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f/v, or i/u). This fact only became apparent during the work of the Prague School linguist in the
earlier part of this century.
Nikolai Trubetskoi noticed that each speech sound or phone is a complex entity. He
called each component of a sound a phonetic feature (voicing, lip rounding are phonetic
features). These features are produced more or less simultaneously rather than consecutively,
which is why we tend to hear them all together as a single unit. After the Second World War,
when sound spectrographs came into general use, the phonetic features posited by the Prague
School linguists actually became visible. They appear as separate formants I the spectrogram of
each sound ([v] has voicing and high static; [u] has a higher first formant and lower second
formant, [i] has a higher second formant and lower first formant)
Thus, not all sounds are equally different, some share virtually no phonetic features,
while others differ in only a single feature. (For instance [f] differs from [v] in only one feature,
whereas [m] and [h] differ in several features). Sound sharing a given phonetic feature can be
grouped together into what are called natural classes (vowels, consonants, nasals, voiced sounds,
etc)
It has be found that a relatively small number of phonetic features were all that was
necessary to describe all sound in any given language. Notice that there are less than half the
number of phonetic features as there are sounds in English. Phonetic features are usually based
on articulatory and sometimes acoustic details (strident vs. non-strident)
One of the Prague linguist, Roman Jakobson, was intrigued by how few phonetic features
there seemed to be in relation to speech sounds in the worlds languages he tried to come up with
a set of universal phonetic features that could be used as tools to describe any sound in any
language of the world. His theory of universal phonetic features failed, however, because as
more languages were described, the number of features kept increasing.