August 15th, 2010
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:
- this boy /ðɪs bɔɪ/ [ð̥ɪs b̥ɔɪ]
- my dog /maɪ dɒɡ/ [maɪ dɒɡ̊]
- misbehave /mɪsbɪheɪv/ [mɪsb̥ɪheɪv̥]
- 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!
Posted in Phonetics | No Comments »
August 14th, 2010
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A couple of days ago a trip to Glendurgan near Falmouth. It is a subtropical valley garden. We went there to meet up with my nephew, his wife and two sons. Sam (aged 3) and Joseph (aged 5). The garden was first laid out in the 1820s and 1830s by Alfred Fox and was handed over to the National Trust in 1962.
One of the attractions of the garden is a cherry yew maze and another is the small hamlet of Durgan at the bottom of the valley which looks onto a small beach on the Helford River.
Sam and Dad (and A. N. Other) in the centre of the maze
To the left you can see Sam’s preferred method of travel on the way to the beach. A jolly time was had by all and at the end of the visit at ice-cream o’clock Joseph expressed the opinion that the National Trust was very lucky to live in such a nice place.
The name of the village, Durgan, derives from Cornish Dowrgeun which means “otter water”. There is another valley garden called Trebah (meaning uncertain) just a mile or so to the west. You can see it on the satellite image at the top of the post.
Posted in Cornwall and Cornish | No Comments »
August 13th, 2010
On 8 March 2008 I wrote a short blog on Kāi Tahu Māori. You can see the complete post on this page. In that post I made two claims which I repeat here for convenience:
The letter k used to write KTM is unique in two respects. (1) it is the only orthographic symbol which incorporates underlining. (2) it is used to reference two different dialects of a language — in effect it means a [k] sound, which in other types of Māori is an [ŋ] sound.
(2) above I still believe to be true, but (1) definitely is not.
Having been trawling through Omniglot, I have come across a handful of languages which use a Latin-based script and which use underlining for various purposes.
For instance, a few Native American languages which indicate voiceless vowels this way. An example is Comanche which has voiceless versions of all its six vowels <a e i o u ʉ> (the last represents [ə]). So <a> = [ḁ], <e> = [e̥] etc.
More on this another time.
Posted in Languages, Phonetics | 3 Comments »
August 8th, 2010
Illiswilgig |
There are lots of charming and/or peculiar place-names on the Isles of Scilly. How about Illiswilgig? This was recorded in 1584 as Inniswelsick, meaning “grassy island”. An even odder one is Izzicumpucca. Apparently this was originally Islonk an Bucca, meaning “the Bucca’s chasm”. A Bucca is a Cornish imp. A couple which always seem to me as if they ought to be somewhere in the Mediterranean are Minalto and Mincarlo. In both cases the first element is Cornish mên – “stone”. In the first name the second element is altow, meaning “cliffs, and in the second name it is carlyth, meaning “rayfish”.
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Photo credit: © Copyright David Lally and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence
Posted in Cornwall and Cornish | 3 Comments »
August 3rd, 2010
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.
Posted in Phonetics | 1 Comment »
