Consonants and vowels

John Goldsmith

Kinds of phonetics

• Transcribing: descriptive phonetics? transcriptional phonetics? No standard name.

• Articulatory phonetics• Acoustic phonetics• Perceptual phonetics (Psychology)• Computational phonetics (CS)

Articulatory apparatus

Some (not so happy) assumptions generally made to

do transcriptions• There is a (1-dimensional) sequence of units

that define or characterize the utterance – rather than 2 or more parallel streams. We think of the articulators as being a single instrument rather than as an orchestra.

• We can slice the utterances into pieces vertically, in time, and ignore most differences in duration.

• Sounds follow one another, and that’s it: there is no packing of them into groups.

Sounds of English

Consonants: first, the stops:• b as in bat, sob, cubby• d as in date, hid, ado• g as in gas, lag, ragged• p as in pet, tap, repeat• t as in tap, pet, attack• k as in king, pick, picking

When we need to emphasizethat we are using a phonetic transcription, we put squarebrackets [b] around the symbols.

More consonants: fricatives

• f as in fail, life• v as in veil, live• Ɵ as in thin, wrath• ð as in this, bathe• s as in soft, miss• z as in zoo, as• š (American) or ʃ (IPA) as in shame, mash• ž (American) or ǯ (IPA)as in triage, garage,

azure, • h as in help, vehicular

affricates

• č (American) or tʃ (IPA) as in cheap, hatch

• ǰ (American) or ʤ (IPA) as in jump, hedge

nasal consonants

• m as in map, him• n as in knot, tin (alveolar POA)• ñ as in canyon • ŋ as in sing, gingham, dinghy

Liquids

• l as in large, gull• r as in red, jar

glides and semi-consonants

• y (American) or j (IPA) as in boy, yellow

• w as in wall, cow

Sub-Classification of Consonants

• 6 stops• 2 affricates• 9 fricatives• 4 nasals• 2 liquids• 2 glides

Short vowels

Front: I as in bitƐ as in betæ as in batBack

as in putʌ as in putt as in boughta or ɑ as in Mott,

ma, spot

ǝ “schwa” as in about

Long vowels

• iy or i as in beet• ey or ej as in bait• ay as in bite• oy as in boy• uw or u as in boot• ow as in boat• aw as how

Review where we’ve been

• We’ve listened to the sounds of “our” English, and assigned a set of symbols to them.

• We abstracted away from pitch, loudness, and duration.

• We hope to better understanding our language’s sounds by analyzing them as being composed of a sequence of identifiable sounds, each of which occurs frequently in words of the language.

• Frequently? If a sound occurs in just 2 or 3 words, we don’t take it seriously (glottal stop, velar fricative)

• We do this against the background knowledge that the inventory of sounds in English is not necessary as human languages go: they are what they are against a much wider backdrop of possible linguistic sounds.

• We also attempt to physically characterize these sounds: acoustically and articulatorily. Consonants are easier to characterize articulatorily, vowels acoustically.

• We are particularly interested in those ways in which the English of Speaker 1 is different from the English of Speaker 2: again, working against the background knowledge of variation.

• We also characterize differences of sounds across sound contexts: we say, notice the different sound that occurs in front of a voiceless consonant in height.

• Looking ahead to phonology, we will attempt to get a handle on variation in sounds in two ways:– Two sounds are similar if (roughly) we can

characterize one of them as a variant of the other used in a particular context (“under the influence of that context,” so to speak)

– Two sounds are distinct (hence, different) if two distinct words differ only with regard to these two sounds, in otherwise identical positions

• We try to characterize the inventory of sounds in a language, knowing that that language chose one set of sounds when a vast range of other possibilities might have been chosen.

Symbols

• We assign symbols to these sounds; in addition, we want to characterize them as best we can articulatorily and acoustically.

Sounds can be divided into two major groups, consonants and vowels; or set along a continuum known as the sonority hierarchy:

Sonority hierarchy

• Vowels

• Glides

• Liquids

• Nasals

• Obstruents: – Fricatives– Affricates– Stops

Consonants

• Consonants = obstruents + sonorants– Obstruents: (oral) stops, affricates, and

fricatives– Sonorants: nasals and liquids (l,r)

Consonants have a point of articulation

The crucial points of articulation for English consonants are:

• Labial• Labio-dental• Dental• Alveolar: at the alveolar ridge, behind the teeth• Post-alveolar/palato-alveolar/alveopalatal:

multiple names for the same thing• Retroflex (r only)• Palatal (y, ñ)• Velar• Laryngeal

Obstruents:

• 6 stops

• 9 fricatives

• 2 affricates

• Nasals (4)

• 2 other sonorants (what are they?)

• 2 glides

Vowels

• Vowels are harder to characterize articulatorily, but we try!

• The fact that it’s harder is reflected in the fact that there is more than one way in which it’s done. IPA is one way; American is another.

IPA

Two systems side by side

A phonetic chart based on the first two formants

From: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/music/vocres.html

/i/ green

/ae/ hat

/u/ boot

graphics thanks to Kevin Russell, Univ of Manitoba

“Hi” /haj/

we were away a year ago FORMANTS