The Sounds of Language

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The Sounds of Language
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The Sounds of Language

• Phonology, Phonetics Phonemics
• Producing and writing speech sounds...
• Consonants, vowels sound charts
• Phonemic analysis...
• Etics and Emics
• Applications.

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Phonetics

• Acoustic
• physical properties of sound, sound waves,
• Auditory
• perception of sounds, psychological reality
• Articulatory
• pronunciation of sounds, articulation
• also known as descriptive phonetics.

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Producing Speech Sounds

• lungs

• oral nasal cavities

• larynx vocal cords
• voicing

• velum (soft palate) mouth closed m, n
  mouth open õ?

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Writing Speech Sounds

• Spelling vs phonetic transcription
• cat (English)
• ciel (French)
• cizi (Czech)
• ghoti
• Phonetic charts
• I.P.A.
• Pike.

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Consonants

• Point of Articulation (Place in vocal tract)
• Manner of Articulation
• Voice

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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.
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Consonants Place (continued)

• Front to back

retroflex ?, ?
velar k, g, x, ?, ?
uvular ? (French r)
pharyngeal ? (Arabic ain)
glottal ?, h .
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Consonants Manner

• Stops (plosives) t, d, !, ?
• Aspirated th, dh
• Fricatives s, z
• Affricates ?, ?
• Taps Trills
• Taps / flaps ?
• Trills r
• Nasals n
• Approximants l, ?, j, w .

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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 .

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Consonants Review
different languages may use different sounds
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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.

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Charting and Sounds

• Shinzwani ?
• voiceless
• retroflex
• stop
• Czech r
• voiced
• alveolar
• fricative
• AND trill.

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Charting and Accents 1

• How would you pronounce Shinzwani ?ona?
• Why did you make the choice you made?
• Place?
• Manner?.

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Vowels Place

• part of tongue raised
• front, center, back
• height of tongue
• high, mid, low

i u e o a
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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 .

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Charting Vowels
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Diphthongs

• to front
• ii seen
• ai sign
• ?i boid

to back uu sue ou hoe au how.
to center i? beer e? bear a? bar ?? bore
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Suprasegmentals

• Additional pronunciation
• o as segment
• Marked with diacritics
• ? as suprasegmental (nasalization)
• o? nasalized segment.

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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.

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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/ .

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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.

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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 dont mark differences in meaning
• when such variations exist, they are called

allophones of a phoneme
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allophones of a phoneme

• 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.

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Allophone Conditioning

• is usually
• patterned
• predictable
• discoverable
• describable.

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Phonemes vs. Allophones Review

• allophones
• non-contrastive
• predictable distribution
• p??n and sp?n
• phonemes
• contrastive
• non-predictable distribution
• p??n vs t??n.

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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.

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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.

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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