Ebook: A colloquial Sinhalese reader in phonetic transcription

Publisher: Manchester, The University press; London, New York
Date: 1919
Pages: 57For the benefit of readers to whom phonetics is a new subject we would explain that phonetics is the science of pronunciation. The primary object of this science is to analyse the mechanism of speech with the greatest possible accuracy.
Phonetic theory is mainly- concerned with describing how speech-sounds are made, and with instructing language learners how to learn to produce foreign sounds. Phonetic transcription is an adjunct to the study of phonetics. It is a special kind of writing based on the principle " one
letter per phoneme. " Its object is to inform the reader what sequences of sounds are used in particular words and sentences.
This book is not primarily a treatise on the phonetics of Sinhalese, but we have thought that a useful purpose would be served by giving a certain amount of information on this subject in the Introduction. Learners of the language must remember that in order to profit by the texts it is essential that they should first be able to make the isolated Sinhalese sounds.