Phonetics introduction

The history of phonetics

Ancient objects, drawings, and written documents show that voice and speech always fascinated men. Written documents and evidences from ancient civilizations point to an awareness of speech, its origin and abnormalities a long time ago. In India more than 2000 years ago there flourished a science of phonetics more advanced than any that has since been known until very recent times [3; 8].

But phonetics was treated as a branch of grammar; still up to the 2th half of the XIXth c. it presented the investigations of the sound matter of different grammatical structures.

“In the second part of the XIXth c. phonetics began developing in all European countries due to the names of I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay, L. V. Scherba, E. Sapir, D. Jones, L. Bloomfield, R. Lackobson” [2; 3].

In the 1886 International Phonetic Association (IPA) was founded. IPA started publications of a special phonetic magazine "Le Mattre Phonetique". It stated phonetic symbols for sounds of many existing languages.