Phonetics and linguistics
Linguistics is said to be a science. The following are two major factors of scientificness. One factor that makes it be referred to as a science is because linguistics applies scientific methods in studying a language structure, difference from other languages and the understanding that people have about that language. As Professor John McWhorter form the Manhattan Institute soberly piped it, linguistics is centered on scientific features of studying language. Some of the scientific aspects that are employed in linguistics are perceptive observations, creating and carrying out tests hypothetically, creating arguments and then preparing inferences.
The second factor that makes linguistics a science; as described by Professor John McWhorter, in a way linguistics share the same purpose as that served by science. When studying scientific linguistics, one discovers the impacts that the field has on our daily lives. Just as science is centered on the study of the world’s past and present, linguistics exposes about our history and can be in a position to expose more about the present-day lives. An example to show the scientificness of linguistics is Sir William Jone’s discovery in 1786 that Sanskrit, an Indo-Aryan historical language that is the basis of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, had a relation with Latin and Greek. This discovery led to the reconstruction of a Proto-Indo-European primary language. Thus, scientifically, it implies that the native speakers of both Greek and Latin had an interaction of the present the ancestors of the present-day native speakers of the Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Thus, it can help in supporting the evidence of continental drift which hugely discussed in science discipline.
Any normal child born anywhere in the world is capable of learning any language to which he/she is exposed. During the first few years of a child’s life, it learns an extensive understanding about a language because it has gains the knowledge of the word order. There are a number of reasons why this specific aspect of human language makes it different from animal communication. One of the differences between human language and animal language is that, animal language is not as complicated and as expressive as the human language.
Two, while the human language comprises of immeasurable distinctive sentences that are the basis of communication in humans, animals do not have this capability as their communication is mostly passed signal codes which therefore implies that they have relatively few statements to pass to each other. As Victoria, Robert & Nina (2010) put it, “the natural sounds and gestures produced by all nonhuman primates are highly stereotyped and limited in the type and number of messages they convey consisting mainly of emotional responses to particular situations. They (animals) have no way of expressing the anger that they felt yesterday or the anticipation of tomorrow.” (26).
Third, there is a lot of creativity in human language compared to animal language. Unlike the animal language, the human language can be twisted and come up with statements that have never been made before. Forth, another difference that distinguishes human language from the animal language is that, the human language is can use displacement which implies that human can refer to things that “are not here” and “not now”. On the contrary, the human language is limited to the immediate situations. Also, the animal language doesn’t use tropes.
There have been extensive experiments by researchers in training animals such as primates. Despite the fact that some primates were more proficient in the training of the language, all were limited to a specific level. One of the most explicit examples to support this fact is the research carried out in early 1930s by a couple that were scientists on their son Donald and a chimpanzee pet named Gua. Donald and Gua were ten months old and seven and seven and half months old respectively. The scientists extensively wrote the growth of both the human infant and the primate infant. That context provided a good understanding of psychology; whereby the recorded development of the two infants (Gua and Donald), both representing the animals and humans respectively, were analyzed. The limited scope and the understanding of the animal language was found as found as following. Gua, the primate, was better in knowing words when was sixteen months old than Donald, the scientists’ son. However, after that, the chimpanzee was never able to learn extra knowledge after sixteen months of age. Conversely, Donald was able to.
There is a difference between phonetics and phonology. Phonetics is the study of the sounds of the human language which are known as phonemes. Conversely, phonology is the study of the structural composition of natural languages and the way in which they are used.
There are two phonological rules namely morphemic rules (also known as morphophonological or morphonemic rules) and allophonic rules. Morphemic rules alter or select important features where they constituent morphemes that have lexical entries. Examples from the English language include kicks, fights, coats, socks and sacs. In the aforementioned examples, the voicing of /z/ is substituted with a voiceless pronunciation of /s/ at the end. The other phonological rule; allophonic rules show the allophones that grasp a phoneme. In other words, whereas there are no qualities of pronunciation in lexical morphemes, allophonic rules fill in. Examples from the English language include words like coats and rude. In the first example, coats, there is the aspiration of the first letter /k/. In the second example, rude, there is a rounding of the first letter /r/.

Reference
Victoria F., Robert R. & Nina H. (2010). An Introduction to Language. Massachussetts: Cengage Learning.