PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY
Segmental Aspects

Communication, oral or written, is a fundamental and most natural way of interaction between living beings. In human society, the spoken form of language is dominant and prevails over the written form. Its historical, structural, functional, and biological priority is inevitable and proved by many scholars. The process of exchanging information in its complexity is mostly and primarily carried out by words (verbal communication) and only accompanied with gestures or other bodily movements representing non-verbal communication. Speech makes use of the smallest units of language which are manifested as concrete, audible realisation of phonemes. Speech recognition is based on a combination of acoustic, grammatical, semantic and situational information sources. Everything that happens in spoken communication is derived from acoustic information, which is the principal stimulus for recognizing the speech mechanism.

Speech is the ability making people special. Only people, as living beings, use speech sounds combined to form meaningful words and words combined into sentences. Human voice is a unique tool used for expressing emotions and sharing messages.

People use not only verbal communication for mutually interacting. There are various other ways “to talk”: sign language expressed via manual gestures and visually emphasized articulation used for presenting conventional signs, or non-verbal communication, commonly combined with verbal communication making use of auditory-vocal, visual or haptic channels, i.e. through non-linguistic and linguistic features. The key prosodic features as intonation, sentence stress or rhythm, paralinguistic aspects concerning voice qualifiers and voice qualifications, kinesic features, especially facial movement, eye contact, head and hand movement, gestures as well as posture together with features as proxemics, touch, clothes and overall appearance help to complete a thorough communication message (Pavlík, 2000).

The way people communicate with each other must sometimes be adapted to difficult living conditions, for example whistled languages are used by the inhabitants of mountainous regions to be able to communicate over long distances. These are for instance Silbo on the island La Gomera on the Canary Islands, or Kus Dili in Northern Turkey. The so-called click languages, e.g. Zulu or Xhosa in Southern and East Africa, make use of clicks. Throat singing is another unusual way of using human voice.

Exchanging messages and sharing personal views, feelings, or ideas is inevitable for humans, as they need interaction. The constant changes in the changing world are also reflected in pronunciation. As a result of our living in the developed, globalised world, “the pronunciation of any language is constantly changing” (Jones, 2003, p. ix), because every language reflects never-ending changes in the society and in the whole world.

The changes in languages, whether considering for example the vocabulary, terminology, or ongoing modifications manifested in the oral performance document the natural process of human existence. All the above aspects constitute the crucial phenomena of the existence of mankind.