Phonetics (pronounced /fntks/, from the Greek: , phn, 'sound, voice') is a

branch of linguistics that comprises the study of thesounds of human speech, orin the
case of sign languagesthe equivalent aspects of sign.[1] It is concerned with the
physical properties of speech sounds or signs (phones): their physiological production,
acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status. Phonology, on
the other hand, is concerned with the abstract, grammatical characterization of systems
of sounds or signs.

Phonetics deals with the production of speech sounds by humans, often without prior
knowledge of the language being spoken.
Phonetics is the study of how the "commands" end up translating into specific
articulator and vocal tract movements. For instance, how the command to retract
the tongue at some particular time "really" maps to minute physical details like
exactly when tongue section X touches mouth section Y and then in turn how that
affects parts of the resultant acoustic signal. Phonetics also makes observations
of how certain groups of instructions can cause very specific consequences. On
the acoustic side, phonetics turns the mental spectrogram we receive from the
nerve endings in our cochleas into feature sets and timings of the sort that it
received from the phonological center during articulation.

Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization

of sounds in languages. It has traditionally focused largely on the study of
the systems of phonemes in particular languages (and therefore used to be also
called phonemics, or phonematics), but it may also cover any linguistic analysis either at
a level beneath the word (including syllable, onset and rime, articulatory gestures,
articulatory features, mora, etc.) or at all levels of language where sound is considered to
be structured for conveying linguistic meaning. Phonology also includes the study of
equivalent organizational systems in sign languages.
The word phonology (as in the phonology of English) can also refer to the phonological
system (sound system) of a given language. This is one of the fundamental systems
which a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax and its vocabulary.
Phonology is often distinguished from phonetics. While phonetics concerns the physical
production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds of speech,[1]
[2]
phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across
languages to encode meaning. For many linguists, phonetics belongs to descriptive
linguistics, and phonology to theoretical linguistics, although establishing the
phonological system of a language is necessarily an application of theoretical principles
to analysis of phonetic evidence. Note that this distinction was not always made,
particularly before the development of the modern concept of the phonemein the mid

20th century. Some subfields of modern phonology have a crossover with phonetics in
descriptive disciplines such aspsycholinguistics and speech perception, resulting in
specific areas likearticulatory phonology or laboratory phonology.

Phonology is about patterns of sounds, especially different patterns of sounds in

different languages, or within each language, different patterns of sounds in different
positions in words etc.
Phonology is the study of the cognitive processes that turn words into
instructions to hand down to the physical body parts that produce the sounds.
These instructions, personified into human commands, might sound like, "close
your lips, now move your tongue to touch your alveolar ridge; begin lowering the
diaphragm at a normal rate and constrict the vocal chords to this degree". On the
acoustic side, phonology's role is much harder to specify (at least to me), but I
would say that the "phonology" center takes in sequences/matricies of interpreted
linguistic features, for example "between 442-488ms, palatalization level 2".
Phonology would then turn that into the abstract "underlying" representations that
can be mapped to morphological parsers and the lexicon.

phonetics

vs.

phonology

Physical description of
sounds

Description of sound interrelation

and function

presence vs. absence of

sounds

complementary vs. contrastive

distribution of

presence vs. absence of

features

redundant vs. contrastive

(phonemic) features

narrow transcription in
square brackets

broad transcription in slanted

brackets

transcr. symbols the same

across langs.

transcription symbols generalized,

unique to each lang.