 Now, we are going to begin talking about structure of language, it is part of I language and this will help us understand underlying patterns. So, first we are going to see as part of a structure of language sound system. So, last time or a couple of days ago I asked you, what is the difference between consonant and vowel? Did I, did you get a chance to take a look at that? Okay, let me, let me go back. Have you learnt a language in the classroom? Yes. Which language did you learn in the classroom? English. English. Where did you start learning English? When? LKG. LKG. Right? Then why did you have to learn it later also? Did, where do you taught English in schools and high schools also? Yes. Why? If you have, if you already did that in LKG then why did you learn it again in high school? Go ahead. More words to vocabulary later in the process. Okay? So, at any point in time, there are lots of questions that any, that one can ask, but right now I will focus on the questions that are related to sounds. So, at any point in your learning of English, where you taught about sounds, that is particularly consonants and vowels. Yes or no? Yes. Not the letters. All right. Letters. Fine. Let us say something about, did your teacher say something about consonants and vowels? Yes. No. So, at least you can say I, we were told, right, but you don't remember. Does anyone remember consonants and vowels? No. Okay. So, can you tell me the things that you remember about those, that class? Just couple of them. Not, not everything you have to list for me. What is it? A, E, I, O, U are vowels and rest of them are consonants. What are you happy with that? Why are they, why are they, sure, that is an important question. Why are A, E, I, O, U vowels and rest of them consonants? Any idea? Okay. Ka, ba starts from tip of the tongue. Say ka, do you see any role of tip of the tongue in that? No. Ba, any role of tip of tongue in that? We use our lips also, B, that part is also sound, so sound plus that part is also sound. Okay. So, you didn't ask these questions at all. We might have asked. You might have asked. You don't remember. Right? Okay. All right. Do you think, which language do you speak other than English? Malayalam. Do you think we have vowels in Malayalam also? Yes. Yes? Yes. What are the vowels of Malayalam? Not A, E, I, O, U. So, a is not a vowel in. Okay. Yes. Do you see the things that we are talking about? Do you follow why we are talking about these things? Vowel sounds are not specific to English or Malayalam. Right? I will ask you one more question before I start with what I have to show. Many of you were told these are the A, E, I, O, and U. These are the vowels. Right? I think you were also told that we have only five vowels in English. Am I right? Now, I have a word for you. Okay? All of us have learnt this word and I will just give one example for today. When we say this word and hear me out carefully. When we say this word, what's the first vowel that you hear? Loudly. Where is that in this? What's the vowel with this one is? And what's the first vowel of this word? Are they the same thing? No. These are the vowels of English and this is a word of English. Right? I am not telling you anything new. You learnt this thing and then you learnt this word also. You were told very conveniently these are the vowels of English and then you were told a word and in that word there is a different vowel which is not part of this five. Did this raise any question in your mind? Did you ask this question? What's the next vowel of this word? When we say this word, what's the next vowel? A. What do we write? So we are saying the next vowel is A. So the first one is A. I am putting two of them to show length and then we are saying the next one is let's say A. So there are two vowels in this word. One is A, the other is A and we write them differently. We write something else, we call it something else. Do you see the inconsistency? Now I am pointing out these things not to show you flaws of English. I am showing you these things to sensitize to the things that you may or may not have paid attention to. Now can we say the vowel A is not part of English? Can we say that? If we are told, we memorized, we got good grades right from LKG and we are doing great. So can I say A is not a vowel of English? We cannot say that. Then either one of the two possibilities is wrong. Either this is not right, right? In that case we can say the fact that we are told there are five vowels in English is wrong or we can say A as a vowel is not part of English sound inventory. Do you see my point? One of the two is wrong. Which one do you think has problems? First one. There are only five letters to represent all the vowels but spoken language has more vowels. Spoken language has more vowels, right? So we are saying the moment we are told that there are five vowels in English language. We need to specify that we are talking about five symbols of Roman alphabet which are 26 in number. Out. When we pay attention to English as a spoken language or when we learn English as spoken language, English as part of a spoken repertoire then we find a different inventory of vowels in the language. Get it? So in the language for the sake of learning to speak there aren't only five vowels in English. Get this? So A is also part of it. How are these things taught to us? Do you remember your LKG or class 1, class 2, English classes? How are these alphabets taught to us? Anybody remembers? Right. So how does that work? A for apple. B for boy. Now I want you to pay attention to the word apple. What's the first sound of the word apple? A. Where is A in that? Do you see this thing? The goal of teaching is spoken English, right? And we want to teach them A for apple. There is no A in the word apple. Do you see the problem? I won't go all the way throughout the list because that's completely flawed. At this stage now you can see this at least. You started learning English from LKG. I didn't learn English in LKG. So in a way what you are saying, you don't even remember your age at that time when you started learning English. I remember. I started learning it when I was 16. I didn't have any idea about the language. Probably I couldn't even write my name with English letters. And I remember that very well. Anything that I am telling you is not because of that. I learned it and I learned these things as well. Where you tell me if what I am saying is not making sense. Do you hear the word A in the word, the sound A in the word apple? And we teach A for apple. What kind of a teaching is this? What do we want to say? If we were trying to teach the word apple begins, writing of the word apple begins with the alphabet sound, sorry alphabet symbol A, then it is making sense. But we are saying A for apple in spoken language. This is why I gave you the example of the word father. Five verbal sounds and the first sound is not part of this five inventory. This whole inventory of five sounds not part of that. So the moment we start paying attention to a spoken language, things are different. Just look at one more example. The next one is B for boy. I think across the country or maybe across the globe this is how it is taught. And then some schools may be using more fancy things like rhymes and other stuff. You tell me is this sound, is this thing B even a sound? So where is B in boy? What is the first sound of boy? B. Where is B in that? See this thing? Where is B in that? And if you can add just one more, it can only become funnier. What is the next one? C for cat. What is the first sound of cat? Where is C in that? The first sound of the word cat is the sound. I hope you can see that we are not making up these things. We do not need to really go to a sophisticated laboratory to see these things. There is no A sound in the word apple. B does not even become a sound and C for cat is completely outrageous because the first sound of the word cat is C which has nothing to do with C. See this thing? Now the goal of this thing is not to show you these issues. And by no means I am trying to say what you have learnt is wrong. I am sorry what you have learnt is bad. What I am trying to say is there is a huge mismatch and if at all I am underlying any deficiency which is we are really playing with children's mind when we are teaching in classroom. A for apple, B for boy and C for cat. It was done to you in such a way... Here by you I mean only you because this was not done to me. It was done to you and every other children in such a way that you cannot forget this thing. Even remember now I am not sure... No I am sure that not all of you went to same school. You went to different schools in different parts of the country and you still remember these three things. A for apple, B for boy and C for cat. In other words it was done in such a pathetic and criminal way that you cannot forget it. This is what is done to children in schools. I am saying these things on record as you can see. Now let us only underline through this description of what we have done. These things should be helpful for us in understanding sound system. Which is to say sounds of spoken language is completely different. No no not different. Writing system may not have to correspond with sounds of the language. No matter how much you teach A for apple, B for boy or C for cat. Every child has already figured out that there is no sound called Ba. No sound called B. We need to say Ba. There is no sound called C. We need to say ka. So what are the three sounds of the word cat? Ka, ay and ta. See this thing. First consonant sound of the word boy, Ba. You keep teaching B, C and all that. But children learning these things have figured out that actual sounds are Ba, ka and ay. They may not have anything to do with A, B and C in spoken language. Get this thing? This is what I want to underline to you. Then again nothing against these things. These are symbols of written script. Therefore, they do not represent total number of vowel sounds in English. Total number of vowel sounds in English is not just five. There are more than that. Can I leave this to you as an assignment to find out total number of vowel sounds in English? Right? No. So when we move on, now I connect with the things that we have been talking about. Sounds are building blocks of language. We have seen there could be many, many words in a language. In finite number of sentences in a language, but a limited and finite set of sounds in every language. That finite set of sound is very small in number. When we look at inventory of sounds across languages, we find very few sounds differ in two languages. There are very few sounds that are different in two languages. In other words, what we are saying is words, sorry, languages share sounds. Get this thing? Languages share sounds. The more number of sounds that are shared in, shared between two languages, the closer the two languages are in terms of comprehension and production. The fewer the numbers of common sounds in two languages, the more and more differences in two languages. These are some of the common generic features of sounds. Then we started talking about consonants and vowels. You are saying that probably we do not remember what we were told and if at all you found something you remember, this is what you remember. Let me tell you about sounds. That is also consonants and vowels. Before we look at that distinction between consonants and vowels, I want to show you a particular picture. Do you see this thing? What does this look like? This looks like human face. That is some kind of drawing of this part. Remember this? See this? This is some kind of drawing of this part. There are two things here where I want your particular attention. All the names that you see listed, they are going to be important. There are two things right now that I want you to see. One is this part. You see this? These are lips, teeth, tongue and this thing. This part is called oral cavity. This part is called nasal cavity. This thing is called just these two parts. I want you to see first. Sounds that are produced in the oral cavity are called oral sounds. Sounds that have something to do with nasal cavity are called nasal sounds. All the sounds that you know irrespective of vowels and consonants, they are going to be of two types. Either oral sounds or nasal sounds. And only this much of apparatus is responsible for sound production, sounds of language. Little bit more about this. Little bit more about this in the sense that what is responsible for production of sounds? These are the places in which these are the different types of cavities. Oral cavity and nasal cavity where sounds are produced. What is responsible for sound production? In fact all of them. I am talking about something else, which is okay. If we have to, let me ask you different question. If we have to say a sound, right? Let us say ka and a, right? So ka is a consonant or a vowel? Consonant, right? And a is a vowel. Even though it is not very clear at this stage how to define a consonant and vowel, we know these two things, right? Ka is a consonant and a is a vowel. If you have to say these two sounds, which one do you think you can say for longer duration? For how long do you think you can say this thing? Forever. Forever? Long time. Long time but for how long? Till our breath. Till we can hold breath. See, we need to be specific, therefore I interrupted, right? Not for ever, but ever is such a long time, right? We can say anything forever. However, we can keep saying the sound for longer duration, as long as we can hold breath. Now, why can we not say ka for long time? There is what? It's understitive passage for all of us. Very nice. Why didn't you say this thing when I was asking you about the difference between consonant and a vowel? They didn't teach you this thing. Then how did you learn that? Very nice. You found that, right? All right. See, lot of times it happens that you find out things on your own, right? And it's a generic thing, no, not generic belief, specific belief in at least language learning. You have seen how children acquired language just yesterday, and I have tried to show you so many things about that. And then, it's not too much to say that children learn much more than they can be taught. In fact, there is no way one can teach everything that children know. See this thing? There is absolutely no way one can teach. And you don't even know what kinds of things children learn. They also learn not to tell others what they may have learned. See this thing? If these things possibly could not be taught, probably these things apply to everybody in a limited sense, but it applies to everybody. Lot of things you figure out on your own. You just saw this thing, what you were taught. You saw A for Apple, B for Boy, and C for Cat. And now, what you have figured out is very, very nice. I am really impressed that for a consonant sound, there is some kind of obstruction, right? And we will talk about those obstructions in order to be specific. And for vowel sounds, there are... It's not fair to say there is no obstruction. It's little obstruction. Because if we say no obstruction, then we will keep speaking all the time. Nobody will shut up. I mean, there are some people who don't stop, but everybody will keep speaking. You just cannot stop if there is no obstruction at all. Right? But let me go through this thing phase-wise. So what's the thing that is responsible for speaking? What's the thing that is responsible for speaking? No. These are the organs. You just said something. I asked you this question for a specific reason. My question was, for how long do you think you can keep saying A? As long as we can hold breath. So what's responsible for sound production is breath. It will be easy for you to understand. As your engineers, human body is the best... is an example of perfect engineering. Nothing happens in human body which has got no meaning, which has no purpose. See, we inhale air and that is called breathing. What happens in breathing? We inhale and then exhale. Inhaling is like input from the immediate society. We inhale. What happens? That air goes all the way to where? Lungs. And this is not biology 101. This is something general knowledge that all of us know. It goes straight to lungs. It's separated in different parts, at least what lungs retains, what body requires, which is oxygen. Lungs retains oxygen that it has separated from inhaling air, which is required for body production of blood and blood circulation and all other kinds of things. We don't need to go into the details of that. What it also does is it exhales rest of it. That could be carbon dioxide or anything else. It only retains oxygen and exhales everything else. This is what is called breathing process. What is responsible for speech sounds is exhaling air. Not inhaling air. Exhaling air. The moment it starts from lungs, it comes to these areas, the places that you were talking about vocal cords, larynx, vealum and everything else that you see, oral cavity and nasal cavity. The exhaling air is moving through these passages. And with more obstruction of that exhaling air, we get consonant sounds with little bit obstruction of that amount of exhaling air. We get vowel sounds. This is so far is common for all the languages of the world. Because there are only few, there is a limitation of this apparatus. This apparatus is limited in its physical form. Therefore, only limited sounds. See this thing? Why limited sounds? Because there is a physical limitation on apparatus where the total number of places of articulation for different sounds is limited in number. However, for combining sounds together and combining words together, what is responsible for them, for those processes, the responsible mechanism for those processes is generative capacity. And generative capacity has something inbuilt which can result into infinite things. Therefore, infinite sentences and words. However, limited number of sounds. Get this thing? I will give you this picture. We will upload this online as well so that you can see these things. One more thing. You see this? There is one more part which is important where you can see, before I give you examples of actual sounds. You see this part? What is this called? This part is called uvilla. You see this area? Now, this is one thing. It is hard to see glottis and larynx and other things. You can see them in picture but it is hard to see in actual sense. However, uvilla you can, if you try, you can see that. You just have to open your mouth wide enough. Do not do it in public. It is not a good thing. You can do it on your own whenever you feel comfortable. It is not a very nice looking thing but you can still see that. It has got a very specific purpose. What it does is, when we are speaking things, when sound production is in process, if it is lowered, then the passage to nasal cavity is open. It should not be very difficult mechanism for you to understand and the moment there is a, there is some amount of flow to nasal cavity, it gets, sounds get nasal quality. Therefore, nasal sounds. So, when we say words like, sounds like m or n, what happens is the uvilla gets lowered. Some part of flow of air moves through nasal cavity and therefore we get nasal sounds. There are more nasal sounds that we get but this is how we get it. When the sounds are not nasals, the uvilla is raised which means the passage to nasal cavity is completely blocked. Therefore, no nasal quality on sounds. What we get is only, only oral sounds. So, when we say ka or ba or pa, do you hear anything nasal about it? We do not realize but uvilla is raised. So, lot of physiological processes that keep going on motorized, motor control things that are going on, we are not aware of them. But these, those things keep happening. That is called conditioning of vocal tract. Speakers of a particular language have a particular set of sounds. While acquiring that language, what happens simultaneously is our vocal tract gets conditioned for that language, for the sounds of that language. Therefore, when we speak English or we learn English later, we will, we say, we speak English differently from those who started English, we started learning English way too early. In other words, if we consider some people as native speakers of English, our English is different from them because of that reason. Under no circumstances, we are going to be speaking like them. You see my point? Therefore, if we do not speak the way Britishers might be speaking or Americans might be speaking, that is not our flaw. That is related to conditioning of vocal tract. The places where we grieve up is responsible for input and that input is responsible for conditioning of vocal tract. And then, when we learn something else later on, that conditioning stays. And if we want to learn some new sounds or languages, then those sounds get influenced by how our vocal tract is already conditioned. It works the same way for native speakers of English if they try to learn Hindi or Malayalam or Punjabi or any other language. Same thing happens to us. Therefore, please keep this thing in mind that we cannot be speaking that way and it is not our flaw. If someone tells you, why do you not speak English the way Americans speak, it is one of the most unethical questions to ask. It is like saying, why don't you look like Americans? Do you see the point? It is just not possible. What is responsible for that is how and when the conditioning of vocal tract really took place. There are some people in America who look like us but their conditioning of vocal tract is perfectly like the conditioning of vocal tract of a native speaker. They speak English differently. They speak English very differently from us and their conditioning is responsible for this. Get this thing? So, these are a couple of side notes. I will keep coming to this picture once again. Right now, I want to take you to these terms. So, two broad types oral and nasal, clear? Places of articulation and manners of articulations are the two things that we will be talking about. Places of articulation refer to different places in this vocal apparatus which are responsible for sound production and how that is there are more things responsible for that which is referred as manners of articulation. So, these are going to be two important things which we will be looking at in a clear way and on the basis of these things we will be able to see the clearer distinctions between consonants and vowels. And to begin with the actual distinction between the consonant and the unrestrictive flow of air with little bit obstruction results into vowel sounds and more obstruction at particular places gives us consonant sounds. Sometimes that obstruction could be total obstruction. Sometimes that obstruction could be partial obstruction we are talking about that is the fundamental distinction between a consonant and a vowel. There is one more thing which is important for you to know which is all the consonant sounds of all the languages that you know or you may not know have one particular vowel already in built in them. One particular vowel right and you can figure out these things very quickly. When we say a sound like ka do you hear any vowel here? When we say ma pa or any other vowel, any other consonant that you know or you may not know will have this sound in built in it. That is also the reason why we are unable to say a consonant for a long time because if you try speaking a consonant for a longer duration what you end up doing is you end up speaking other vowel sound. In fact it is so important that we cannot even say a consonant sound without that. Can you try saying ka without that a nice try right. Nice effort. What I am saying? It is impossible to say sorry sankal right. That is true. So I am not saying it is not possible at all. That is going to be possible in a word but can we say that half la what I am saying is if you are saying just isolated sound there is no way we can say that. It is a great example. It is not just a Hindi in all languages of the world we can say sounds without that vowel only when they are in words for example when we say a word of English like school school the first two sounds what are they sa and ka right and I think I have given you this example earlier also that if we want to reduce the cluster we would end up saying as sakul. So the fact that we are not saying sakul and we are saying school something is happening to that what is happening here in the word sakul I am sorry school. So we have two sounds here and ka both of them are vowel I am sorry both of them are consonants we know that consonants have inbuilt vowel sounds in them that inbuilt sound is actually a this is how we represent them it is called a schwa a so when they form a cluster of two consonants together this one is dropped so dropping this vowel out of a out of an isolated sound is not possible however dropping of this vowel quality that is inbuilt vowel quality out of a sound is possible when they form a cluster with another sound see this thing so we can say sakul where sa is being spoken being pronounced without that a the moment we add that a that becomes sakul right the moment we add those that that vowel it becomes sakul you see what Punjabis are doing they are not doing anything wrong it is simply the fact that their language does not allow cluster that is to be more specific we can say their language does not allow dropping of that inbuilt vowel from a from a consonant sound and this cluster of two consonants or three consonants are not only possible in the beginning of a word it is also going to be possible in the middle of a word therefore we get words like sankalp in a language like Hindi what is not possible is a cluster at the end of a word at the end of a word where the last consonant is going to be half that word is not possible in a language like Hindi however they used to be possible here in something like Sanskrit so you may have things written at least in some places words like have you seen this word written and then in some of the letters you see some slant line given that is an indication of half sound that is that half sound simply means lack of that vowel so probably in old time it was possible to say a half sound at the end of the word in a language like Sanskrit but now that that word is part of Hindi Swagatam we do not say that there is a half we may write in any which way we want but we do not say it that way we still say how do we say that word for welcome do you hear that sound a there is a complete word complete sound how we write is not important we started with that I just told you A for apple and B for boy does not mean much so how we write is a completely different convention is a completely different system of learning however spoken language is different when we look at these fundamental aspects get this any questions so far no are these things making sense clear I have a two more minutes to show you something some examples of vowel sounds these are not all there are some examples of vowel sounds they are a a e e o n o so one is a short vowel and its counterpart a is a longer than that when we say long vowel we mean relatively longer than a when we say e the distinction between e and e is again relative distinction one is shorter the other is longer and finally the vowel sound o has similar distinction between short and long what is another interesting point with these vowels is a what would be the place of articulation for a in the oral cavity that is to say if we divide it in let us say three parts vertically right if we divide this in three parts vertically and we say front part mid part and back part so a will be therefore that is called a back vowel e e relative to o mid vowel not just because it is written here I want you to realize that and when we say o that is front vowel see this thing now this distinction that you see first there are two things I say before I stop for today this distinction that you see front back and mid these are called on vertical axis places of articulations and if one is short the other is long that is about manner of articulation that is how these things are set number one distinction is not a new thing that I am giving you do you know when this distinction was first brought to attention any idea so naturally you do not know who did that have you heard the name of panini anybody oh he said that panini so when did he live sorry say something when did he live he just some estimates he lived around 500 BC which is how many years from now 2500 years the point is it is not 10 years ago it was not published in science or somewhere else do you know do you guys know the year of invention for printing press it was around french revolution right these things were done way before any machine sophisticated machines like the ones that we see were developed or even printing press or papers were in place this was just somebody's observation which is absolutely accurate with all kinds of mechanical apparatus even today there is no dispute that who is a front wobble of course but these are english terminology panini had different terms for them okay he did not talk about mid back and front he talked about same thing in different different language, language of his time but these distinctions were done long long time ago is nothing new about them and the second thing is these vowels are called cardinal vowels and they are not the vowels of hindi or tamil these vowels all the languages of the world this distinction of a and a e and e and u and u is done in all the languages of the world probably some of the languages are dead from panini and time some of the languages didn't even exist for example modern spoken hindi and modern spoken english was definitely not there at that time so what he was talking about was true for languages of that time true for languages that may have died true for languages that did not even exist see the power of that argument see the power of that classification that someone came up with 2500 years ago there are couple of other things about consonants that he has given he has talked about and the picture that I was trying to show you the story that I told you about exhaling air being responsible for production of a speech sounds the distinction between oral cavity and nasal cavity how oral sounds are produced and nasal sounds are produced all of them we are discussed by panini nothing new in those things it's just that these stories have been told in different languages at different points in time we talk about consonant part when we meet thank you