Types

• Phonetics can be separated into three fields of study.
  
  --Articulatory phonetics is the study of how speech is made with the mouth, tongue and lungs.
  
  --Acoustic phonetics is the study of how speech sounds acoustically, such as speech frequency and harmonics.
  
  --Auditory phonetics is the study of how speech is perceived by the brain.
  
  

History

• Around 750 A.D., the Indian grammarian Pāṇini studied and wrote about the rules of articulation of Sanskrit. He also wrote some of the first known works on linguistic theories in general.
  
  Many other Indian linguists followed in Pāṇini's footsteps.
  
  

17th and 18th Centuries

• The discovery of how lateral (L sounds) and nasal (N and M) sounds are made took place during this time. Also, many speech synthesis machines were built and tested by scientists from all fields.
  
  

19th and 20th Centuries

• By the late 1800s, the International Phonetic Association decided to create a phonetic system in order to describe sounds from all languages. This is the alphabet that all those studying phonetics still use today. Called IPA for short, the system allows linguists to explain the pronunciation of any language with one writing system.
  
  

Modern Phonetics

• Today, phonetics is studied alongside phonology, the study of meaning in the smallest units of sound. Because all of linguistics is interdisciplinary, it is difficult to exclude the meaning of the sound from the way the sound is produced and perceived.