On Phonetic and Phonetic Systems: Taking Chinese as an Example

Subjects: Linguistics and Applied Linguistics >> Linguistics and Applied Linguistics submitted time 2023-04-28

孔江平

Abstract： With the progress of phonetics technology and research methods, phonemics has gradually developed from the methodology of structuralism to the methodology of cognitive science, and gradually established the "cognitive phonemics". From the perspective of cognitive phonemics, phonetic awareness is the first step in establishing phonemes. Phonemic awareness is usually defined as the phonetic units that can be perceived by native speakers without discriminating meanings. Phonetic awareness can be divided into natural phonetic awareness and unnatural phonetic awareness. Based on these basic concepts, this paper discusses the phonemic system of Chinese in different historical periods: 1) Syllabic phoneme system "Zhiyin"; 2) phonemic system of initials and finals "Fanqie"; 3) Quasi-phonemic system of initials, rhymes and tones "Guang Yun"; 4) Quasi-phonemic system of initials, rhymes and tones "Zhuyin Fuhao"; 5) Phonemic system of segments "Hanyu Pinyin". The study found that the phonemic system of Chinese gradually changed from the phonemic system based on natural phonetic awareness to the phonemic system based on unnatural phonetic awareness. From the point of view of phonetic units, it also gradually changes from syllables to segments. Based on these studies and findings, this paper gives a clear definition of "phonemic system" and "phonetic notation system", and expounds the difference between them. According to the definitions of "phonemic system" and "phonetic notation system", it is found that most of the field investigations and studies on phonemic construction of Chinese-Tibetan languages have established "phonetic notation system" rather than "phonemic system".

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