Description
THIS volume by Kenneth Lee Pike has grown out of some seven years of practical experience in the field attempting to analyze and describe the sounds of a number of non-Indo-European languages. For much of this time Dr. Pike lived among the Mixtecos in south- western Mexico, an Indian people numbering about 200,000. The language of these people he has mastered and is describing in several monographs. His experience, however, has not been limited to this particular language. As the phonetics specialist of the Wycliffe Bible Translators who have language investigators working in each of the important Indian languages of Mexico, and as the professor of phonetics of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in which these and other such investigators are trained, he has assisted in analyzing and de- scribing the sounds of a wide variety of the languages of so-called primitive peoples. Phonetics, which is now followed by a second and a third volume on related subjects, first reviews critically the basic assumptions of phonetic theory and then proceeds to clarify and restate many of these assumptions. Upon this foundation the author constructs basic definitions and classifications of such items as phone, syllable, stop, vowel, and consonant, and provides a descriptive order in which all sounds may be described in relation to their productive mechanisms.
The end sought is the description of any sound apart from speech in order that factors of speech may not give undue influence to the terminology applied to it. To accomplish this end it was necessary to examine the relationship between speech and non-speech sounds and to establish a technic of description which could deal with all nonsense sounds and syllables as well as with those of language. In other words, it was necessary to divorce pure phonetics, the description of the nature and formation of sounds, from phonemics, the function of sounds in speech.
ISBN: 0472087339
