Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 3, Day 2) – Linguistics in Your Life

Posted by hallep on Tuesday, June 28, 2016 in Grade 5, Grade 6, SAVY.

We had a very busy day today learning about phonology, phonetics and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This morning we talked about various writing systems. We learned that American English has way more phonemes (sounds) than our alphabet has letters to represent them. The IPA was created as a tool that linguists use to represent these sounds. Each sound has one letter and each letter has one sound. We spent most of the rest of the morning learning the consonants in the IPA, and we explored how we make those sounds with our mouths. Later we introduced the vowels, which can be very tricky. After lunch, we practiced reading transcribed speech in the IPA, and then we practiced transcribing speech ourselves. Our last activity of the day involved listening to the World in Words podcast (http://www.pri.org/collections/world-words) and discussing issues with language discrimination and efforts to revitalize languages. We discussed reasons why someone may or may not want to pass on their language.