Our Language : Oral and Aural

Nidhu Bhusan Das : We are children. We use our mother tongue to express ourselves. We begin to learn the language by way of verbal interactions in the family. At birth we make the sound Oah. Then we follow moms and others in the family as they talk to us, observe the movement of their lips and imitate them. In course of time, we come to know about other organs of speech and begin to use them in imitation of the elders. Thus imitation is the basic action in the process of language learning. The first sound we produce is vowel. It is easy to produce. We need not obstruct the air stream to produce the vowel sound. Just opening the mouth we can produce such sound. Then we proceed to produce the consonant sounds using different speech organs. What is important to know about language is that it is primarily an oral exercise. In fact, language is for the mouth to produce and the ear to hear. So, language is oral and aural. However, language is written and printed for recording the thoughts and expressions. Thus we have two types of realization of language. They are phonological and orthographic. The oral and aural form is Phonological and the written form is Orthographic. Thus /tri: / is phonological and ‘tree’ is orthographic. Now what is the smallest / lowest unit of a language? It is the phoneme. What is phoneme? Let’s see. Let’s take the two letters ‘a’ and‘t’ and we have ‘at’. We can have different words using before it different other letters. We can use ‘c’ to get ‘cat’ , ‘b’ to have ‘bat’ , ‘r’ to get ‘rat’, ‘s’ to have ‘sat’ , ‘p’ to obtain ‘pat’. Here ‘c’,’b’, ‘r’,‘s’ have made all the difference. These are the phonemes. Phonology: Human speech mechanism has the capability to produce an infinite number of speech sounds. The sounds are important for differences in the meanings of words. The English words late, gate, fate, rate, mate, bait, pate, wait differ from each other for the initial consonant sounds only. The initial sound of each word and the substitution of one sound for another bring about a change in the meaning of the word. The difference is contrastive. All these contrastive sounds are phonemes. English sound system has 44 phonemes. In languages there are restrictions on the sequences of phonemes. For example, in English the sequences of consonants/sl-/, /kl-/, /pr-/ can occur at the beginning of words like slate, cloak, and press. But the sequences /ls-/,/nr-/./tl-/ cannot occur as initial sounds of a word. In the same way it is possible to have the combinations/-st/, /-kt/, /-nt/ in the terminal position in the English words first, act, stunt. But it is not possible for the combinations/-tk/, /-pg/, /-zt/ to occur in the final postions in English words. So, we find that there is order not only in a sentence but also at the level of words.