Confusing Sounds of Speech

This chapter was all over the place for me. All in all, it was about phonology. The different types of phonology, the terms and much more about speech sounds. The chapter introduced how each meaning distinguish sounds in a certain language. Yule explains parts about substituting one sound for another can change a meaning these two sounds represent “phonemes”. He also mentions the everyday sounds that people use is called “assimilation” which is one of the co-articulation effects. This can mean when two words have almost the same sound. What I found interesting was the fact that when people say “friendship” without pronouncing the “d” I always thought of it as a flaw that Americans comprise. However, Yule claims that this way of talking is “described as elision” (49). It’s just everyday talking. I related this specific part about the “elision” the co-articulation effect because even in Arabic sometimes there are sounds you don’t pronounce in everyday language. There are many sounds in words that become combined when pronouncing in Arabic just because we talk fast and we become use to one particular way. Honestly I didn’t understand a lot about this chapter it was very confusing, the words look alike and I had to read each paragraph twice or more to understand a bit. I didn’t understand the part about syllables and clusters and also allophones, phones and phonemes. What I want to explore more is why is it that any word that is in the same minimal set that is not in the regular vocabulary like mig or tig or whatever it is. Why that is these words can’t have meaning or representation. What does it take for a word to become part of our language?