The Sounds of Language
The Sounds of Language
• Phonology, Phonetics & Phonemics…
• Producing and writing speech sounds...
• Consonants, vowels & sound charts…
• Phonemic analysis...
• Etics and Emics…
• Applications….
Phonetics
• Acoustic
– physical properties of sound, sound waves,
• Auditory
– perception of sounds, psychological “reality”
• Articulatory
– pronunciation of sounds, articulation
– also known as descriptive phonetics.
Producing Speech Sounds
• lungs
• oral &
nasal
cavities
• larynx &
vocal
cords
– voicing
• velum
(soft palate)
mouth closed: [m, n]
mouth open = [õ]
Writing Speech Sounds
• Spelling vs phonetic transcription
– cat (English)
– ciel (French)
– cizi (Czech)
– “ghoti”
• Phonetic charts
– I.P.A.
– Pike.
Consonants
• Point of Articulation (Place in vocal tract)
• Manner of Articulation
• Voice
Consonants: Place
• From front to back:
bilabial [p, b, m]
labiodental [f, v]
(inter)dental [, ]
alveolar [t, d, s, z, n, l]
alveopalatal (palatal-alveolar; postalveolar)
[, , ñ].
Consonants: Place (continued)
Front to back
retroflex
[,  ]
velar [k, g, x, , ]
uvular [ ] (French ‘r’)
pharyngeal [ (Arabic
‘ain’)]
glottal [, h]
.
Consonants: Manner
• Stops (plosives) [t, d], [!, ]
• Aspirated: [th, dh]
• Fricatives [s, z]
• Affricates [ʧ, ʤ]
• Taps & Trills
– Taps / flaps [ ]
– Trills [ r ]
• Nasals [ n ]
• Approximants [ l, , j, w ].
A Word About Approximants
• Sometimes called liquids & glides
• Variously charted in different systems
• IPA calls them approximants [ w, j,  ]
– And lateral approximants [ l ]
• Pike calls some of them frictionless laterals [ l ]
– He calls some of them semivowels [w, y]
– And he calls some of them vowels [ r ].
Consonants: Review
different languages may
use different sounds
Phonetic Charting
• Mapping the sounds of a language
– Helps you to analyze and pronounce sounds...
– Helps you to analyze sound systems...
• and to see patterns
– Guides you in understanding accents….
Charting and Sounds
• Shinzwani [  ]
– voiceless
– retroflex
– stop
• Czech [ ř ]
– voiced
– alveolar
– fricative
– AND trill.
Charting and Accents: 1
• How would you pronounce Shinzwani [ona]?
– Why did you make the choice you made?
• Place?
• Manner?.
Vowels: Place
• part of tongue raised
i
u
e
o
– front, center, back
• height of tongue
– high, mid, low
a
Vowels: Manner
• rounded
[u, o] - back (e.g. most English back vowels)
[y, ø] - front (e.g., French, German, Danish)
• unrounded
[ i, e] - front (e.g. all English front vowels)
[ ,  ] - back (e.g., Turkish, Native American
languages)
• tense/lax (close/open)
– [i] vs [I] .
Charting Vowels
Diphthongs
to front
[ii] seen
[ai] sign
[i] boid
to back
to center
[i] beer
[e] bear
[a] bar
[] bore
[uu] sue
[ou] hoe
[au] how.
Suprasegmentals
• Additional pronunciation
– [o] as segment
• Marked with diacritics
– [  ] as suprasegmental (nasalization)
• [o] = nasalized segment.
Phones and Phonemes
• phone
– smallest identifiable unit of sound in a language
– more easily identified by outsiders
• phoneme
– smallest contrastive unit of sound in a language
– heard as a single sound by insiders
– Contrasts are not predictable.
Phonology
• Sounds and their arrangements
– Phonetics & Phonemics
• Phonetics:
– identify & describe sounds in detail (phones)
• Phonemics
– analyze arrangements of sounds
– identify groupings of sounds (phonemes)
• Examples:
– English “pill” vs “spill -- [ph] + [p] = /p/
– Hindi “phl” (fruit) vs “pl” (minute) -- [ph] + [p] = /ph / + /p/ .
Identifying Phonemes
• Minimal pairs
– reveal contrasts in sounds
• ‘pin’ ‘tin’ ‘kin’ ‘bin’ ‘din’ ‘gin’
• Examples for practice (W/R p. 48)
– 3.2a Shinzwani
– 3.2b Hindi
– 3.2c Czech
– 3.2d French
– 3.2e Chatino.
Variations
• a phoneme can be a single sound/phone
• or it can be a group of sounds/phones
– members of a group are usually similar
• they are close on the phonetic chart
• they sound like ‘variations’ of one another
– members of a group are non-contrastive
• they don’t mark differences in meaning
– when such variations exist, they are called:
• are heard as ‘the same sound’ by native
speakers
• are usually ‘complementary’ to one another
– we say they are in ‘complementary distribution’
• because the variation is usually ‘conditioned’
by neighboring sounds,
– we can also call this ‘conditioned variation.’
Allophone Conditioning
• is usually
– patterned
– predictable
– discoverable
– describable.
Phonemes vs. Allophones:
Review
• allophones
– non-contrastive
– predictable distribution
• [pn] and [spn]
• phonemes
– contrastive
– non-predictable distribution
• [pn] vs [tn].
Etics vs. Emics
• Ken Pike, 1950s
• A core concept in anthropology
• Etics
– outside, cross-cultural /comparative
– absolute, objective
– a step to emic analysis
• Emics
– inside, culture-specific
– relative, subjective
– a goal of emic analysis.
Doing Phonological Research
• Descriptive v prescriptive approaches
– Transcription v spelling
• Avoid using your own categories
– Find out how the system operates on its own terms
• Describe the patterns you find
– Identify the units
– Identify relationships between the units.
Comparative Phonology
• How many phonemes in a language?
– From a few dozen to 100+
– average figures:
• vowels: 8.7
– English has 14
• consonants: 22.8
– English has 24