ABSTRACT
The only universal medium of linguistic communication among all normal human beings is speech, and the scientific study of speech is known as phonetics. An array of elaborate, delicate, and expensive apparatus, in phonetics laboratories, is now available for the detailed investigation of the processes studied in articulatory, acoustic, and auditory phonetics. Speech is in one sense a wonderful by-product of the physiologically necessary process of breathing out, ridding the lungs of spent air, charged with carbon dioxide. Traditionally and familiarly speech sounds are classified as consonants and vowels, though this division is not always as easy as it looks, and a clearcut definition of vowel and consonant valid for all languages is very hard to arrive at. Vowel sounds are differentiated principally by two factors, the position of the tongue in the mouth and the shape of the lips. In consonants the two most important components are the place of articulation and the manner of articulation.
