means. "Geology," for example, means the study of (-ology) the Earth (geo). English, for how big and strong it is, is very insecure. In order to sound fancy, it grabs Greek and Latin words when there are perfectly good Saxon words lying around. It's almost as if English is forever afraid to come into its own.

Borrowing foreign words is great for many reasons, such as making it easier to find common ground with non-native speakers, but there are also some drawbacks. One of the most treacherous places to find such drawbacks is in any English-speaking university. Sometimes it's only as bad as making a funny-sounding word by Latinizing a newly discovered element like berkelium. Sometimes it's as bad as hanging a degree on your wall you can't read, like a pretty one from Dickinson College. Sometimes it makes it just a little weird to figure out what the difference between phonology and phonetics is. When you start breaking up those two words, you're left with something fairly clear when it comes to "phonology," but "phonetics" isn't so easy. The suffix, "-etic" merely turns nouns into longer nouns or into adjectives. It's an artifact of ancient Greece, English puts to use haphazardly. Consider words like "pathetic," "peripatetic," or "telekinetics."

Phonology is big, bigger than phonetics or phonemics. Here's the definition. It's the study of the sound of a language or of all speech sounds. It includesphonetics and phonemics. Pretty easy, right?

Well, phonology is so big, that it usually needs to be taken in bite-sized portions in order to be approached at all. One of the bigger pieces that people take out of the phonology pie in order to cut up even further is one called "phonetics." Before you read about phonetics though, stop to think about all the movements your whole body goes through in order to create the sounds you use in a sentence. Feel your diaphragm undulate, your tongue move and swell, your lips twitch, your lungs fill and empty themselves, your larynx vibrate, even your nose hold sounds for tiny moments. If you put all of that together, you get a glimpse at what phonology is about. Understanding how speech sound are made helps linguists figure out where languages came from and where they are going; it helps scientists program computers to comprehend and mimic human speech; and it might even help you learn a new language.
Phonetics

Phonetics is primarily used to describe the way sounds are written and how written words are perceived as sounds. Here's the definition. If you look at the definition, you can see how there's overlap with that of "phonology." That overlap in definition can be a source of confusion for some, but there's no reason to let it ruin your day.

For most people the only reason they will ever need phonetics to use the international phonetic alphabet, which is really only usable to a select few. It's a way of standardizing the pronunciation of words from any language so that, theoretically, anyone reading any word in any language can at least pronounce it properly.