History of Phonetics

History of Phonetics:-

            The ancient Hindu Rishis who composed the Vedas must have the knowledge of phonetics. The words in the Vedas were pronounced very accurately. To mispronounce a Vedic Mantra or Richa was regarded as a sing. The classification of sounds in ‘Varnas’ in Sanskrit shows that those people had a sound knowledge of phonetics. The works of Panini (400 B.C. ) an Patanjali (2^nd century A.D.) show that they had sound knowledge of phonetics. During the same period the Greeks, Egyptians and the Arabs also took interest in speech sounds during the seventh century. The study of ‘Koran’ reveals that they had a deep interest in the study of pronunciation and lexicography. Then the Buddhist and the Christian missionaries also contributed towards phonetics. The first phonetician of the modern world was the Dane J. Matthias, author of DE Litteris (1586). Englishman mathematician John Wallis, who instructed deaf-mutes, was the first to classify vowels in the 1653, according to their place of articulation. The vowel triangle was invented by 1781 by C.F. Hellwag from Germany. Ten years later Austrian mechanician Wolfgang von Kempelen invested a machine that produced speech sound. German physicist Hermann Helmholtz, who wrote ‘sensations of Tone’ (1863), inaugurated the study of acoustical phonetics. Frenchman Abbe Jean Pierre Rousselot pioneered in experimental phonetics. Late in the 19^th century the theory of the phoneme was advanced by Jan Baudouin De Courtenay from Poland and Ferdinand De Saussure from Switzerland. In the United States, linguist Leonard Bloomfield and the anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir contributed greatly to phonetic theory. Linguist Roman Jacobson developed a theory of the universal characteristics of all phonemic systems. Palgrave and Hart had keen interest in the description of the organs of speech. They defined vowels and consonants. Wallis wrote a grammar in which he laid more stress on phonetics. Then Wallis described the function of the speech organs and suggested a phonetic alphabet.  

            In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the writers like Dr. Johnson, Sheridan and John Walker were more interested in dictionaries with a purpose to standardize spelling and pronunciation. In the nineteenth century Alexander Bell made notable researches in all branched of phonetics. The international Phonetics Alphabet was formatted in 1889. In the twentieth century phonetic has developed immensely and it has achieved an independent status. The modern linguists try to find out accurate and precise ways of pronunciation. Spectrographs, Oscillograph, and tape recorders are greatly helpful in the study of the sounds. They analyze speech into basic units. Daniel Jones, Abercrombie, Chomsky, Trager and Smith have made a remarkable construction to the study of speech-sounds.