mindmap
root((PHON))
phonics
A method of teaching beginners to read and pronounce words by learning the characteristic sounds of letters, letter groups, and especially syllables.
🌱My son's school switched to phonics instruction several years ago, and reading achievement in the early grades has been improving. 🌳In the field of beginning reading, there are two basic schools of thought in the U.S. today. One emphasizes "whole language" teaching, which relies on teaching a lot of reading; the other emphasizes phonics, teaching how letters and syllables correspond to sounds. Phonics instruction may be especially difficult in English, since English has the most difficult spelling of any Western language. Consider the various ways we create the f sound in cough, photo, and giraffe, or the sh sound in special, issue, vicious, and portion, or the k sound in tack, quite, and shellac, and how we pronounce the o in do, core, lock, and bone, or the ea in lead, ocean, idea, and early. Teaching phonics obviously isn't an easy job, but it's probably an important one. phonetic Relating to or representing the sounds of the spoken language.
🌱In almost every Spanish word the pronunciation is clear from the spelling, so the phonetic part of learning Spanish isn't usually a big challenge. 🌳The English alphabet is phonetic—that is, the letters represent sounds. The Chinese alphabet, however, isn't phonetic, since its symbols represent ideas rather than sounds. But even in English, a letter doesn't always represent the same sound; the "a" in cat, father, and mate, for example, represents three different sounds. Because of this, books about words often use specially created phonetic alphabets in which each symbol stands for a single sound in order to represent pronunciations. So in this book, cat, father, and mate would be phonetically represented as ˈkat, ˈfä-thər, and ˈmāt. polyphonic Referring to a style of music in which two or more melodies are sung or played against each other in harmony.
🌱Whenever he needed something calming, he would put on some quiet polyphonic music from the Renaissance and just let the voices waft over him. 🌳Since poly- means "many" （See POLY,） polyphonic music has "many voices." In polyphony, each part has its own melody, and they weave together in a web that may become very dense; a famous piece by Thomas Tallis, composed around 1570, has 40 separate voice parts. Polyphony reached its height during the 16th century with Italian madrigals and the sacred music of such composers as Tallis, Palestrina, and Byrd. Usually when we speak of polyphony we're talking about music of Bach's time and earlier; but the principles remain the same today, and songwriters such as the Beatles have sometimes used polyphony as well. cacophony Harsh or unpleasant sound.
🌱In New York she was often dragged off by her boyfriend to downtown jazz concerts, where she struggled to make sense of what sounded like nothing but cacophony. 🌳Cacophony employs the Greek prefix caco-, meaning "bad," but not everything we call cacophonous is necessarily bad. Grunge, thrash, hardcore, and goth music are unlistenable to some people and very popular to others. Open-air food markets may be marked by a cacophony of voices but also by wonderful sights and sounds. On the other hand, few people can really enjoy, for more than a few minutes, the cacophony of jackhammers, car horns, and truck engines that assaults the city pedestrian on a hot day in August.
🌱My son's school switched to phonics instruction several years ago, and reading achievement in the early grades has been improving. 🌳In the field of beginning reading, there are two basic schools of thought in the U.S. today. One emphasizes "whole language" teaching, which relies on teaching a lot of reading; the other emphasizes phonics, teaching how letters and syllables correspond to sounds. Phonics instruction may be especially difficult in English, since English has the most difficult spelling of any Western language. Consider the various ways we create the f sound in cough, photo, and giraffe, or the sh sound in special, issue, vicious, and portion, or the k sound in tack, quite, and shellac, and how we pronounce the o in do, core, lock, and bone, or the ea in lead, ocean, idea, and early. Teaching phonics obviously isn't an easy job, but it's probably an important one. phonetic Relating to or representing the sounds of the spoken language.
🌱In almost every Spanish word the pronunciation is clear from the spelling, so the phonetic part of learning Spanish isn't usually a big challenge. 🌳The English alphabet is phonetic—that is, the letters represent sounds. The Chinese alphabet, however, isn't phonetic, since its symbols represent ideas rather than sounds. But even in English, a letter doesn't always represent the same sound; the "a" in cat, father, and mate, for example, represents three different sounds. Because of this, books about words often use specially created phonetic alphabets in which each symbol stands for a single sound in order to represent pronunciations. So in this book, cat, father, and mate would be phonetically represented as ˈkat, ˈfä-thər, and ˈmāt. polyphonic Referring to a style of music in which two or more melodies are sung or played against each other in harmony.
🌱Whenever he needed something calming, he would put on some quiet polyphonic music from the Renaissance and just let the voices waft over him. 🌳Since poly- means "many" （See POLY,） polyphonic music has "many voices." In polyphony, each part has its own melody, and they weave together in a web that may become very dense; a famous piece by Thomas Tallis, composed around 1570, has 40 separate voice parts. Polyphony reached its height during the 16th century with Italian madrigals and the sacred music of such composers as Tallis, Palestrina, and Byrd. Usually when we speak of polyphony we're talking about music of Bach's time and earlier; but the principles remain the same today, and songwriters such as the Beatles have sometimes used polyphony as well. cacophony Harsh or unpleasant sound.
🌱In New York she was often dragged off by her boyfriend to downtown jazz concerts, where she struggled to make sense of what sounded like nothing but cacophony. 🌳Cacophony employs the Greek prefix caco-, meaning "bad," but not everything we call cacophonous is necessarily bad. Grunge, thrash, hardcore, and goth music are unlistenable to some people and very popular to others. Open-air food markets may be marked by a cacophony of voices but also by wonderful sights and sounds. On the other hand, few people can really enjoy, for more than a few minutes, the cacophony of jackhammers, car horns, and truck engines that assaults the city pedestrian on a hot day in August.
PHON is a Greek root meaning "sound," "voice," or "speech." It's probably most familiar in the form of the English suffix -phone, in words that begin with a Greek or Latin root as well. Thus, the tele- in telephone means "far," the micro- in microphone means "small," the xylo- in xylophone means "wood," and so on.🌸