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What's the difference between phonetics and phonology?

-Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with


"the sounds of language".
-Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of
human speech.
Phonetics is about the physical aspect of sounds, it studies the production and the
perception of sounds, called phones. Phonetics has some subcategories, but if not
specified, we usually mean the " articolatory phonetics" that is "the study of the
production of speech sounds by the articulatory and vocal tract by the speaker".
Phonetic transcriptions are done using the square brackets, [ ].

Phonology is about the abstract aspect of sounds and it studies the phonemes
(phonemic trancriptions adopt the slash / /). Phonology is about establishing what
are the phonemes in a given language, i.e. those sounds that can bring a difference
in meaning between two words. A phoneme is a phonic segment with a meaning
value, for example in minimal pairs:

bat - pat
had - hat
Or in Italian:

psca -> // = Peach (the fruit)
psca -> /e/ = Fishing (the activity)


In short, nobody really knows the difference, but the broad agreement is that
phonetics is lower-level and more articulator-centric and phonology is higher-level
and more cognition-centric.
A simple way to show the difference is that

phonetics is the study of possible sounds that a human mouth can make and human
ear can hear over all languages
phonology is the study of those same sounds within individual languages (which in
each language is a much smaller set that than the total possible).
When studying a particular language, phonology is mostly all that matters.
Comparison between languages brings out the phonetics. Catalan has one nasal
phoneme (doesn't distinguish m,n, and ng, even though they are pronounced as
such in different contexts). And English doesn't distinguish some things that make
semantic differences in other languages
Phonetics is what comes out of your mouth and goes into your ears. Phonology is
how those sounds are arranged in your head to go to your mouth, and how the
sounds from your ears are deconstructed to be processed by your brain.

Phonetics studies the nature (acoustic and articulatory) of sounds that human's
produce while speaking. Phonology studies their function in differentiating
meaning in various contexts.

Thus (very crudely), phonetics will notice the difference between the aspirated and
non-aspirated /p/ in pin vs. spin. But phonology will be mostly interested in the
fact that the meaning of both words will change when you replace /p/ with /k/ in
exactly the same way as in lip vs. lick where aspiration doesn't enter the picture.

But of course, phonology can only be successful when it has good phonetics to rely
on.

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