Applied comparative contrastive study of English and Romanian vowels

There are a lot of issues awaited to be studied by the research of human languages. Language is regarded to be a means of communication and thinking as well as an object of understanding, all these determine the necessity for further investigation in the field of language study and pronunciation.

The necessity of communication among different countries was neither so obvious and urgent as nowadays. It is quickly developing due to a wide use of information facilities and progress in economy. This fact has a great impact on all sides and aspects of the modern communication. This paper is dedicated to the study of English and Romanian vowel system. Taking into consideration the above mentioned the main goal of this paper was set in the following way: to characterize and analyse English and Romanian vowels.

The objectives of the paper are the following:

1. to select useful information about the topic from various resources;

2. to explore phonetic phenomena;

3. to identify phonetic difficulties;

4. to elaborate activities eliminating pronunciation difficulties.

The practical importance of the research consists in the fact that the teacher and the learner of the foreign language should be able to recognize and to produce the sounds and sound clusters of the studied language just the similar way a native speaker does it. The results of the research may be used in learning the English language. It helps to produce the sounds with the required quality and enhances listening comprehension.

Complex method of the research in this paper comprises analytical and sintectical analysis for theoretical chapter as well as comparative and methodological techniques for the practical part.

The diploma paper consists of an introduction, two chapters, conclusions, bibliography and appendix.

In the introduction, the main goal, objectives, the topic, and the material of the

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research are formulated.

In the first chapter, the theoretical peculiarities dedicated to the study of English and Romanian vowels are discussed.

In the second chapter are presented the elaborated exercises. Exercises for deep breathing and exercises for each vowel and diphthong.

In the conclusions, the results of the research are mentioned.

In the bibliography lists, the quoted and recommended literature are presented.

In the appendix are presented exercises and activities/ tongue twisters, proverbs, poem.

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Chapter One. Theoretical Preliminaries to English and Romanian

vowels

1. The Notion of a Phoneme

To know how sounds are produced by speech organs is not enough to describe and classify them as language units. When we talk about the sound of a language, the term ,,sound'' can be interpreted in two different ways. In the first place, we can say that [t] and [d] are two different sounds in English, [t] being fortis and [d] being lenis and we can illustrate this by showing how they contrast with each other to make a difference of meaning in a large number of pairs, such as tie-die, scat/seed. But on the other hand if we listen carefully to the [t] in ,,let us'' and compare it with the [t] in ,,let them'' we can hear that the two sounds are also not the same, the [t] of ,,let us'' is alveolar, while the [t] of ,,let them'' is dental. In both examples the sounds differ in one articulator feature only. In the second case the difference between the sounds leas functionally no significance. It is perfectly clear that the sense of ,,sound'' in these two cases is different. To avoid this ambiguity the linguist uses two separate terms: ,,phoneme'' which is used to mean ,,sound'' in its contrastive sense, and ,,allophone'', which is used for sounds which are variants of a phoneme; they usually occur in different positions in the word and hence cannot contrast with each other, nor be used to make meaningful distinctions.1

As we probably know from the course of general linguistics, the definitions of the phoneme vary greatly.

The truly materialistic view of the phoneme was originated by the Russian linguist L. V. Shcherba. Accordingly to L. V. Shcherba the phoneme may be viewed as a functional, material and abstract unit. These three aspects of the phoneme are

1. Socolova M. A. ,,English Phonetics'' 1991 p. 33

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concentrated in the definition of the phoneme suggested by V. A.

Vassilyev, who looks upon the phoneme as ''... a dialectical unit of these aspects because they determine one another and are thus interdependent''1. Vassilyev defined the phoneme like this: ,,The segmental