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Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning 'sound, voice') is the study of sounds and the human voice. It is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones) as well as those of non-speech sounds, and their production, audition and perception, as opposed to phonology, which is the study of sound systems and abstract sound units (such as phonemes and distinctive features). Phonetics deals with the sounds themselves rather than the contexts in which they are used in languages. Discussions of meaning (semantics) do not enter at this level of linguistic analysis, therefore. While writing systems and alphabets often attempt to represent the sounds of speech, phoneticians are more concerned with the sounds themselves than the symbols used to represent them. So close is the relationship between them, however, that many dictionaries list the study of the symbols (more accurately semiotics) as a part of phonetic studies . Logographic writing systems typically give much less phonetic information, although it is not necessarily non-existent. For instance, in Chinese characters, a phonetic is a portion of the character that hints at its pronunciation, while the radical gives semantic information. Characters featuring the same phonetic typically have similar pronunciations, but by no means are the pronunciations predictably determined by the phonetic; this is because pronunciations diverged over many centuries while the characters remained the same. Not all Chinese characters are radical-phonetic compounds, but a good majority of them are. Phonetics has three main branches: There are over a hundred different phones recognized as distinctive by the International Phonetic Association (IPA) and transcribed in their International Phonetic Alphabet. Phonetics was studied as early as 2500 years ago in ancient India, with account of the place and manner of articulation of consonants in his 5th century BCE treatise on Sanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today, except Tamil script, order their consonants according to classification.
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