fonetinen

Fonetinen is a Finnish adjective that denotes a relation to phonetics, the branch of linguistics that studies the physical aspects of speech sounds. In this sense, fonetinen concerns the actual production, transmission, and perception of sounds, as distinct from phonology, which focuses on the abstract systems and patterns of sound in a language. Phonetics is commonly divided into articulatory, acoustic, and auditory subfields.

In practice, fonetinen analysis involves describing how sounds are made with the vocal tract, measuring their acoustic properties, and considering how listeners perceive sounds. Researchers use tools such as spectrograms, waveforms, and various articulatory descriptions, and they often employ the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to transcribe speech sounds in a way that is independent of a language’s writing system. Fonetinen transcription aims for a precise representation of sounds, sometimes more detailed than broad phonemic transcriptions used in dictionaries or language teaching.

In Finnish linguistic usage, fonetinen appears in phrases like fonetinen analyysi, fonetinen kirjoitus, or fonetinen järjestelmä, referring to sound-level analysis, transcription, or systems for representing speech sounds. The term is widely used across linguistics, language education, speech therapy, and speech technology, including automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech systems, where distinguishing phonetic detail from orthography is important.

Etymology: fonetinen derives from Greek phonē, meaning sound or voice, through the European linguistic tradition, and is adopted into Finnish to describe properties related to phonetics.