The science or doctrine of the elementary sounds uttered by the human voice in speech, including the various distinctions, modifications, and combinations of tones; phonetics. Also, a treatise on sounds.

The study of the set of meaningless sounds and the rules by which we combine them to make words and sentences. go to glossary index

the sounds that combine to form language

the science of describing and analyzing the patterns of sound combinations of a language. Every language has its own unique pat-terns. For example, Spanish and English both have the sounds /s/ as in sand, /p/ as in pan, and /l/ as in land. English can put all three sounds together in a single syllable, for example, in the words splice or splash, but Spanish cannot combine the three sounds. On the other hand, Polish and English both have the sounds d as in dine and v as in vine; English can-not combine them in that order in a single syllable, but Polish can, as in the word dva (two).