A LITTLE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PHONETICS Peter Roach Professor of Phonetics University of Reading, UK. email: [email protected] Website: http://www.personal.reading.ac.uk/~llsroach/peter/ 2002 This book is aimed at first-year students of Phonetics. It is based on a book I wrote which was published in 1992. The book, which had the title Introducing Phonetics, has now been deleted from the publisher's list. The title was misleading: this is not an introduction to Phonetics but a series of short explanations of technical terms used in the subject. I have, in fact, written what I hope is a truly introductory textbook on Phonetics for Oxford University Press in the series Oxford Introductions to Language Study, edited by Henry Widdowson, which was published in 2001. Its title is Phonetics. Many of the examples in this encyclopaedia are from English (as spoken in England). Although I would have liked to use a lot more examples from other languages, English is relevant and familiar for the majority of users of the book. For further detail of the phonetics of English, please see my English Phonetics and Phonology (Cambridge University Press: 3rd Edition, 2000). At the end, I have added a list of recommended reading. Since I feel that this little encyclopaedia still has some use, I have updated and rewritten the material from the earlier book, and hope that it will be useful to students in getting to grips with terminology in Phonetics. In keeping with the practice in the earlier book, I have printed in bold type words which are defined elsewhere in the book. I would be grateful for suggestions on how to improve it. The nice thing about books in electronic form is that improvements and corrections can be made immediately. Peter Roach Peter Roach 2 Symbols for English Transcription (a) Vowels British English (BBC accent) is generally described as having short vowels, long vowels and diphthongs. There are said to be seven short vowels, five long ones and eight diphthongs. • Short vowels: pit pet pat putt pot put another ɪ e æ ʌ ɒ ʊ ǝ ǝ • Long vowels: bean barn born boon burn iː ɑː ɔː uː ɜː • Diphthongs: bay buy boy no now peer pair poor eɪ ai ɔɪ ǝʊ aʊ ɪǝ eǝ ʊǝ (b) Consonants Plosives: p b t d k g pin bin tin din kin gum Affricates: ʧ ʤ ch ain Jane Fricatives: f v θ ð s z ʃ ʒ h f ine vine think this seal zeal sheep measure how Nasals: m n ŋ sum sun sung Approximants: l r w j l ight right wet yet Peter Roach 3 See also the IPA Chart at the end of the book. accent This word is used (rather confusingly) in two different senses: (1) accent may refer to prominence given to a syllable, usually by the use of pitch. For example, in the word 'potato' the middle syllable is the most prominent; if you say the word on its own you will probably produce a fall in pitch on the middle syllable, making that syllable accented. In this sense, accent is distinguished from the more general term stress, which is more often used to refer to all sorts of prominence (including prominence resulting from increased loudness, length or sound quality), or to refer to the effort made by the speaker in producing a stressed syllable. (2) accent also refers to a particular way of pronouncing: for example, you might find a number of English speakers who all share the same grammar and vocabulary, but pronounce what they say with different accents such as Scots, Cockney or Received Pronunciation (BBC accent). The word accent in this sense is distinguished from dialect, which usually refers to a variety of a language that differs from other varieties in grammar and/or vocabulary. acoustic phonetics An important part of phonetics is the study of the physics of the speech signal: when sound travels through the air from the speaker's mouth to the hearer's ear it does so in the form of vibrations in the air. It is possible to measure and analyse these vibrations by mathematical techniques, usually by using specially-developed computer software to produce spectrograms. Acoustic phonetics also studies the relationship between activity in the speaker's vocal tract and the resulting sounds. Analysis of speech by acoustic phonetics is claimed to be more objective and scientific than the traditional auditory method which depends on the reliability of the trained human ear. active articulator see articulation affricate An affricate is a type of consonant consisting of a plosive followed by a fricative with the same place of articulation: examples are the /ʧ/ and /ʤ/ sounds at the beginning and end of the English words 'church' /ʧɜːʧ/, 'judge' /ʤʌʤ/ (the first of these is voiceless, the second voiced). It is often difficult to decide whether any particular combination of a plosive plus a fricative should be classed as a single Peter Roach 4 affricate sound or as two separate sounds, and the question depends on whether these are to be regarded as separate phonemes or not. It is usual to regard /ʧ/ and /ʤ/ as affricate phonemes in English (usually symbolised č , j by American writers); /ts, dz, tr, dr / also occur in English but are not usually regarded as affricates. The two phrases 'why choose' /waɪ ʧuːz/ and 'white shoes' /waɪt ʃuːz/ are said to show the difference between the /ʧ/ affricate (in the first example) and separate /t/ and /ʃ/ (in the second). air-stream All speech sounds are made by making air move. Usually the air is moved outwards from the body, creating an egressive airstream; more rarely speech sounds are made by drawing air into the body - an ingressive airstream. The most common way of moving air is by compression of the lungs so that the air is expelled through the vocal tract. This is called a pulmonic airstream (usually an egressive pulmonic one, but occasionally speech is produced while breathing in). Others are the glottalic (produced by the larynx, with closed vocal folds; it is moved up and down like the plunger of a bicycle pump) and the velaric (where the back of the tongue is pressed against the soft palate, or velum, making an air-tight seal, and then drawn backwards or forwards to produce an airstream). Ingressive glottalic consonants (often called implosives) and egressive ones (ejectives) are found in many non-European languages; click sounds (ingressive velaric) are much rarer, but occur in a number of southern African languages such as Hottentot, Xhosa and Zulu. Speakers of other languages, including English, use click sounds for non-linguistic communication, as in the case of the "tut-tut" (American "tsk-tsk") sound of disapproval. allophone Central to the concept of the phoneme is the idea that it may be pronounced in many different ways. In English (BBC) we take it for granted that the /r/ sound in 'ray' and 'tray' are "the same sound" (i.e. the same phoneme), but in reality the two sounds are very different - the /r/ in 'ray' is voiced and non- fricative, while the /r/ sound in 'tray' is voiceless and fricative. In phonemic transcription we use the same symbol /r/ for both (the slant brackets indicate that phonemic symbols are being used), but we know that the allophones of /r/ include the voiced non-fricative sound and the voiceless fricative one. Using the square brackets that indicate phonetic (allophonic) symbols, the former is [̻] and the latter []. In theory a phoneme can have an infinite number of allophones, but in practice for descriptive purposes we tend to concentrate on the ones that occur most regularly. Peter Roach 5 alveolar Behind the upper front teeth there is a hard, bony ridge called the alveolar ridge; the skin covering it is corrugated with transverse wrinkles. The tongue comes into contact with this in some of the consonants of English and many other languages; sounds such as [t], [d], [s], [z], [n], [l] are consonants with alveolar place of articulation. alveolo-palatal When we look at the places of articulation used by different languages we find many differences in the region between the upper teeth and the front part of the palate. It has been proposed that there is a difference between alveolo-palatal and palato-alveolar that can be reliably distinguished, though others argue that factors other than place of articulation are usually involved, and there is no longer an alveolo- palatal column on the IPA Chart. The former place is further forward in the mouth than the latter: the usual example given for alveolo-palatal consonants is that of Polish // and // as in 'Kasia' and 'kasza'. anterior In phonology it is sometimes necessary to distinguish the class of sounds that are articulated in the front part of the mouth (anterior sounds) from those articulated towards the back of the mouth. All sounds forward of palato-alveolar are classed as anterior. apical Consonantal articulations made with the tip of the tongue are called apical; this term is usually contrasted with laminal, the adjective used to refer to tongue-blade articulations. It is said that English /s/ is usually articulated with the tongue blade, but Spanish /s/ (when it occurs before a vowel) and Greek /s/ are said to be apical, giving a different sound quality. approximant This is a phonetic term of comparatively recent origin. It is used to denote a consonant which makes very little obstruction to the airflow. Traditionally these have been divided into two groups: semivowels such as the /w/ in English 'wet' and /j/ in English 'yet', which are very similar to close vowels such as [u] and [i] but are produced as a rapid glide, and liquids, sounds which have an identifiable constriction of the airflow but not one that is sufficiently obstructive to produce fricative noise, compression or the diversion of airflow through another part of the vocal tract as in nasals. This category includes laterals Peter Roach 6 such as English /l/ in 'lead' and non-fricative /r/ (phonetically []) in 'read'. Approximants therefore are never fricative and never contain interruptions to the flow of air. articulator/ory/ation The concept of the articulator is a very important one in phonetics. We can only produce speech sound by moving parts of our body, and this is done by the contraction of muscles. Most of the movements relevant to speech take place in the mouth and throat area (though we should not forget the activity in the chest for breath control), and the parts of the mouth and throat area that we move when speaking are called articulators. The principal articulators are the tongue, the lips, the lower jaw and the teeth, the velum or soft palate, the uvula and the larynx. It has been suggested that we should distinguish between active articulators (those which can be moved into contact with other articulators, such as the tongue), and passive articulators which are fixed in place (such as the teeth, the hard palate and the alveolar ridge). The branch of phonetics that studies articulators and their actions is called articulatory phonetics. articulatory setting This is an idea that has an immediate appeal to pronunciation teachers, but has never been fully investigated. The idea is that when we pronounce a foreign language, we need to set our whole speech- producing apparatus into an appropriate 'posture' or 'setting' for speaking that language. English speakers with a good French accent, for example, are said to adjust their lips to a more protruded and rounded shape than they use for speaking English, and people who can speak several languages are claimed to have different "gears" to shift into when they start saying something in one of their languages. (See also voice quality). arytenoids Inside the larynx there is a tiny pair of cartilages shaped rather like dogs' ears. They can be moved in many different directions. The rear ends of the vocal folds are attached to them, so that if the arytenoids are moved towards each other the folds are brought together, making a glottal closure or constriction, and when they are moved apart the folds are parted to produce an open glottis. The arytenoids contribute to the regulations of pitch: if they are tilted backwards, the vocal folds are stretched lengthwise (which raises the pitch if voicing is going on), while tilting them forwards lowers the pitch as the folds become thicker. Peter Roach 7 aspiration This is noise made when a consonantal constriction is released and air is allowed to escape relatively freely. English /p t k / at the beginning of a syllable are aspirated in most accents, so that in words like 'pea', 'tea', 'key' the silent period while the compressed air is prevented from escaping by the articulatory closure is followed by a sound similar to /h/ before the voicing of the vowel begins. This is the result of the vocal folds being widely parted at the time of the articulatory release. It is noticeable that when /p t k / are preceded by /s/ at the beginning of a syllable they are not aspirated. Pronunciation teachers used to make learners of English practise aspirated plosives by seeing if they could blow out a candle flame with the rush of air after /p t k / - this can, of course, lead to a rather exaggerated pronunciation. A rather different articulation is used for so-called voiced aspirated plosives found in many Indian languages (often spelt 'bh', 'dh', 'gh' in the Roman alphabet) where after the release of the constriction the vocal folds vibrate to produce voicing, but are not firmly pressed together; the result is that a large amount of air escapes at the same time, producing a "breathy" quality. It is not necessarily only plosives that are aspirated: both unaspirated and aspirated affricates are found in Hindi, for example, and unaspirated and aspirated voiceless fricatives are found in Burmese. See also voice onset time. assimilation If speech is thought of as a string of sounds linked together, assimilation is what happens to a sound when it is influenced by one of its neighbours. For example, the word 'this' has the sound /s/ at the end if it is pronounced on its own, but when followed by /ʃ/ in a word such as 'shop' it often changes in rapid speech (through assimilation) to /ʃ/, giving the pronunciation / ðɪʃʃɒp /. Assimilation is said to be progressive when a sound influences a following sound, or regressive when a sound influences one which precedes it; the most familiar case of regressive assimilation in English is that of alveolar consonants (e.g. / t d s z n /) which are followed by non-alveolar consonants: assimilation results in a change of place of articulation from alveolar to a different place. The example of 'this shop' is of this type; others are 'football' (where 'foot' / fʊt/ and / bɔːl / combine to produce / fʊpbɔːl /) and 'fruit-cake' (/ fruːt / + / keɪk / = / fruːkkeɪk /). Progressive assimilation is exemplified by the behaviour of the 's' Peter Roach 8 plural ending in English, which is pronounced with a voiced / z / after a voiced consonant (e.g. 'dogs' /dɒgz/) but with a voiceless / s / after a voiceless consonant (e.g. 'cats' / kæts /). The notion of assimilation is full of problems: it is often unhelpful to think of it in terms of one sound being the cause of the assimilation and the other the victim of it, when in many cases sounds appear to influence each other mutually; it is often not clear whether the result of assimilation is supposed to be a different allophone or a different phoneme; and we find many cases where instances of assimilation seem to spread over many sounds instead of being restricted to two adjacent sounds as the conventional examples suggest. Research on such phenomena in experimental phonetics does not usually use the notion of assimilation, preferring the more neutral concept of coarticulation. attitude/inal Intonation is often said to have an attitudinal function. What this means is that intonation is used to indicate to the hearer a particular attitude on the part of the speaker (e.g. friendly, doubtful, enthusiastic). Considerable importance has been given by some language teaching experts to learning to express the right attitudes through intonation, but it has proved extremely difficult to state usable rules for foreigners to learn and results have often been disappointing. It has also proved very difficult to design and carry out scientific studies of the way intonation conveys attitudes in normal speech. auditory When the analysis of speech is carried out by the listener's ear, the analysis is said to be an auditory one, and when the listener's brain receives information from the ears it is said to be receiving auditory information. In practical phonetics, great importance has been given to auditory training: this is sometimes known as ear-training, but in fact it is the brain and not the ear that is trained. With expert teaching and regular practice it is possible to learn to make much more precise and reliable discriminations among speech sounds than untrained people are capable of. Although the analysis of speech sounds by the trained expert can be carried out entirely auditorily, in most cases the analyst also tries to make the sound (particularly when working face to face with a native speaker of the language or dialect), and the proper name for this analysis is then auditory-kinaesthetic. Peter Roach 9 BBC pronunciation The British Broadcasting Corporation is looked up to by many people in Britain and abroad as a custodian of good English; this attitude is normally only in respect of certain broadcasters who represent the "official" voice of the Corporation, such as newsreaders and announcers, and does not apply to the "unofficial" voices of people such as disc-jockeys and chat-show presenters (who may speak as they please). The high status given to the BBC's voices relates both to pronunciation and to grammar, and there are listeners who write angry letters to the BBC or the Radio Times to complain about "incorrect" pronunciations such as "loranorder" for "law and order". Although the attitude that the BBC has a responsibility to preserve some imaginary pure form of English for posterity is extreme, there is much to be said for using the "official" BBC accent as a standard for foreign learners wishing to acquire an English accent. The old standard "RP" is based on a very old-fashioned view of the language; the present-day BBC accent is easily accessible and easy to record and examine. It is relatively free from class-based associations and it is available throughout the world on the Overseas Service of the BBC. The BBC nowadays uses quite a large number of speakers from Celtic countries (particularly Ireland, Scotland and Wales), and the description of "BBC Pronunciation" should not be treated as including such speakers. The Corporation has its own Pronunciation Unit, but contrary to some people's belief its function is more to advise on the pronunciation of foreign words and of obscure British names than to monitor pronunciation standards. Broadcasters are not under any obligation to consult the Unit, and in addition, the BBC now obliges broadcasters to pay for consulting it. bilabial See labial, place of articulation. binary Phonologists like to make clear-cut divisions between groups of sounds, and usually this involves "either-or" choices: a sound is either voiced or voiceless, consonantal or non-consonantal, rounded or unrounded. Such choices are binary choices. In the study of phonetics, however, it is acknowledged that sounds differ from each other in "more or less" fashion rather than "either-or": features like voicing, nasality or rounding are scalar or multi-valued, and a sound can be, for example, fully voiced, partly voiced, just a little bit voiced or not voiced at all. Peter Roach 10 brackets When we write phonetic or phonemic transcription it is conventional to use brackets at the beginning and end of the item or passage to indicate the nature of the symbols. Generally, slant brackets (or "obliques") are used to indicate phonemic transcription and square brackets for phonetic transcription. For example, for the word 'phonetics' we could write / fnetks / and [ fnetsks]. breath The movement of air into and out of the lungs. Speech is something which is imposed on normal breathing, resulting in a reduced rate of air-flow out of the body. Mostly the air pressure that pushes air out and allows us to produce speech sounds is caused by the chest walls pressing down on the lungs, and we can give the air an extra push with the diaphragm, a large sheet of muscle lying between the lungs and the stomach. breath-group In order to carry out detailed analysis, linguists need to divide continuous speech into small, identifiable units. In the present-day written forms of European languages, the sentence is an easy unit to work with, and the full stop ("period" in U.S.A.) clearly marks its boundaries. It would be helpful if we could identify something similar in spoken language and one possible candidate is a unit whose boundaries are marked by the places where we pause to breathe: the breath-group. Unfortunately, although in the production of isolated sentences and in very careful speech the places where a speaker will breathe may be quite predictable, in natural speech such regularity disappears, so that the breath-group can vary very greatly in terms of its length and its relationship to linguistic structure. It is, consequently, little used in modern phonetics and linguistics. breathy This is one of the adjectives used to describe voice quality or phonation type. In breathy voice, the vocal folds vibrate but allow a considerable amount of air to escape at the same time; this adds "noise" (similar to loud breathing) to the sound produced by the vocal folds. It is conventionally thought that breathy voice makes women's voices sound attractive, and it is used by speakers in television advertisements for "soft" products like toilet paper and baby powder. broad phonetic transcription see transcription