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Manner Of Articulation

Manner of articulation

In linguistics, manner of articulation describes how the tongue, lips, and other speech organs involved in making a sound make contact. Often the concept is only used for the production of consonants. For any place of articulation, there may be several manners, and therefore several homorganic consonants. One parameter of manner is stricture, that is, how closely the speech organs approach one another. Parameters other than stricture are those involved in the ar sounds (taps and trills), and the sibilancy of fricatives. Often nasality and laterality are included in manner, but phoneticians such as Peter Ladefoged consider them to be independent.

Stricture

From greatest to least stricture, speech sounds may be classified along a cline as stop consonants (with occlusion, or blocked airflow), fricative consonants (with partially blocked and therefore strongly turbulent airflow), approximants (with only slight turbulence), and vowels (with full unimpeded airflow). Affricates often behave as if they were intermediate between stops and fricatives, but phonetically they are sequences of stop plus fricative. Historically, sounds may move along this cline toward less stricture in a process called lenition.

Other parameters

Sibilants are distinguished from other fricatives by the shape of the tongue and how the airflow is directed over the teeth. Fricatives at coronal places of articulation may be sibilant or non-sibilant, with sibilants more common. Taps and flaps are similar to very brief stops. However, their articulation and behavior is distinct enough to be considered a separate manner, rather than just length. Trills involve the vibration of one of the speech organs. Since trilling is a separate parameter from stricture, the two may be combined. Increasing the stricture of a typical trill results in a trilled fricative. Trilled affricates are also known. Nasal airflow may be added as an independent parameter to any speech sound. It is most commonly found in nasal stops and nasal vowels, but nasal fricatives, taps, and approximants are also found. When a sound is not nasal, it is called oral. An oral stop is often called a plosive, while a nasal stop is generally just called a nasal. Laterality is the release of airflow at the side of the tongue. This can also be combined with other manners, resulting in lateral approximants (the most common), lateral flaps, and lateral fricatives and affricates.

Individual manners

- Plosive, or oral stop, where there is complete occlusion (blockage) of both the oral and nasal cavities of the vocal tract, and therefore no air flow. Examples include English /p t k/ (voiceless) and /b d g/ (voiced). If the consonant is voiced, the voicing is the only sound made during occlusion; if it is voiceless, a plosive is completely silent. What we hear as a /p/ or /k/ is the effect that the onset of the occlusion has on the preceding vowel, and well as the release burst and its effect on the following vowel. The shape and position of the tongue (the place of articulation) determine the resonant cavity that gives different plosives their characteristic sounds. All languages have plosives.
- Nasal stop, usually shortened to nasal, where there is complete occlusion of the oral cavity, and the air instead passes instead through the nose. The shape and position of the tongue determine the resonant cavity that gives different nasal stops their characteristic sounds. Examples include English /m, n/. Nearly all languages have nasals, the only exceptions being in the area of Puget Sound and a single language on Bougainville Island.
- Fricative, sometimes called spirant, where there is continuous frication (turbulent and noisy airflow) at the place of articulation. Examples include English /f, s/ (voiceless), /v, z/ (voiced), etc. Most languages have fricatives, though many have only an /s/. However, the Australian languages are almost completely devoid of fricatives of any kind. :
- Sibilants are a type of fricative where the airflow is guided by a groove in the tongue toward the teeth, creating a high-pitched and very distinctive sound. These are by far the most common fricatives. Fricatives at coronal (front of tongue) places of articulation are usually, though not always, sibilants. English sibilants include /s/ and /z/. :
- Lateral fricatives are a rare type of fricative, where the frication occurs on one or both sides of the edge of the tongue. The "ll" of the Welsh language and the "hl" of Zulu are lateral fricatives.
- Affricate, which begins like a plosive, but this releases into a fricative rather than having a separate release of its own. The English letters "ch" and "j" represent affricates. Affricates are quite common around the world, though less ubiquitous than fricatives.
- Flap, often called a tap, is a momentary closure of the oral cavity. The "tt" of "utter" and the "dd" of "udder" are pronounced as a flap in North American English. Many linguists distinguish taps from flaps, but there is no consensus on what the difference might be. No language relies on such a difference. There are also lateral flaps.
- Trill, in which the articulator (usually the tip of the tongue) is held in place, and the airstream causes it to vibrate. The double "r" of Spanish "perro" is a trill. Trills and flaps, where there is one or more brief occlusions, constitute a class of consonant called rhotics.
- Approximant, where there is very little obstruction. Examples include English /w/ and /r/. In some languages, such as Spanish, there are sounds which seem to fall between fricative and approximant. :
- One use of the word semivowel is a type of approximant, pronounced like a vowel but with the tongue closer to the roof of the mouth, so that there is slight turbulence. In English, /w/ is the semivowel equivalent of the vowel /u/, and /j/ (spelled "y") is the semivowel equivalent of the vowel /i/ in this usage. Other descriptions use semivowel for vowel-like sounds that are not syllabic, but don't have the increased stricture of approximants. These are found as elements in diphthongs. The word may also be used to cover both concepts. :
- Lateral approximants, usually shortened to lateral, are a type of approximant pronounced with the side of the tongue. English /l/ is a lateral. Together with the rhotics, which have similar behavior in many languages, these form a class of consonant called liquids.

Broader classifications

Manners of articulation with substantial obstruction of the airflow (plosives, fricatives, affricates) are called obstruents. These are prototypically voiceless, but voiced obstruents are extremely common as well. Manners without such obstruction (nasals, liquids, approximants, and also vowels) are called sonorants because they are nearly always voiced. Voiceless sonorants are uncommon, but are found in Welsh and Classical Greek (the spelling "rh"), in Tibetan (the "lh" of Lhasa), and the "wh" in those dialects of English which distinguish "which" from "witch". Sonorants may also be called resonants, and some linguists prefer that term, restricting the word 'sonorant' to non-vocoid resonants (that is, nasals and liquids, but not vowels or semi-vowels). Another common distinction is between stops (plosives and nasals) and continuants (all else); affricates are considered to be both, because they are sequences of stop plus fricative.

Other airstream initiations

All of these manners of articulation are pronounced with an airstream mechanism called pulmonic egressive, meaning that the air flows outward, and is powered by the lungs (actually the ribs and diaphragm). Other airstream mechanisms are possible. Sounds which rely on some of these include:
- Ejectives, which are glottalic egressive. That is, the airstream is powered by an upward movement of the glottis rather than by the lungs or diaphragm. Plosives, affricates, and occasionally fricatives may occur as ejectives. All ejectives are voiceless.
- Implosives, which are glottalic ingressive. Here the glottis moves downward, but the lungs may be used simultaneously (to provide voicing), and in some languages no air may actually flow into the mouth. Implosive oral stops are not uncommon, but implosive affricates and fricatives are rare. Voiceless implosives are also rare.
- Clicks, which are velaric ingressive. Here the back of the tongue is used to create a vacuum in the mouth, causing air to rush in when the foreward occlusion (tongue or lips) is released. Clicks may be oral or nasal, stop or affricate, central or lateral, voiced or voiceless. They are extremely rare in normal words outside Southern Africa. However, English has a click in its "tsk tsk" (or "tut tut") sound, and another is used to say "giddy up" to a horse.

External links

- [http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~danhall/phonetics/sammy.html Interactive place and manner of articulation] Category:Phonetics ko:조음 방법 ja:調音方法

Consonant

:See also consonance in music. A consonant is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by a closure or stricture of the vocal tract sufficient to cause audible turbulence. The word consonant comes from Latin and means "sounding with" or "sounding together", the idea being that consonants don't sound on their own, but only occur with a nearby vowel, which is the case in Latin. This conception of consonants, however, does not reflect the modern linguistic understanding which defines consonants in terms of vocal tract constriction. Since the number of consonants in the world's languages is much greater than the number of consonant letters in any one alphabet, linguists have devised systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique symbol to each possible consonant. In fact, the Latin alphabet, which is used to write English, has fewer consonant letters than English has consonant sounds, so some letters represent more than one consonant, and digraphs like "sh" and "th" are used to represent some sounds. Many speakers aren't even aware that the "th" sound in "this" is a different sound from the "th" sound in "thing" (in the IPA they're [ð] and [θ], respectively). Each consonant can be distinguished by several features:
- The manner of articulation is the method that the consonant is articulated, such as nasal (through the nose), stop (complete obstruction of air), or approximant (vowel like).
- The place of articulation is where in the vocal tract the obstruction of the consonant occurs, and which speech organs are involved. Places include bilabial (both lips), alveolar (tongue against the gum ridge), and velar (tongue against soft palate). Additionally, there may be a simultaneous narrowing at another place of articulation, such as palatalisation or pharyngealisation.
- The phonation of a consonant is how the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation. When the vocal cords vibrate fully, the consonant is called voiced; when they do not vibrate at all, it's voiceless.
- The voice onset time (VOT) indicates the timing of the phonation. Aspiration is a feature of VOT.
- The airstream mechanism is how the air moving through the vocal tract is powered. Most languages have exclusively pulmonic egressive consonants, which use the lungs and diaphragm, but ejectives, clicks, and implosives use different mechanisms.
- The length is how long the obstruction of a consonant lasts. This feature is not distinctive in English, but various languages such as Italian, Japanese and Finnish have two length levels, "single" and "geminate". Estonian and some Sami languages have three lengths on the phonetic level: short, geminate, and long geminate.
- The articulatory force is how much muscular energy is involved. This has been proposed many times, but no distinction relying exclusively on force has ever been demonstrated. All English consonants can be classified by a combination of these features, such as "voiceless alveolar stop consonant" [t]. In this case the airstream mechanism is omitted. Some pairs of consonants like p::b, t::d are sometimes called fortis and lenis, but this is a phonological rather than phonetic distinction.

Consonant as a symbol

The word consonant is also used to refer to a letter of an alphabet that denotes a consonant sound. Consonant letters in the English alphabet are B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, W, X, Z, and usually Y: The letter Y stands for the consonant [j] in "yoke" but for the vowel in "myth", for example.

Links

- [http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~danhall/phonetics/sammy.html interactive manner and place of articulation]
- [http://www.oneletterwords.com Dictionary of All-Consonant Words]: a free online dictionary with over 1,000 words with no vowels and examples of usage from literature.
- ko:닿소리 ja:子音

Place of articulation

In phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is the point of contact, where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an active (moving) articulator (typically some part of the tongue) and a passive (stationary) articulator (typically some part of the roof of the mouth). Along with the manner of articulation and phonation, this gives the consonant its distinctive sound.

Types of articulation

A place of articulation is defined as both the active and passive articulators. For instance, the active lower lip may contact either a passive upper lip (bilabial, like ) or the upper teeth (labiodental, like ). The hard palate may be contacted by either the front or the back of the tongue. If the front of the tongue is used, the place is called retroflex; if back of the tongue ("dorsum") is used, the place is called "dorsal-palatal", or more commonly, just palatal. There are five basic active articulators: the lip ("labial consonants"), the flexible front of the tongue ("coronal consonants"), the middle/back of the tongue ("dorsal consonants"), the root of the tongue together with the epiglottis ("radical consonants"), and the larynx ("laryngeal consonants"). These articulators can act independently of each other, and two or more may work together in what is called coarticulation (see below). The passive articulation, on the other hand, is a continuum without many clear-cut boundaries. The places linguolabial and interdental, interdental and dental, dental and alveolar, alveolar and palatal, palatal and velar, velar and uvular merge into one another, and a consonant may be pronounced somewhere between the named places. In addition, when the front of the tongue is used, it may be the upper surface or blade of the tongue that makes contact ("laminal consonants"), the tip of the tongue ("apical consonants"), or the under surface ("sub-apical consonants"). These articulations also merge into one another without clear boundaries. Consonants that have the same place of articulation, such as alveolar [n, t, d, s, z, l] in English, are said to be homorganic.

Table of active articulations and places of articulation

List of places where the obstruction may occur

- Bilabial: between the lips
- Labiodental: between the lower lip and the upper teeth
- Linguolabial: between the front of the tongue and the upper lip
- Dental: between the front of the tongue and the top teeth
- Alveolar: between the front of the tongue and the ridge behind the gums (the alveolus)
- Postalveolar: between the front of the tongue and the space behind the alveolar ridge
- Retroflex: in "true" retroflexes, the tongue curls back so the underside touches the palate
- Palatal: between the middle of the tongue and the hard palate
- Velar: between the back of the tongue and the soft palate (the velum)
- Uvular: between the back of the tongue and the uvula (which hangs down in the back of the mouth) (All of the above may be nasalized, and most may be lateralized.)
- Pharyngeal: between the root of the tongue and the back of the throat (the pharynx)
- Epiglotto-pharyngeal: between the epiglottis and the back of the throat
- Epiglottal: between the aryepiglottal folds and the epiglottis (see larynx)
- Glottal: at the glottis (see larynx)

Nasals and laterals

- In nasals, the velum is lowered to allow air to pass through the nose (technically a place, but generally considered as a manner of articulation)
- In laterals, the air is released past the tongue sides and teeth rather than over the tip of the tongue. English has only one lateral, /l/, but many languages have more than one, e.g. Spanish written "l" vs. "ll"; Hindi with dental, palatal, and retroflex laterals; and numerous Native American languages with not only lateral approximants, but also lateral fricatives and affricates. Some Northeast Caucasian languages have five, six, or even seven lateral consonants.

Coarticulation

Some languages have consonants with two simultaneous places of articulation, called coarticulation. When these are doubly articulated, the articulators must be independently movable, and therefore there may only be one each from the categories labial, coronal, dorsal, and radical. (The glottis controls phonation and sometimes the airstream, and is not considered an articulator.) However, more commonly there is a secondary articulation of an approximantic nature, in which case both articulations can be similar, such as labialized labials, palatalized velars, etc. Some common coarticulations include:
- Labialization, rounding the lips while producing the obstruction, as in and English .
- Palatalization, raising the body of the tongue toward the hard palate while producing the obstruction, as in Russian .
- Velarization, raising the back of the tongue toward the soft palate (velum), as in the English dark el, or .
- Pharyngealization, constriction of the throat (pharynx), such as Arabic "emphatic" .
- Doubly articulated stop: a stop produced simultaneously with another stop, such as labial-velar , found throughout West and Central Africa. There is also a labial-alveolar , found in only a single language in New Guinea.

Links

- [http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~danhall/phonetics/sammy.html interactive places and manners of articulation] Category:Phonetics ko:조음 위치 ja:調音部位

Homorganic

Types of articulation

Table of active articulations and places of articulation

List of places where the obstruction may occur

Nasals and laterals

Coarticulation

Links

- [http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~danhall/phonetics/sammy.html interactive places and manners of articulation] Category:Phonetics ko:조음 위치 ja:調音部位

Flap consonant

In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator is thrown against another. The main difference between a flap and a stop consonant is that in a flap, there is no buildup of air pressure behind the place of articulation, and consequently no release burst. Otherwise a flap is similar to a brief stop. Many linguists use the terms tap and flap indiscriminantly. Peter Ladefoged proposed for a while that it may be useful to distinguish between them. However, his usage has been inconsistent, contradicting itself even between different editions of the same text. The last proposed distinction was that a tap strikes its point of contact directly, as a very brief plosive, whereas a flap strikes the point of contact tangentially: "Flaps are most typically made by retracting the tongue tip behind the alveolar ridge and moving it forward so that it strikes the ridge in passing." However, he no longer feels this is a useful distinction to make, and prefers to use the word flap in all cases. For linguists that do make the distinction, the coronal tap is transcribed as a fish-hook ar, , while the flap is transcribed as a small capital dee, , which is not recognized by the IPA. Otherwise alveolars are typically called taps, and other articulations flaps. No language contrasts a tap and a flap at the same place of articulation. The flap and tap consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are: Lateral flaps may be more common than much of the literature would lead one to believe. Many of the languages of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific that don't distinguish r from l may have a lateral flap, but this is generally missed by European linguists, who often aren't familiar with the sound. However, many of these languages may instead not have a lateral-central contrast at all, so that even a consistently neutral articulation may be perceived as sometimes lateral or [l], sometimes central . This has been suggested to be the case for Japanese, for example. The Iwaidja language of Australia has both alveolar and retroflex lateral flaps, and perhaps a palatal lateral flap as well. (However, the latter may instead be a palatalized alveolar lateral flap.) These contrast with lateral approximants at the same positions, as well as a central retroflex flap , alveolar trill , and alveolar approximant . The symbol for the alveolar lateral flap is the basis for the expected (though not officially recognized) symbol for the retroflex lateral flap, Image:Lateral flaps.png Symbols such as these are uncommon, but are becoming more frequent now that font-editing software has become accessible. Note however that besides not being sanctioned by the IPA, there are no Unicode values for them. However, the retroflex lateral flap may be written as a digraph with the right-tail diacritic, . The only common non-rhotic flap is the labiodental flap, found throughout central Africa in languages such as Margi. In 2005, the IPA adopted a right-hook vee, :30px for this sound. Previously, it had been transcribed with the use of the breve diacritic, , or other ad hoc symbols. Other flaps are much less common. They include a bilabial flap in Banda, which may be an allophone of the labiodental flap, and a velar lateral flap as an allophone in Kanite and Melpa. These are often transcribed with the breve diacritic, as , but other possibilities sometimes seen include the new labiodental flap plus an advanced diacritic for the bilabial, and a monogram (by analogy with ) for the velar. If other flaps are found, the breve diacritic could be used to represent them, but would more properly be combined with the symbol for the corresponding voiced plosive, as in the hypothetical palatal and uvular flaps .

Links

- List of phonetics topics
- [http://journals.dartmouth.edu/webobjbin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/1/xmlpage/1/article/262?htmlAlways=yes A Crosslinguistic Lexicon of the Labial Flap] Category:Consonants ko:탄음 ja:はじき音

Trill consonant

In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. Spanish <rr> as in perro is an alveolar trill, while the Portuguese <rr> is almost always uvular. Trills are very different from flaps. Whereas with a flap (or tap), a specific gesture is used to strike the active articulator against the passive one, in the case of a trill the articulator is held in place, where the airstream causes it to vibrate. Usually a trill vibrates for 2-3 periods, but may be up to 5, or even more if geminate. However, trills may also be produced with only a single period. While this might seem like a flap, the articulation is different; trills will vary in the number of periods, but flaps do not. Trill consonants included in the International Phonetic Alphabet:
- - coronal trill
- - bilabial trill
- - uvular trill The bilabial trill is uncommon. The coronal trill is most frequently alveolar , but dental and postalveolar articulations and also occur. A retroflex trill found in Toda has been transcribed (that is, the same as the retroflex flap), but might be less ambiguously written . One other trill has been reported, an epiglottal trill. Epiglottal consonants are often allophonically trilled, and in some languages the trill is the primary realization of the consonant. There is no official symbol for this in the IPA, but occasionally a small capital [Я] will be used. There are also vowels accompanied by epiglottal trill, called strident. The Czech language has two contrastive alveolar trills. In one of these the tongue is raised, so that there is audible frication during the trill, sounding rather like a simultaneous and . A symbol for this sound, , has been dropped from the IPA. It is now generally transcribed as a raised r, . Liangshang (Cool Mountain) has two "buzzed" or fricative vowels, written , which may also be trilled, . The Chapakuran language and the Muran language have a very unusual trilled phoneme, a voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate .

Sibilant

A sibilant, or a strident fricative, is a type of fricative or affricate, made by speeding up air through a narrow channel and directing it over the sharp edge of the teeth. Sibilants are louder than their non-sibilant counterparts, and most of their acoustic energy occurs at higher frequences than non-sibilant fricatives. has the most acoustic strength at around 8,000 Hz, but can reach as high as 10,000 Hz. has the bulk of its acoustic energy at around 4,000 Hz, but can extend up to around 8,000 Hz. Of the sibilants, the following have IPA symbols of their own: :Alveolar: :
- , (either apical or laminal) :Postalveolar: :
- , (Palato-alveolar: that is, "domed" (partially palatalized) postalveolar, either laminal or apical) :
- , (Alveolo-palatal: that is, laminal palatalized postalveolar; these are equivalent to ) :
- , : (Retroflex, which can mean one of three things: (a) non-palatalized apical postalveolar, (b) sub-apical postalveolar or pre-palatal, or (c) non-palatalized laminal ("flat") postalveolar, sometimes transcribed . Diacritics can be used for finer detail. For example, apical and laminal alveolars can be specified as vs ; a dental (or more likely denti-alveolar) sibilant as ; a palatalized alveolar as ; and a generic postalveolar as , a transcription frequently used when none of the above apply (that is, for a laminal but non-palatalized, or "flat", postalveolar). Only the alveolar and palato-alveolar sibilants are distinguished in ; the former are apical, while the latter are slightly labialized and generally called simply "postalveolar": . and have laminal denti-alveolars, palatalized denti-alveolars, flat postalveolars, and alveolo-palatals, ; whereas has apical alveolars, flat postalveolars, and alveolo-palatals, . Few languages distinguish more than three series of sibilants without secondary articulation, but has four series of plain sibilants, and the Chinese dialect of Qinan, in Shandong province, is said to have five. has a laminal alveolar, an apical postalveolar, laminal domed postalveolars, and sub-apical palatals. Since two of these could be called 'retroflex', Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996 have resurrected the old IPA diacritic for retroflex, the underdot, for apical retroflexes, and reserve the letters for sub-apical retroflexes. Thus the Toda sibilants can be transcribed , although the official IPA symbols are also sufficient. (In some publications the underdot and underbar are interchanged.) Some authors, as for instance Chomsky & Halle (1964), group [ f ] and [ v ] as sibilants. However, they do not have the grooved articulation and high frequencies of other sibilants, and most phoneticians (for instance by Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996), continue to group them together with the bilabial fricatives [ , ] as non-sibilant anterior fricatives.

Nasality

In phonetics, nasalization is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. The effect is as if an [n] sound were produced simultaneously with the oral sound. In the International Phonetic Alphabet nasalization is indicated by printing a tilde above the symbol for the sound to be nasalized: is the nasalized equivalent of , and is the nasalized equivalent of . The most common nasalized sounds are nasal vowels, found in , , and the Texas "twang". There are occasional cases where vowels show contrasting degrees of nasality. (See nasal vowel.) However, there are also nasalized consonants which contrast with purely oral consonants. Some of the South Arabic languages have nasalized fricatives, such as , which sounds something like a simultaneous [n] and [z]. The sound written r in Mandarin has an odd history; for example, it has been borrowed into as both [z] and [n]. It seems likely that it was once a nasalized fricative, perhaps a palatal . In the velar nasal , the tongue often does not make full contact, resulting in a nasalized approximant, . This is cognate with a nasalized in other Athabaskan languages. In , phonemic contrasts with (allophonically) nasalized , and so is likely to be a true fricative rather than an approximant. Note that nasal stops are not nasalized, rather they are purely nasal. They are called stops because airflow through the mouth is blocked, but air flows freely through the nose. Besides nasalized oral fricatives, there are true nasal fricatives, called nareal fricatives, sometimes produced by people with speech defects. That is, the turbulence in the airflow characteristic of fricatives is produced not in the mouth but in the nasal passages. A tilde plus trema diacritic is used for this in the Extended IPA: is an alveolar nareal fricative, with no airflow out of the mouth, while is an oral fricative (a [v]) with simultaneous nareal frication.

Peter Ladefoged

Peter Ladefoged (1925-) is a British-American phonetician. He has been active at the universities of Edinburgh, Scotland and Ibadan, Nigeria 1953-61. He is currently Professor of Phonetics Emeritus at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught from 1962–1991. His book A Course in Phonetics is a common introductory text in phonetics, and The Sounds of the World's Languages (co-authored with Ian Maddieson) is widely regarded as a standard phonetics reference. Ladefoged has also written several books on the phonetics of African languages. Ladefoged earned his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1959. Ladefoged has been involved with the phonetics laboratory at UCLA since he set it up in the 1960s. He also has been interested in listening to and describing every sound used in spoken human language, which he estimates at 900 consonants and 200 vowels. This research formed the basis of much of The Sounds of the World's Languages. Ladefoged has also long been a member of the International Phonetic Association, and has been involved in maintaining its International Phonetic Alphabet. He is also editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association.

Bibliography

- A Course in Phonetics (1975) ISBN 0155073192
- Elements of Acoustic Phonetics (1995) ISBN 0226467643
- The Sounds of the World's Languages (Phonological Theory) (with Ian Maddieson) (1996) ISBN 0631198156
- Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Languages (2000) ISBN 0631214127
- Phonetic Data Analysis: An Introduction to Fieldwork and Instrumental Phonetics (2003) ISBN 0631232702
- Language in Uganda (zusammen mit Ruth Glick & Clive Criper). - Oxford : Univ. Pr., 1972. - ISBN 0-19-436101-2
- A phonetic study of West African languages. - Cambridge : Univ. Pr., 1968
- Preliminaries to linguistic phonetics. - Chicago, Ill. : Univ. Pr., 1971
- Three areas of experimental phonetics : stress and respiratory activity, the nature of vowel quality, units in the perception and production of speech. - Oxford : Univ. Pr., 1975. - ISBN 0-19-437110-7

External links

- [http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/ladefoge/ Peter Ladefoged's home page at UCLA] Ladefoged, Peter Ladefoged, Peter Ladefoged, Peter Ladefoged, Peter

Stop consonant

A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. The term plosive is reserved for oral (non-nasal) stops: that is, stops with a release burst. All languages in the world have stops. Most have at least [p], [t], [k], [n], [m]. However, colloquial Samoan lacks the dentals [t] and [n], and the northern Iroquoian languages lack the labials [p] and [m]. Several of the Chimakuan, Salishan, and Wakashan languages around Puget Sound lack nasal stops.

Stop articulation

In the articulation of the stop, three phases can be distinguished:
- Catch: The airway closes so that no air can escape through the mouth (hence the names stop). With nasal stops, the air escapes through the nose.
- Hold or occlusion: The airway stays closed, causing a pressure difference to build up (hence the name occlusive).
- Release or burst: The closure is opened. In the case of plosives, the released airflow produces a sudden impulse causing an audible sound (hence the name plosive). In many languages, such as and , final stops lack a release burst, or have a nasal release. See Unreleased stop. In affricate stops, the release is a fricative.

Classification of stops

Nasalization

nasal stops are differentiated from oral stops only by a lowered velum that allows the air to escape through the nose during the occlusion. Nasal stops are acoustically sonorants, as they have a non-turbulent airflow and are nearly always voiced, but they are articulatorily obstruents, as there is complete blockage of the oral cavity. A prenasalized stop starts out with a lowered velum that raises during the occlusion. The closest examples in English are consonant clusters such as the [nd] in candy, but many languages have prenasalized stops that behave as single consonants. Swahili is well known for having words that begin with sounds like [mp] or [nd]. A postnasalized stop begins with a raised velum that lowers during the occlusion. This causes an audible nasal release, as in English sudden. Russian and other Slavic languages have words that begin with [dn], which can be seen in the name of the Dnieper River. Note that the terms prenasalization and postnasalization are normally only used in languages where these sounds are phonemic, that is, not analyzed into sequences of plosive plus nasal stop.

Voice

Voiced stops are articulated with simulaneous vibration of the vocal cords, voiceless stops without. Plosives are commonly voiceless, whereas nasal stops are only rarely so.

Aspiration

In aspirated stops, the voice onset (the time when the vocal cords begin to vibrate) comes perceivably later than the release of the stop. The duration between the release of the stop and the voice onset is called voice onset time (VOT). Tenuis stops have a voice onset time close to zero, meaning that voicing begins when the stop is released. Voiced stops have a negative voice onset time, meaning the voicing begins before the stop is released. A stop is called "fully voiced" if it is voiced during the entire occlusion. In English, however, initial voiced plosives like [b] or [d] are only partially voiced, meaning that voicing picks up sometime during the occlusion. Aspirated stops have a voice onset time greater than zero, so that there is a period of voiceless airflow (a phonetic ) before the onset of the vowel. In most dialects of English, the final g in the word bag is likely to be fully voiced, while the initial b will be only partially voiced. Initial voiceless plosives, like the p in pie, are aspirated, with a palpable puff of air upon release, while a plosive after an s, as in spy, is tenuis. If you speak near a candle flame, you will see that the flame will flicker more when you say pie, tie, chi than when you say spy, sty, sky.

Length

In a geminate or long stop, the occlusion lasts longer than in normal stops. In languages where stops are only distinguished by length (e.g. Arabic, Ilwana, Icelandic), the long stops may last up to three times as long as the short stops. Italian is well known for its geminate stop, as the double t in the name Vittoria takes just as long to say as the ct does in English Victoria. Note that there are many languages where the features voice, aspiration, and length reinforce each other, and in such cases it may be hard to tell which of these features predominates. In such cases the terms fortis is sometimed used for aspiration or gemination, while lenis is used for single, tenuis or voiced stops. Beware, however, that the terms fortis and lenis are poorly defined, and their meanings vary from source to source.

Airstream mechanism

Stops may be made with more than one airstream mechanism. The normal mechanism is pulmonic egressive, that is, with air flowing outward from the lungs. All languages have pulmonic stops. Some languages have stops made with other mechanisms as well: ejective stops (glottalic egressive), implosive stops (glottalic ingressive), or click consonants (velaric ingressive).

Tenseness

A fortis stop (in the narrow sense) is produced with more muscular tension than a lenis stop (in the narrow sense). However, this is difficult to measure, and there is usually debate over the actual mechanism of alleged fortis or lenis consonants. There are a series of stops in Korean, sometimes written with the IPA symbol for ejectives, which are produced using "stiff voice", meaning there is increased contraction of the glottis than for normal production of voiceless stops. The indirect evidence for stiff voice is in the following vowels, which have a higher fundamental frequency than those following other stops. The higher frequency is explained as a result of the glotis being tense. Other such phonation types include breathy voice, or murmur; slack voice; and creaky voice.

Examples

Here are the oral stops (plosives) granted dedicated symbols in the IPA. See also the nasal stops.
- voiceless bilabial plosive
- voiced bilabial plosive
- voiceless alveolar plosive
- voiced alveolar plosive
- voiceless retroflex plosive
- voiced retroflex plosive
- voiceless palatal plosive
- voiced palatal plosive
- voiceless velar plosive
- voiced velar plosive
- voiceless uvular plosive
- voiced uvular plosive
- epiglottal plosive
- glottal stop

English stops

, , (aspirated word-initially, tenuis in clusters with s) , , (in most dialects: partially voiced word-initially, fully voiced intervocalically) , , (fully voiced nasal stops) (glottal stop, not as a phoneme in most dialects)

Fricative consonant

Fricatives (or spirants) are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These are the lower lip against the upper teeth in the case of , or the back of the tongue against the soft palate in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach. This turbulent airflow is called frication. A particular subset of fricatives are the sibilants (sometimes referred to as stridents). When forming a sibilant, one still is forcing air through a narrow channel, but in addition the tongue is curled lengthwise to direct the air over the edge of the teeth. English , , , and are examples of this.

Sibilant fricatives

- voiceless coronal sibilant
- voiced coronal sibilant
- ejective coronal sibilant
- voiceless dental sibilant
- voiced dental sibilant
- voiceless postalveolar sibilant (laminal)
- voiced postalveolar sibilant (laminal)
- voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant (domed, partially palatalized)
- voiced palato-alveolar sibilant (domed, partially palatalized)
- voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant (laminal, palatalized)
- voiced alveolo-palatal sibilant (laminal, palatalized)
- voiceless retroflex sibilant (apical or sub-apical)
- voiced retroflex sibilant (apical or sub-apical) All sibilants are coronal, but may be dental, alveolar, postalveolar, or palatal (retroflex) within that range. However, at the postalveolar place of articulation the tongue may take several shapes: domed, laminal, or apical, and each of these is given a separate symbol and a separate name. Prototypical retroflexes are sub-apical and palatal, but they are usually written with the same symbol as the apical postalveolars. The alveolars and dentals may also be either apical or laminal, but this difference is indicated with diacritics rather than with separate symbols.

Central non-sibilant fricatives

Lateral fricatives

- voiceless coronal lateral fricative
- voiced coronal lateral fricative
- voiceless retroflex lateral fricative
- voiceless palatal lateral fricative (needs a raising diacritic)
- voiceless velar lateral fricative

Symbols used for both fricatives and approximants

- voiced uvular fricative
- voiced pharyngeal fricative
- voiced epiglottal fricative No language distinguishes voiced fricatives from approximants at these places, so the same symbol is used for both. For the pharyngeals and epiglottals, approximants are more numerous than fricatives. A fricative realization may be specified by adding the uptack to the letters, . Likewise, the downtack may be added to specify an approximant realization, .

Pseudo-fricatives

- voiceless glottal transition
- breathy-voiced glottal transition The glottal "fricatives" are actually unaccompanied phonation states of the glottis, without any accompanying manner, fricative or otherwise. However, they are called fricatives for historical reasons. In addition, is usually called a "voiceless labial-velar fricative", but it is actually an approximant. True doubly-articulated fricatives do not appear to occur in any language.

Languages

See table of consonants for a table of fricatives in English. Ubykh may be the language with the most fricatives, with 27, some of which do not have symbols or diacritics in the IPA. This number actually outstrips the number of all consonants in English (which has 24 consonants). By contrast, many languages have no phonemic fricatives at all, and this is a common feature of many Australian Aboriginal languages.

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract where there is no build-up of air pressure above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, which are characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract. The additional requirement is that vowels function as syllabic units: it is this criterion that distinguishes vowels from semivowels (and approximants, which in some languages may be slightly more constricted). In most languages, vowels usually form the nucleus or peak of a syllable, whereas consonants form the onset and coda. However, some languages allow sounds that wouldn't normally be classified as vowels to form the nucleus of a syllable, such as the sound of l in the English word table (the final e is not pronounced), or the sound of r in the Czech word vrba (meaning "willow"). The non-vowel sounds that may function as syllable nuclei are called sonorants. (In some languages, such as Tashlhyt Berber and Oowekyala, non-sonorant consonants can also form the nucleus of a syllable.) The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "uttering voice" or "speaking".

Articulation

The articulatory features that distinguish different vowels in a language are said to determine the vowel's quality. Daniel Jones developed the cardinal vowel system to describe vowels in terms of the common features height (vertical dimension), backness (horizontal dimension) and roundedness (lip position). These three parameters are indicated in the schematic IPA vowel diagram on right. There are however still more possible features of vowel quality, such the velum position (nasality), type of vocal fold vibration (phonation), and tongue root position.

Height

Height refers to either the vertical position of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth or the aperture of the jaw. In high vowels, such as i] and u], the tongue is positioned high in the mouth, whereas in low vowels, such as a], the tongue is positioned low in the mouth. Sometimes the terms open and close are used as synonyms for low and high for describing vowels. The International Phonetic Alphabet identifies seven different vowel heights, although no known language distinguishes all seven:
- close vowel (high vowel)
- near-close vowel
- close-mid vowel
- mid vowel
- open-mid vowel
- near-open vowel
- open vowel (low vowel) It may be that some varieties of have five contrasting heights. The Bavarian dialect of Amstetten has thirteen long vowels, reported to be distinguished as four heights (close, close-mid, mid, and near-open) among the front unrounded, front rounded, and back rounded vowels, plus an open central vowel: . Otherwise, the usual limit on the number of vowel heights is four. The parameter of vowel height appears to be the most primary feature of vowels cross-linguistically in that all languages use height constrastively. The other possible parameters, such as backness and roundedness (explained below), are not used in all languages.

Backness

Backness refers to the horizontal tongue position during the articulation of a vowel relative to the back of the mouth. In front vowels, such as , the tongue is positioned forward in the mouth, whereas in back vowels, such as , the tongue is positioned towards the back of the mouth. The International Phonetic Alphabet identifies five different degrees of vowel backness, although no known language distinguishes all five:
- front vowel
- near-front vowel
- central vowel
- near-back vowel
- back vowel The highest number of constrastive degrees of backness is 3.

Roundedness

Roundedness refers to whether the lips are rounded or not. In most languages, roundedness is a reinforcing feature of mid to high back vowels, and not distinctive. Usually the higher a back vowel, the more intense the rounding. However, some languages treat roundedness and backness separately, such as French and German (with front rounded vowels), most Uralic languages ( has a rounding contrast for /o/ and front vowels), Turkic languages (with an unrounded /u/), Vietnamese (with back unrounded vowels), and Korean (with a contrast in both front and back vowels). Nonetheless, even in languages such as German and Vietnamese, there is usually some correlation between rounding and backness: Front rounded vowels tend to be less front than front unrounded vowels, and back unrounded vowels tend to be less back than back rounded vowels. That is, the placement of unrounded vowels to the left of rounded vowels on the IPA vowel chart is reflective of their typical position. Different kinds of labialization are also possible. The /u/, for example, is not rounded like English /u/, where the lips are protruded (or pursed), but neither are the lips spread to the sides as they are for unrounded vowels. Rather, they are compressed in both directions, leaving a slot between the lips for the air to escape. (See Vowel roundedness for illustrations.) Swedish is one of the few languages where this feature is contrastive, have both protruded-lip and compressed-lip high front vowels. In many treatments, both are considered a type of rounding, and are often called endolabial rounding (pursed, where the insides of the lips approach each other) and exolabial rounding (compressed, where the margins of the lips approach each other). However, other phoneticians do not believe that these are subsets of a single phenomenon of rounding, and prefer instead the three independent terms rounded, compressed, and spread (for unrounded).

Nasalization

Nasalization refers to whether some of the air escapes through the nose. In nasal vowels, the velum is lowered, and some air travels through the nasal cavity as well as the mouth. An oral vowel is a vowel in which all air escapes through the mouth. French, Polish and Portuguese contrast nasal and oral vowels.

Phonation

Voicing describes whether the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation of a vowel. Most languages only have voiced vowels, but several Native American languages, such as Cheyenne and Totonac, contrast voiced and devoiced vowels. Vowels are devoiced in whispered speech. As in Japanese and Quebec French, vowels that are between voiceless consonants are often devoiced. Modal voice, creaky voice, and breathy voice (murmured vowels) are phonation types that are used contrastively in some languages. Often, these co-occur with tone or stress distinctions; in the Mon language, vowels pronounced in the high tone are also produced with creaky voice. In cases like this, it can be unclear whether it is the tone, the voicing type, or the pairing of the two that is being used for phonemic contrast. This combination of phonetic cues (i.e. phonation, tone, stress) is known as register or register complex.

Tongue root retraction

Advanced tongue root (ATR) is a feature common across much of Africa. The contrast between advanced and retracted tongue root resembles the tense/lax contrast acoustically, but they are articulated differently. ATR vowels involve noticeable tension in the vocal tract.

Secondary narrowings in the vocal tract

Pharyngealized vowels occur in some languages; Sedang uses this contrast, as do the Tungusic languages. Pharyngealisation is similar in articulation to retracted tongue root, but is acoustically distinct. A stronger degree of pharyngealisation occur in the Northeast Caucasian languages and the Khoisan languages. These might be called epiglottalized, since the primary constriction is at the tip of the epiglottis. The greatest degree of pharyngealisation is found in the strident vowels of the Khoisan languages, where the larynx is raised, and the pharynx constricted, so that either the epiglottis or the arytenoid cartilages vibrate instead of the vocal chords. Note that the terms pharyngealized, epiglottalized, strident, and sphincteric are sometimes used interchangeably.

Rhotic vowels

Rhotic vowels are the "ar-colored vowels" of English and a few other languages.

Tenseness/checked vowels vs. free vowels

Tenseness is used to describe the opposition of tense vowels as in leap, suit vs. lax vowels as in lip, soot. This opposition has traditionally been thought to be a result of greater muscular tension, though phonetic experiments have repeatedly failed to show this. Unlike the other features of vowel quality, tenseness is only applicable to the few languages that have this opposition (mainly Germanic languages, e.g. English), whereas the vowels of the other languages (e.g. Spanish) cannot be described with respect to tenseness in any meaningful way. In most Germanic languages, lax vowels can only occur in closed syllables. Therefore, they're also known as checked vowels, whereas the tense vowels are called free vowels since they can occur in any kind of syllable.

Acoustics

free vowel The acoustics of vowels are fairly well-understood. The different vowel qualities are realized in acoustic analyses of vowels by the relative values of the formants, acoustic resonances of the vocal tract which show up as dark bands on a spectrogram. The vocal tract acts as a resonant cavity, and the position of the jaw, lips, and tongue affect the parameters of the resonant cavity, resulting in different formant values. The acoustics of vowels can be visualized using spectrograms, which display the acoustic energy at each frequency, and how this changes with time. The first formant, abbreviated "F1", corresponds to vowel openness (vowel height). Open vowels have high F1 frequences while close vowels have low F1 frequencies, as can be seen at right: The and have similar low first formants, whereas has a higher formant. The second formant, F2, corresponds to vowel frontness. Back vowels have low F2 frequencies while front vowels have high F2 frequencies. This is very clear at right, where the front vowel has a much higher F2 frequency than the other two vowels. However, in open vowels the high F1 frequency forces a rise in the F2 frequency as well, so a better measure of frontness is the difference between the first and second formants. For this reason, vowels are usually plotted as F1 vs. F2 – F1. This is the case for the vowel chart at the top of this page. (This dimension is usually called 'backness' rather than 'frontness', but the term 'backness' can be counterintuitive when discussing formants.) R-colored vowels are characterized by lowered F3 values. Rounding is generally realized by a complex relationship between F2 and F3 that tends to reinforce vowel backness. One effect of this is that back vowels are most commonly rounded while front vowels are most commonly unrounded; another is that rounded vowels tend to plot to the right of unrounded vowels in vowel charts. That is, there is a reason for plotting vowel pairs the way they are.

Prosody and intonation

The features of vowel prosody are often described independently from vowel quality. In non-linear phonetics, they are located on parallel layers. The features of vowel prosody are usually considered not to apply to the vowel itself, but to the syllable, as some languages do not contrast vowel length separately from syllable length. Intonation encompasses the changes in pitch, intensity, and speed of an utterance over time. In tonal languages, in most cases the tone of a syllable is carried by the vowel, meaning that the relative pitch or the pitch contour that marks the tone is superimposed on the vowel. If a syllable has a high tone, for example, the pitch of the vowel will be high. If the syllable has a falling tone, then the pitch of the vowel will fall from high to low over the course of uttering the vowel. Length or quantity refers to the abstracted duration of the vowel. In some analyses this feature is described as a feature of the vowel quality, not of the prosody. Japanese, Finnish, Hungarian, Arabic and Latin have a two-way phonemic contrast between short and long vowels. The Mixe language has a three-way contrast among short, half-long, and long vowels, and this has been reported from a few other languages, in not all of which is the distinction phonemic. Long vowels are written in the IPA with a triangular colon, which has two equilateral triangles pointing at each other in place of dots (). The IPA symbol for half-long vowels is the top half of this (). Longer vowels are sometimes claimed, but these are always divided between two syllables. It should be noted that the length of the vowel is a grammatical abstraction, and there may be more phonologically distinctive lengths. For example, in Finnish, there are five different physical lengths, because stress is marked with length on both grammatically long and short vowels. However, Finnish stress is not lexical and is always on the first two moras, thus this variation serves to separate words from each other. In non-tonal languages, like English, intonation encompasses lexical stress. A stressed syllable will typically be pronounced with a higher pitch, intensity, and length than unstressed syllables. For example in the word intensity, the vowel represented by the letter 'e' is stressed, so it is longer and pronounced with a higher pitch and intensity than the other vowels.

Monophthongs, diphthongs, triphthongs

A vowel sound whose quality doesn't change over the duration of the vowel is called a monophthong. Monophthongs are sometimes called "pure" or "stable" vowels. A vowel sound that glides from one quality to another is called a diphthong, and a vowel sound that glides between three qualities is a triphthong. All languages have monophthongs and many languages have diphthongs, but triphthongs or vowel sounds with even more target qualities are relatively rare cross-linguistically. English has all three types: the vowel sound in hit is a monophthong , the vowel sound in boy is in most dialects a diphthong , and the vowel sounds of way , flower (BrE AmE ) form a triphthong (dissylabic in the latter cases), although the particular qualities vary by dialect. The longest sensible word with most consecutive vowels is Finnish riiuuyöaieuutinen (courting night intention news [certainly yellow press stuff!]), syllabicated rii-uu-yö-ai-e-uu-ti-nen. In phonology, diphthongs and triphthongs are distinguished from sequences of monophthongs by whether or not the vowel sound may be analyzed into different phonemes or not. For example, the vowel sounds in a two-syllable pronunciation of the word flower (BrE AmE ) phonetically form a dissyllabic triphthong, but are phonologically a sequence of a diphthong (represented by the letters ) and a monophthong (represented by the letters ). Some linguists use the terms diphthong and triphthong only in this phonemic sense.

Vowels in languages

The semantic significance of vowels varies widely depending on the language. In some languages, particularly Semitic languages, vowels mostly serve to denote inflections. This is similar to English man vs. men. In fact, the alphabets used to write the Semitic languages, such as the Hebrew alphabet and the Arabic alphabet, do not ordinarily mark all the vowels. These alphabets are called abjads. Although it is possible to construct simple English sentences that can be understood without written vowels (cn y rd ths?), extended passages of English lacking written vowels are difficult if not impossible to completely understand (consider dd, which could be any of add, aided, dad, dada, dead, deed, did, died, dodo, dud, dude, eddie, iodide, or odd). In most languages, vowels are an unchangeable part of the words, as in English man vs. moon which are not different inflectional forms of the same word, but different words. Vowels are especially important to the structures of words in languages that have very few consonants (like Polynesian languages such as Maori and Hawaiian), and in languages whose inventory of vowels is larger than its inventory of consonants.

Vowel systems

Most languages have 3–7 vowels, the following 5-vowel system being the most common: This particular configuration is common because it makes the most efficient use of the vowel space, so slight variations in a vowel are not easily confused for a different sound. Spanish and Modern Greek, for example, have this vowel system; Latin had a similar system that also distinguished between long and short vowels, although that distinction wasn't made in written Latin; it is for this reason that the Latin alphabet has five vowel letters. All languages have at least two vowels; the Tshwizhyi and Abzhui dialects of Abkhaz contrasts only and , with significant allophony. (There have been proposals to posit only one vowel in some Abkhaz dialects; however, most linguists who are familiar with Abkhaz do not accept this theory.) Three-vowel systems have been noted in a number of languages. These include:
- (Arabic, Inuktitut, Quechua),
- (Pirahã),
- (Wichita). A few languages, such as Navajo, have four-vowel systems that lack /u/ but there is no known natural language that lacks some form of a. At the other end of the spectrum, languages with more than twelve vowels are relatively uncommon, although some widely-spoken languages have large vowel inventories, particularly Germanic languages. For example, English has 14–20 vowels (including diphthongs) depending on dialect, and Swedish has 17 distinct vowel qualities in the height-backness-roundedness spectrum, although these also involve a length contrast, and the long vowels have diphthongized allophones. French has 16 vowel qualities, including nasals, and the previously-mentioned Sedang has 24 distinct monophthongs, which it achieves by contrasting phonation on seven vowel qualities. uses phonation and nasalization with five vowel qualities to achieve approximately 40 vowels, most of which may occur both long and short.

Written vowels

The name "vowel" is often used for the symbols used for representing vowel sounds in a language's writing system, particularly if the language uses an alphabet. In the Latin alphabet, the vowel letters are usually A, E, I, O, U, and in some languages Y, as in English and W, as in Welsh. There is necessarily not a direct one-to-one correspondence between the vowel sounds of a language and the vowel letters. Many languages that use a form of the Latin alphabet have more vowel sounds than can be represented by the standard set of five vowel letters. In the case of English, the five primary vowel letters can represent both long and short vowel sounds (some of the long vowel sounds in English are actually diphthongs). Furthermore, in English some vowel sounds are represented by combinations of vowel letters, such as the ea in beat or by a vowel letter and an approximant letter, as the ow in how, or the er in her. Other languages cope with the limitation in the number of Latin vowel letters in similar ways. Many languages, like English, make extensive use of combinations of vowel letters to represent various sounds. Other languages add diacritical marks to vowels, such as accents or umlauts, to represent the variety of possible vowel sounds. Some languages have also constructed additional vowel letters by modifying the standard Latin vowels in other ways, such as æ or ø that are found in some of the Scandinavian languages. The International Phonetic Alphabet has a set of 28 symbols to represent the range of basic vowel qualities, and a further set of diacritics to denote variations from the basic vowel.

Written vowels in writing systems

- Arabic: دَ دِ دُ دَ‌ا دَ‌ى دِ‌ي دُو
- Devanagari: Independent vowels: अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ए ऐ ओ औ Dependent vowels: ा ि ी ु ू े ै ो ौ
- Guaraní: oral: a e i o u y; nasal: ã ẽ ĩ õ ũ ỹ
- Japanese: normal: あいうえお grammatical: へを
- Korean: ㅏ ㅐ ㅑ ㅒ ㅓ ㅔ ㅕ ㅖ ㅗ ㅘ ㅙ ㅚ ㅛ ㅜ ㅝ ㅞ ㅟ ㅠ ㅡ ㅢ ㅣ
- Latin: a e i o u
- Finnish: back: a u o; neutral: i e; front: ä y ö; long vowels doubled (aamu, uuma, etc.)
- Estonian and Võro: a e i o u ü ä ö õ (y), half-long and over-long vowels doubled
- Skolt Sami: u o õ å a, i e â ä (normal), u´ o´ õ´ å´ a´, i´ e´ â´ ä´ (centralized), long vowels doubled (lääij, nââ'ǩǩted, etc.).
- Norwegian and Swedish: back ('hard'): a o u å; front ('soft'): e i y æ/ä ø/ö
- Russian: non-iotating ('hard'): А О У Ы Э; iotating ('soft'): Я Ё Ю И Е

References

- Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, 1999. Cambridge University ISBN 0521637511
- Johnson, Keith, Acoustic & Auditory Phonetics, second edition, 2003. Blackwell ISBN 1405101237
- Ladefoged, Peter, A Course in Phonetics, fourth edition, 2000. Heinle ISBN 0155073192
- Ladefoged, Peter, Elements of Acoustic Phonetics, 1995. University of Chicago ISBN 0226467643
- Ladefoged, Peter and Ian Maddieson, The Sounds of the Worlds Languages, 1996. Blackwell ISBN 0631198156
- Ladefoged, Peter, Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Languages, 2000. Blackwell ISBN 0631214127.
- Lindau, Mona. (1978). Vowel features. Language, 54, 541-563.
- Stevens, Kenneth N. (1998). Acoustic phonetics. Current studies in linguistics (No. 30). Cambridge, MA: MIT. ISBN 0-2621-9404-X.
- Stevens, Kenneth N. (2000). Toward a model for lexical access based on acoustic landmarks and distinctive features. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 111 (4), 1872-1891.
- Korhonen, Mikko. Koltansaamen opas, 1973. Castreanum ISBN 951-45-0189-6

External links

- [http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/vowels/contents.html Vowels and Consonants] Online examples from Ladefoged's Vowels and Consonants, referenced above.
- [http://www.oneletterwords.com Dictionary of All-Vowel Words]: a free online dictionary with over 1,000 words with no consonants and examples of usage from literature.
- roa-rup:Vocală ko:홀소리 ja:母音

Affricate

Affricate consonants begin like stops (most often an alveolar, such as or ), but release as a fricative such as or (or, a couple languages, into a fricative trill) rather than directly into the following vowel.

Samples

The English sounds spelt "ch" and "j" (transcribed and in IPA), German and Italian z and Italian z are typical affricates. These sounds are fairly common in the world's languages, as are other affricates with similar sounds, such as those in Polish and Chinese. However, other than , voiced affricates are relatively uncommon. For several places of articulation they aren't attested at all. Much less common are e.g. labiodental affricates, such as in German, or velar affricates, such as in Tswana (written kg) or High Alemannic Swiss German dialects (depending on the dialect also uvular ). Worldwide, only a few languages have affricates in these positions, even though the corresponding stop consonants are virtually universal. Also less common are alveolar affricates where the fricative is lateral, such as the sound found in Nahuatl and Totonac. Many Athabaskan languages (such as Chipewyan and Navajo) have series of coronal affricates which may be unaspirated, aspirated, or ejective in addition to being interdental/dental, alveolar, postalveolar, or lateral, i.e. , , , , , , , , , , , and . Affricates may also be contrasted by palatalization, as in the Erzya language, where voiceless alveolar, postalveolar and palatal affricates are contrasted. Affricates may also have phonemic length, that is, affected by a chroneme, as in .

Notation

Affricates are often represented by the two sounds they consist of (e.g. , ). However, single signs for the affricates may be desirable, in order to stress that they function as unitary speech segments (i.e. as phonemes). In this case, the IPA recommends to join the two elements of the affricate by a tie bar (e.g. , ). Ligatures are available in Unicode for the six common affricates , , , , , and . Another method is to indicate the release of the affricate with a superscript: , . This is derived from the IPA convention of indicating other releases with a superscript. In other phonetic transcription systems, such as the Americanist system, the affricates , , , , , and are represented as or ; , , or (older) ; or ; , , or (older) ; ; and or respectively. Within the IPA, and are sometimes transcribed as palatal stops, and .

Affricates vs. stop-fricative sequences

Affricates can contrast with stop-fricative sequences. Examples include: : Polish: in czysta 'clean (f.)' vs. in trzysta 'three hundred', and : Klallam: in 'look at me' vs. in 'he looks at it'. The difference is that in the stop-fricative sequence, the stop has a release of its own before the fricative starts, but in the affricate, the fricative element is the release. Stop-fricative sequences may have a syllable boundary between the two segments. Affricates and stop-fricative sequences are also distinguished phonemically. In English, and (as in nuts and nods) are considered to be sequences of a stop phoneme and a fricative phoneme even though they are phonetically affricates, because they may have a morpheme boundary in them (e.g. nuts is nut + s). The real English affricate phonemes and cannot have a morpheme boundary, and in order to show that they are not sequences of phonemes, they can be written with the ligatures or tie bars, or different characters and , avoiding the ambiguous and .

List of affricates

In the case of coronals, the symbols are normally used for the stop portion of the affricate regardless of place. For example, is commonly seen for . For legibility, the tie bars have been removed from the table entries. The exemplar languages are ones that these sounds have been reported from, but in several cases they may need confirmation.

Trilled affricates

- Prenasalized trilled bilabial affricate
- Voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate (in )
- Voiceless retroflex trilled affricate (in ) (needs confirmation)
- Voiced retroflex trilled affricate (in Malagasy) (needs confirmation) The more common of the voiceless affricates are all attested as ejectives as well: . Several Khoisan languages such as are reported to have voiced ejective affricates, but these are actually consonant clusters: . Affricates are also commonly aspirated: , and occasionally murmured: . Labialized, palatalized, velarized, and pharyngealized affricates also occur.

Coronal consonant

Coronal consonants are articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue. Only the coronal consonants can be divided into apical (using the tongue tip), laminal (using the tongue blade), domed (with the tongue bunched up), or sub-apical (with the tongue curled back), as well as a few rarer orientations, because only the front of the tongue has such dexterity. Coronals also have another dimension, grooved, that is used to make sibilants in combination with the orientations above. Coronal places of articulation include the dental consonants at the upper teeth, the alveolar consonants at the upper gum (the alveolar ridge), the various postalveolar consonants (domed palato-alveolar, laminal alveolo-palatal, and apical retroflex) just behind that, and the true retroflex consonants curled back against the hard palate. (the list below is only partial, so far being just the alveolars)

Length (phonetics)

In phonetics, length or quantity is a feature of sounds that are distinctively longer than other sounds. There are long vowels as well as long consonants (the latter are often called geminates). Many languages do not have distinctive length. Among the languages that have distinctive length, there are only a few that have both distinctive vowel length and distinctive consonant length. It is more common that there is only one or that they depend on each other. The languages that distinguish b