John Maidment's Blog

In a comment on my post about Scilly place-names Glorios from South Korea asked some questions about English pronunciation. I promised to deal with them in another post. So here we go…

Glorios wrote:

my own finding is that for me when some voiced sounds come at the end of words or syllables, the sound of voiced sounds seem to get closer to the sound of its voiceless partners.

can you explain why and let me know the way to distinguish them.

Glorios is quite right, of course, but we can get a bit more specific than that. There is a process in English called devoicing. Some voiced sounds lose some or all of their vocal fold vibration in certain environments.

Question (1) Which sounds are affected? There are two different groups, which behave differently from one another. Group 1: Obstruent consonants /b d ɡ v ð z ʒ dʒ/ Group 2: approximant consonants /w r l j/.

Question (2) When do they lose their vocal fold vibration? For the Group 1 consonants to retain full voicing they must be surrounded by voiced sounds. If one of the Group 1 consonants is preceded by a voiceless sound or silence, or followed by a voiceless sound or silence, then some or all of its vocal fold vibration will be lost. Here are some examples of devoicing of Group 1 consonants with a phonemic and a phonetic transcription:

1. this boy /ðɪs bɔɪ/ [ð̥ɪs b̥ɔɪ]
2. my dog /maɪ dɒɡ/ [maɪ dɒɡ̊]
3. misbehave /mɪsbɪheɪv/ [mɪsb̥ɪheɪv̥]
4. She’s so good /ʃiːz səʊ ɡʊd/ [ʃiːz̥ səʊ ɡʊd̥]

From the above we can learn a number of things:

• Devoicing is indicated in a phonetic transcription by a small circle below the relevant symbol, or in the case of symbols with descenders, above it.
• Devoicing can take place at the beginnings of words, at the ends of words, and in the middle of words.
• Devoicing of Group 1 consonants is very frequent in English.

I’m going to leave the rest of the story for another day. Watch this space!

Just in case you are not familiar with the terminology, pulmonic ingressive sounds are made with air drawn into the lungs rather than the usual outward direction of pulmonic egressive sounds. When I was teaching phonetics and dealing with the matter of airstream mechanisms I regularly skimmed over the matter of pulmonic ingressive sounds. This was just to keep things simple. Pulmonic ingressive sounds are quite interesting, however.

Usually published accounts of airstream mechanisms do what I used to do and say airily that they are only used for paralinguistic purposes like expressing pain. There is more to the matter than that.

First, there is the matter of Damin, a ritual language spoken by members of two Australian peoples, the Lardil and the Yangkaal, who live on islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It seems likely that the language was invented by the Lardil, though they maintain that it was created by a mythological figure in the Dreamtime. The phoneme inventory of Damin is very similar to that of Lardil, except that it contains six extra consonant segments:

• Four nasalised clicks: ŋʘ ŋ| ŋǃ ŋǂ (Damin is the only language outside Southern Africa to have clicks)
• A reverse click kʘ↑
• A pulmonic ingressive voiceless lateral fricative ɬ↓

Next we have ǃXóõ, a language of Botswana, which has a stupendous array of clicks, including aspirated clicks with a voiceless ingressive nasal accompaniment at five places of articulation – ↓ŋ̊ʘʰ and the like. You can hear sound files for these and all the clicks at the UCLA Archive.

Then there is the mysterious case of Tsou, a Taiwanese language. Sometime in the 1990s a study of the speech of one speaker of this language was published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association. It was reported that word-initial voiceless fricatives were produced with a pulmonic ingressive airstream mechanism. A subsequent study with other speakers failed to corroborate this finding.

I think the use of pulmonic ingressive speech as a paralinguistic feature is rather under-researched. However, there is some interesting information about this on Robert Eklund’s site.