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Vowel Roundedness

Vowel roundedness

In phonetics, vowel roundedness refers to the amount of rounding in the lips during the articulation of a vowel. That is, it is vocalic labialization. When pronouncing a rounded vowel, the lips form a circular opening, while unrounded vowels (also called spread vowels) are pronounced with the lips relaxed. In most languages, front vowels tend to be unrounded, while back vowels tend to be rounded, but some languages, such as and , distinguish rounded and unrounded front vowels of the same height, while distinguishes rounded and unrounded back vowels of the same height. In the International Phonetic Alphabet vowel chart, rounded vowels are the ones that occur on the right in each pair of vowels. There are also diacritics, respectively , to indicate greater or lesser degrees of rounding. The 'more' and 'less rounded' diacritics are sometimes also used with consonants to indicate degrees of labialization. For example, in the Athabaskan language , voiceless velar fricatives distinguish three degrees of labialization, transcribed either or .

Types of rounding

voiceless velar fricative There are two types of vowel rounding: endolabial, or compressed, and exolabial, or protruded. In endolabial rounding, the corners of the mouth are drawn slightly together and the lips may be compressed horizontally, but the lips do not protrude and only their outer surface is exposed. In exolabial rounding, the lips protrude like a tube, as when kissing; the inner surface of the lips is exposed. Usually, back rounded vowels are exolabial, while front rounded vowels are endolabial. However, in , the back high vowel is endolabial. Swedish is unusual in that it makes a phonemic distinction between the two types, having unrounded, endolabial, and exolabial front close-mid vowels. There is no dedicated IPA diacritic to represent this contrast, and without disambiguation both the word "rounded" and the symbols for the rounded vowels are understood to refer to exolabial rounding. The northern Iroquoian languages have no labial consonants. They do have , , and , but these do not involve noticeable rounding (protrusion) of the lips. It may be that they are compressed. It is not known how this might relate to the labialization distinction in Hupa.

Phonetics

:This article is about linguistics. For the voicemail transcription service, see Phonetic (service) Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). It is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones) as well as those of non-speech sounds, and their production, audition and perception, as opposed to phonology, which operates at the level of sound systems and abstract sound units (such as phonemes and distinctive features). Phonetics deals with the sounds themselves rather than the contexts in which they are used in languages. Discussions of meaning (semantics) therefore do not enter at this level of linguistic analysis. While writing systems and alphabets are in many cases closely related to the sounds of speech, strictly speaking, phoneticians are more concerned with the sounds of speech than the symbols used to represent them. So close is the relationship between them however, that many dictionaries list the study of the symbols (more accurately semiotics) as a part of phonetic studies. On the other hand, logographic writing systems typically give much less phonetic information, but the information is not necessarily non-existent. For instance, in Chinese characters, a phonetic refers to the portion of the character that hints at its pronunciation, while the radical refers to the portion that serves as a semantic hint. Characters featuring the same phonetic typically have similar pronunciations, but by no means are the pronunciations predictably determined by the phonetic due to the fact that pronunciations diverged over many centuries while the characters remained the same. Not all Chinese characters are radical-phonetic compounds, but a good majority of them are. Phonetics has three main branches:
- articulatory phonetics, concerned with the positions and movements of the lips, tongue, vocal tract and folds and other speech organs in producing speech
- acoustic phonetics, concerned with the properties of the sound waves and how they are received by the inner ear
- auditory phonetics, concerned with speech perception, principally how the brain forms perceptual representations of the input it receives. There are over a hundred different phones recognized as distinctive by the International Phonetic Association (IPA) and transcribed in their International Phonetic Alphabet. Phonetics was studied as early as 2500 years ago in ancient India, where there existed numerous phonetically extremely accurate treatises on the orthoepy of Sanskrit and a Tamil grammar book Tolkāppiyam (c. fifth century BCE) that described the place and manner of articulation of consonants. Most Indian languages group and order their consonants based on place and methods of articulation.

External links and references

- [http://www2.unil.ch/ling/english/phonetique/table-eng.html On-line phonetics course]
- [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Summer_2004/ling001/lecture2.html The sounds and sound patterns of language] U Penn
- [http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/ UCLA lab data]
- [http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/ UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive]
- [http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/phonetik/EGG/page1.htm EGG and Voice Quality] (electroglottography, phonation, etc.)
- [http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/handbook.htm IPA handbook]
- [http://www.ling.lu.se/research/speechtutorial/tutorial.html Speech Analysis Tutorial]

Bibliography

- Catford, J. C. (1977). Fundamental problems in phonetics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-32520-X.
- Clark, John; & Yallop, Colin. (1995). An introduction to phonetics and phonology (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19452-5.
- Hardcastle, William J.; & Laver, John (Eds.). (1997). The handbook of phonetic sciences. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-6311-8848-7.
- Ladefoged, Peter. (1982). A course in phonetics (2nd ed.). London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
- Ladefoged, Peter. (2003). Phonetic data analysis: An introduction to fieldwork and instrumental techniques. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0-631-23269-9 (hbk); ISBN 0-631-23270-2 (pbk).
- Ladefoged, Peter; & Maddieson, Ian. (1996). The sounds of the world's languages. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-19814-8 (hbk); ISBN 0-631-19815-6 (pbk).
- Maddieson, Ian. (1984). Patterns of sounds. Cambridge studies in speech science and communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Pike, Kenneth L. (1943). Phonetics: A critical analysis of phonetic theory and a technic for the practical description of sounds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
- Pisoni, David B.; & Remez, Robert E. (Eds.). (2004). The handbook of speech perception. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-6312-2927-2.
- Rogers, Henry. (2000). The Sounds of Language: An Introduction to Phonetics. Harlow, Essex: Pearson. ISBN 0-582-38182-7.
- Stevens, Kenneth N. (1998). Acoustic phonetics. Current studies in linguistics (No. 30). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-2621-9404-X.
- ko:음성학 ja:音声学

LIP

LIP, Lip, or Lips may refer to:
- Lip, a former French watch maker - see Besançon
- Lip, the main character of Panel de Pon
- London Institute of Pataphysics - see Pataphysics
- Large igneous province, a massive volcanic formation
- Lip, covering the human mouth
- Lips (muppet), the trumpet player for The Electric Mayhem
- LIP, Lymphoid interstitial pneumonia - see lymphoid interstitial pneumonitis

Labialization

Labialisation is secondary articulatory feature of sounds in a language, most usually used to refer to consonants. Labialisation, simply put, is the usage of the lips as a secondary articulator while the remainder of the oral cavity produces some other phoneme. While labialisation is by no means universal in the world's languages, it is certainly extremely widespread. It appears in families as varied as Northwest Caucasian, Athabaskan, Salishan, Sahaptian and (from a diachronic perspective) Indo-European, where it is thought that the proto-language, Proto-Indo-European, used labialised velar consonants. Mycenaean Greek appears to have used it as well. Labialisation is not restricted to lip-rounding, although this is certainly the most common type. Lip-rounding in American English consists of three types: slight, tight and none. Slight lip-rounding is used on "sh, ch, r, and j." Tight lip-rounding is used to create the "w" sound. "L" is made with none. This information is extremely useful for non-native English speakers whose native sounds are created using different articulatory muscles. For example, the difference between "r" and "l" can be taught using training in lip-rounding and tongue placement. The following labial articulations have been found as realisations of labialisation:
- Labial rounding, with or without protrusion of the lips (found in Navajo)
- Labiodental frication (found in Abkhaz)
- Bilabial frication (found in Ubykh)
- Bilabial trill (found in Ubykh)
- Bilabial plosion (found in Ubykh) Labialisation also refers to a specific type of assimilatory process where a given sound become labialised due to the influence of neighboring labial sounds. Category:Labial Category:Assimilation ja:唇音化

Front vowel

A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. The front vowels identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:
- close front unrounded vowel [i]
- close front rounded vowel [y]
- close-mid front unrounded vowel [e]
- close-mid front rounded vowel [ø]
- open-mid front unrounded vowel [ɛ]
- open-mid front rounded vowel [œ]
- near-open front unrounded vowel [æ]
- open front unrounded vowel [a]
- open front rounded vowel [ɶ] In some languages, the open front vowels do not pattern or group with the other front vowels in their phonologies.

Effect on preceding consonant

In the phonology of many Indo-European languages, front vowels have a special effect on certain preceding velar consonants, bringing them forward to alveolar, postalveolar, or palatal consonant sounds. This is not unique to Indo-European — similar effects can be observed in other languages including Japanese. See also palatalization. Some examples in familiar languages include the "C" and "G" in Italian and French, and the "K" in Norwegian and Swedish. English follows the same pattern as French but without as much regularity. : Category:Vowels Category:Phonology

Back vowel

A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. The back vowels identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:
- close back unrounded vowel
- close back rounded vowel
- close-mid back unrounded vowel
- close-mid back rounded vowel
- open-mid back unrounded vowel
- open-mid back rounded vowel
- open back unrounded vowel
- open back rounded vowel See also: List of phonetics topics Category:Vowels ja:後舌母音

International Phonetic Alphabet

: "IPA" redirects here. For other uses, see IPA (disambiguation). The NATO phonetic alphabet has also informally been called the International Phonetic Alphabet. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) used in spoken human language. It is intended as a notational standard for the phonemic and phonetic representation of all spoken languages. For a treatment of the English language using the IPA, see International Phonetic Alphabet for English, for a brief chart, see IPA chart for English.
History

Description
The general principle of the IPA is to provide a separate symbol for each speech segment, avoiding letter combinations (digraphs) such as sh and th in English orthography, and avoiding ambiguity such as that of c in English.
The principle of formation
The IPA is what MacMahon (1996) has termed a "selective" phonetic alphabet. It aims to provide a separate symbol for every contrastive (that is, phonemic) sound occurring in human language. For instance, a flap and a tap are two different articulations, but since no language has (yet) been found to make a phonemic distinction between them, the IPA does not provide them with dedicated symbols. Instead, it provides a single symbol, , that covers both. For non-contrastive (that is, phonetic or subphonemic) details of these sounds, the IPA relies on diacritics, which are optional. Thus there is a certain level of flexibility in representing a language with the IPA.
The principles behind the used symbols
The letters chosen for the IPA are generally drawn from the Latin and Greek alphabets, or are modifications of Latin or Greek letters. There are also a few letters derived from Latin punctuation, such as the glottal stop (originally an apostrophe, but later given the form of a "gelded" question mark to have the visual impact of the other consonants), and one, , although Latin in form, was inspired by Arabic ﻉ. In contrast, the old Latin-derived symbols for the clicks have been abandoned in favor of the iconic Khoisanist symbols, such as . The sound-values of the consonants from the Latin alphabet correspond to usage in French and Italian, which are close to those of most other European languages as well: , , , (hard) , , , , , (unvoiced) , , , . English values are used for , , and , The vowels from the Latin alphabet (, , , , ) correspond to the vowels of Spanish and are similar to Italian. is like the vowel in piece, like rule, etc. The other symbols from the Latin alphabet (, , , , , and ) correspond to sounds these letters represent in other languages. has the Germanic value, English y in yoke. has the Scandinavian and Old English value (Finnish y, German y or ü, French u, Dutch u). Letters that share a particular modification sometimes correspond to a similar type of sound. For example, all the retroflex consonants have the same symbol as the equivalent alveolar consonant, with the addition of a rightward pointing hook at the bottom. Although there is some correspondence between modified letters, generally the IPA does not have a systematic "featural" relationship between graphic shape and articulation. For instance, there is not a consistent relationship between lowercase letters and their small capital counterparts, nor are all labial consonants linked through a common character design. Diacritic marks can be combined with IPA letters to transcribe modified phonetic values or secondary articulations. There are also special symbols for suprasegmental features such as stress and tone.
Types of transcriptions
The International Phonetic Association recommends that a phonetic transcription should be enclosed in square brackets ("[ ]"). A transcription that specifically denotes only phonological contrasts may be enclosed in slashes ("/ /") instead. If one is in doubt, it is best to use brackets, for by setting off a transcription with slashes one makes a theoretical claim that every symbol within is phonemically contrastive for the language being transcribed. Phonetic transcriptions try to objectively capture the actual pronunciation of a word, whereas phonemic transcriptions are model dependent. For example, Noam Chomsky transcribed the English word night phonemically as /nixt/. In his model, the phoneme /x/ is often silent, but shows its presence by “lengthening” the preceding vowel. The preceding vowel in this case is the phoneme /i/, which is pronounced [aj] when long. So phonemic /nixt/ is equivalent to phonetic [najt], but only if you share Chomsky's belief that historical sounds such as the gh in night may remain in a word long after they have ceased to be pronounced. For phonetic transcriptions, there is flexibility in how closely sounds may be transcribed. A transcription that gives only a basic idea of the sounds of a language in the broadest terms is called a "broad transcription"; in some cases this may be equivalent to a phonemic transcription (only without any theoretical claims). A close transcription, indicating precise details of the sounds, is called a "narrow transcription". These are not binary choices, but the ends of a continuum, with many possibilities in between. All are enclosed in brackets. For example, in some dialects the English word pretzel in a narrow transcription would be , which notes several phonetic features that may not be evident even to a native speaker. An example of a broader transcription is , which only indicates some of the easier to hear features. A yet broader transcription would be . Here every symbol represents an unambiguous speech sound, but without making any claims as to their status in the language. There are also several possibilities in how to transcribe this word phonemically, but here the differences are not of precision, but of analysis. For example, pretzel could be or . The special symbol for English r is not used, for it is not meaningful to distinguish it from a rolled r. The differences in the letter e reflect claims as to what the essential difference is between the vowels of pretzel and pray; there are half a dozen ideas in the literature as to what this may be. The second transcription claims that there are two vowels in the word, even if they can't both be heard, while the first claims there is only one. Occasionally a transcription will be enclosed in pipes ("| |"). This goes beyond phonology into morphological analysis. For example, the words pets and beds could be transcribed phonetically as and (in a fairly narrow transcription), and phonemically as and . Because /s/ and /z/ are separate phonemes in English (unlike Spanish, for example), they receive separate symbols in the phonemic analysis. However, you probably recognize that underneath this, they represent the same plural ending. This can be indicated with the pipe notation. If you believe the plural ending is essentially an s, as English spelling would suggest, the words can be transcribed and . If, as most linguists would probably suggest, it is essentially a z, these would be and . To avoid confusion with IPA symbols, it may be desirable to specify when native orthography is being used, so that, for example, the English word jet is not read as "yet". This is done with angle brackets or chevrons: . It is also common to italicize such words, but the chevrons indicate specifically that they are in the original language's orthography, and not in English transliteration.
Consonants (pulmonic)

Single articulation
Closeup of the main pulmonic consonant section of the IPA chart The pulmonic consonant table, which includes most consonants, is arranged in rows that designate manner of articulation and columns that designate place of articulation. The main chart only includes consonants with a single place of articulation. Notes:
- Asterisks (
- ) mark reported sounds that do not (yet) have official IPA symbols. See the articles for ad hoc symbols found in the literature.
- Daggers (†) mark IPA symbols that do not yet have official Unicode support. Since May 2005, this is the case of the labiodental flap, symbolized by a right-hook v: labiodental flap ([http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/N2945.pdf Proposal to add this symbol to Unicode])
- In rows where some symbols appear in pairs (the obstruents), the symbol to the right represents a voiced consonant (except for breathy-voiced ). However, cannot be voiced. In the other rows (the sonorants), the single symbol represents a voiced consonant.
- Although there is a single symbol for the coronal places of articulation for all consonants but fricatives, when dealing with a particular language, the symbols are treated as specifically alveolar, post-alveolar, etc., as appropriate for that language.
- Shaded areas indicate articulations judged to be impossible.
- The symbols represent either voiced fricatives or approximants.
- It is primarily the shape of the tongue rather than its position that distinguishes the fricatives , , and .
- The labiodental nasal is not known to exist as a phoneme in any language.
Coarticulation
Closeup of the co-articulated consonant section of the IPA chart
Notes:
- is described as a "simultaneous and ". However, this analysis is disputed. See the article for discussion.
- To be complete, this chart should also include the semi-palatalized postalveolar (palato-alveolar) fricatives and .
- The miscellaneous portion of the chart, as published by the IPA, includes additional symbols that would have been included in the main consonant chart were it not for difficulties in typesetting on a printed page. In this article, which does not suffer from such problems, they have been included in the main chart above.
Consonants (non-pulmonic)
Closeup of the non-pulmonic consonant section of the IPA chart Notes:
- All clicks are doubly articulated and require two symbols: a velar or uvular stop, plus a symbol for the release: , etc. When the dorsal articulation is omitted, a may usually be assumed.
- Symbols for the voiceless implosives are no longer supported by the IPA. Instead, the voiced equivalent is used with a voiceless diacritic: , etc.
- Although not confirmed from any language, and therefore not "explicitly recognized" by the IPA, a retroflex implosive, , is supported in the Unicode Phonetic Extensions Supplement, added in version 4.1 of the Unicode Standard, or can be created as a composite .
- The ejective symbol is often seen for glottalized but pulmonic sonorants, such as , but these are more properly transcribed as creaky ().
Vowels
Closeup of the vowel chart of the IPA Notes:
- Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel, as does (at least prototypically). All others are unrounded.
- is not confirmed as a distinct phoneme in any language.
- is officially a front vowel, but there is little distinction between front and central open vowels, and is frequently used for an open central vowel.
Affricates and double articulation
Affricates and doubly articulated stops are represented by two symbols joined by a tie bar, either above or below the symbols. The six commonest affricates are optionally represented by ligatures, though this is no longer official IPA usage, due to the great number of ligatures that would be required to represent all affricates this way. A third affricate transcription sometimes seen uses the superscript notation for a consonant release, for example for , paralleling ~ . The symbols for the palatal plosives, are often used as a convenience for or similar affricates, even in official IPA publications, so they must be interpreted with care. Image of the six common affricate ligatures and their official IPA equivalents Note:
- If your browser uses Arial Unicode MS to display IPA characters, the following incorrectly formed sequences may look better due to a bug in that font: .
Extended IPA
The Extended IPA was designed for disordered speech. However, some of the symbols (especially diacritics, below) are occasionally used for transcribing normal speech as well. View a pdf file [http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ExtIPAChart97.pdf here]. The last symbol may be used with the alveolar click for , a combined alveolar and sublaminal click or "cluck-click".
Suprasegmentals
Closeup of the suprasegmental section of the IPA chart
Intonation

Tone
IPA allows for the use of either tone diacritics or tone letters to indicate tones. Note:
- With regard to tone diacritics, Unicode encodes marks for some contour tones, but not all. In Unicode version 4.1, only hacek (rising) and circumflex (falling) diacritics were encoded. Subsequent versions may also include six additional diacritics for contour tones, such as the macron-acute and the grave-acute-grave ligatures. (See an image here.) Note that contour tone diacritics are not encoded as sequences of level tone diacritics in Unicode.
- With regard to tone letters, Unicode does not have separate encodings for contour tones. Instead, sequences of level tone letters are used, with proper display dependent on the font, usually by means of OpenType font rendition: or . (These are probably not displaying correctly in your browser. See the image for a sample of how they should appear.) Since few fonts support combination tone letters (see the external links for one that is free), a common solution is to use the old system of superscript numerals from '1' to '5', for example [e⁵³, e³¹²]. However, this depends on local linguistic tradition, with '5' generally being high and '1' being low for Asian languages, but '1' being high and '5' low for African languages. An old IPA convention sometimes still seen is to use sub-diacritics for low contour tones: for low-falling and low-rising.
- The upstep and downstep modifiers are superscript arrows. Unicode version 4.1 does not encode these, though subsequent versions will. The arrows for upstep and downstep should not be confused with the full-height arrows, which are used to indicate airflow direction.
Diacritics
Closeup of the diacritic section of the IPA chart
Sub-diacritics may be placed above a symbol with a descender, i.e. . The dotless i, <ı>, is used when the dot would interfere with the diacritic. Other IPA symbols may appear as diacritics to represent phonetic detail: (fricative release), (breathy voice), (glottal onset), (epenthetic schwa), o (diphthongization). Notes: #Some linguists restrict this breathy-voice diacritic to sonorants, and transcribe obstruents as . #With aspirated voiced consonants, the aspiration is also voiced. Many linguists prefer one of the diacritics dedicated to breathy voice. The state of the glottis can be finely transcribed with diacritics. A series of alveolar plosives ranging from an open to a closed glottis phonation are:
Extended IPA diacritics
The letters and diacritics of the ExtIPA The ExtIPA has widened the use of some of the regular IPA diacritics, such as for pre-aspiration, or for a linguolabial sibilant, as well as adding some new ones. Some of the ExtIPA diacritics can be used for non-disordered speech as well, for example for the unusual airstream mechanisms of Damin. One modification is the use of subscript parentheses around the phonation diacritics to indicate partial phonation; a single parenthesis at the left or right of the voicing indicates that it is partially phonated at the beginning or end of the segment. For example, is a partially voiced [s], shows partial initial voicing, and partial final voicing; also is a partially devoiced [z], shows partial initial devoicing, and partial final devoicing. These conventions may be convenient for representing various voice onset times. Phonation diacritics may also be prefixed or suffixed rather than placed directly under the segment to represent relative timing. For instance, is a pre-voiced [z], a post-voiced [z], and is an [a] with a creaky offglide. Other ExtIPA diacritics are, In addition to these symbols, a subscript < or > indicates that an articulation is laterally offset to the left or right, and a double exclamation mark indicates 'ventricular' phonation, though it is not clear how this differs from 'harsh' phonation.
Prosodic notation
The ExtIPA also makes use of musical notation for the tempo and dynamics of connected speech. These are subscripted on the insides of a notation that indicates that they are comments on the prosody. Pauses are indicated with periods or numbers inside parentheses.
Obsolete and nonstandard symbols

How to transcribe sounds that don't have symbols in the IPA charts
The remaining blank cells on the IPA chart can be filled without too much difficulty if the need arises. Some ad hoc symbols have appeared in the literature, for example for the lateral flaps and voiceless lateral fricatives, the epiglottal trill, and the labiodental plosives. Diacritics can supply much of the remainder, which would indeed be appropriate if the sounds were allophones. For example, the Spanish bilabial approximant is commonly written as a lowered fricative, . Similarly, voiced lateral fricatives would be written as raised lateral approximants, . A few languages such as Banda have a bilabial flap as the preferred allophone of what is elsewhere a labiodental flap. It has been suggested that this be written with the labiodental flap symbol and the advanced diacritic, . Similarly, a labiodental trill would be written (bilabial trill and the dental sign). Palatal and uvular taps, if they exist, and the epiglottal tap could be written as extra-short plosives, . A retroflex trill can be written as a retracted , just as retroflex fricatives sometimes are. The remaining consonants, the uvular laterals and the palatal trill, while not strictly impossible, are very difficult to pronounce and are unlikely to occur even as allophones in the world's languages. The vowels are similary manageable by using diacritics for raising, lowering, fronting, backing, centering, and mid-centering. For example, the unrounded equivalent of can be transcribed as mid-centered , and the rounded equivalent of [æ] as raised . True mid vowels are lowered , while centered are near-close and open central vowels, respectively. The vowels that aren't representable in this scheme are the compressed vowels, which would require a dedicated diacritic.
Names of the symbols
It is often desirable to distinguish an IPA symbol from the sound it is intended to represent, since there is not a one-to-one correspondance between symbol and sound in broad transcription. The symbol's names and phonetic descriptions are described in the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. The symbols also have nonce names in the Unicode standard. In some cases, the Unicode names and the IPA names do not agree. For example, IPA calls "epsilon", but Unicode calls it "small letter open E".
The letters
The traditional names of the Latin and Greek letters are used for unmodified symbols. In Unicode, some of the symbols of Greek origin have Latin forms for use in IPA; the others use the symbols from the Greek section. Examples: Note #The Latin "upsilon" is frequently called "horseshoe u" in order to distinguish it from the Greek upsilon. Historically, it derives from a Latin small capital U. The IPA standard includes some small capital letters, such as , although it is common to refer to these symbols as simply "capital" or "cap" letters, because the IPA standard does not include any full-size capital letters. A few letters have the forms of cursive or script letters. Examples: Note #The "looptail G" 10 px is not strictly an IPA character, but is an acceptable alternative. #In form and origin, but not in name, this is the Greek upsilon. Ligatures are called precisely that, although some have alternate names. Examples: Many letters are turned, or rotated 180 degrees. Examples: The symbol can be described as a turned cee, but it is almost always referred to as open o, which described both its articulation and its shape. The symbol is often also called "caret" or "wedge" for it similarity to that diacritic. A few letters are reversed (flipped on a vertical axis): reversed E, reversed epsilon, reversed glottal stop [often called by its Arabic name, ayin]. One letter is inverted (flipped on a horizontal axis): inverted R. ( could also be called an inverted double-u, but turned double-u is more common.) When a horizontal stroke is added, it is called a bar: barred H, barred o, reversed barred glottal stop or barred ayin, barred dotless J or barred gelded J [apparently never 'turned F'], double-barred pipe, etc. One letter instead has a slash through it: slashed O. The implosives have hook tops: hook-top B, as does hook-top H. Such an extension at the bottom of a letter is called a tail. It may be specified as left or right depending on which direction it turns: right-tail N, right-tail turned R, left-tail N [note that has its own traditional name, engma], left-tail em, tail Z [or just retroflex Z], etc. When the tail loops over itself, it's called curly: curly-tail jay, curly-tail C. There are also a few unique modifications: belted L, closed reversed epsilon [there was once also a closed omega], right-leg turned M, turned long-leg R [there was once also a long-leg R], double pipe, and the obsolete stretched C. Several non-English letters have traditional names: C cedilla, eth (also spelled edh), engma, schwa, exclamation mark, pipe. Other symbols are unique to the IPA, and have developed their own quirky names: fish-hook R, ram's horns, bull's eye, esh [apparently never 'stretched ess'], ezh [sometimes also yogh], hook-top heng. The is usually called by the sound it represents, glottal stop. This is not normally a problem, because this symbol is seldom used to represent anything else. However, to specify the symbol itself, it is sometimes called a gelded question mark.
The diacritic marks
Diacritics with traditional names: : acute, macron, grave, circumflex, caron, wedge, or háček, diaeresis or umlaut, breve, (superscript) tilde, plus variants such as subscript tilde, superimposed tilde, etc. Non-traditional diacritics: : seagull, hook, over-cross, corner, bridge, inverted bridge, square, under-ring, over-ring, left half-ring, right half-ring, plus, under-bar, arch, subscript wedge, up tack, down tack, left tack, right tack, tie bar, under-dot, under-stroke. Diacritics are alternately named after their function: The bridge is also called the dental sign, the under-stroke the syllabicity sign, etc.
Comparison to other phonetic notation
The IPA is not the only phonetic transcription system in use. The other common Latin-based system is the Americanist phonetic notation, devised for representing American languages, but used by some US linguists as an alternate to the IPA. There are also sets of symbols specific to Slavic, Indic, Finno-Ugric, and Caucasian linguistics, as well as other regional specialies. The differences between these alphabets and IPA are relatively small, although often the special characters of the IPA are abandoned in favour of diacritics or digraphs. Other alphabets, such as Hangul, may have their own phonetic extensions. There also exist featural phonetic transcription systems, such as Alexander Bell's Visible Speech and its derivatives. There is an extended version of the IPA for disordered speech (extIPA), which has been included in this article, and another set of symbols used for voice quality (VoQS). There are also many personal or idiosyncratic extensions, such as Luciano Canepari's ^canIPA. Since the IPA uses symbols that are outside the ASCII character set, several systems have been developed that map the IPA symbols to ASCII characters. Two notable systems are Kirshenbaum and SAMPA (or X-SAMPA). These systems are often used in electronic media, although their usage has been declining with the development of computer technology, specifically because of spreading support for Unicode. See also: Unicode and HTML
See also

- International Phonetic Alphabet for English explains those IPA symbols used to represent the phonemes of English.
- IPA chart for English: simplifed version.
- TIPA provides IPA support for LaTeX.
- SAMPA, X-SAMPA and Kirshenbaum are other methods of mapping IPA designations into ASCII.
- List of phonetics topics
- Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA)
External links

- [http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html Official home page of the IPA]
Free IPA font downloads

- [http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=DoulosSILfont Doulos SIL], a Times IPA font that supports tone letters, the new labiodental flap, and many non-standard phonetic symbols, but only in roman typeface.
- [http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium Gentium], a highly legible international (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic) font in roman and italic typefaces that includes the IPA, but not yet tone letters or the new labiodental flap.
- [http://www.travelphrases.info/gallery/Test_IPA.html Test page] for installed fonts. Includes alternate variants and tone letters.
Keyboards

- [http://www.linguiste.org/phonetics/ipa/chart/keyboard/ Online keyboard]
- [http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=ipa-sil_keyboard IPA-SIL keyboard layout for Mac OS X] for Unicode IPA input
- [http://wikisophia.org/wiki/Wikitex#Tipa WikiTeX] supports editing IPA sequences directly in Wiki articles.
Sound files

- [http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/index.html Peter Ladefoged's Course in Phonetics (with sound files)]
- [http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/course/chapter1/chapter1.html Pronounceable IPA chart]
- [http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/vowels/contents.html An introduction to the sounds of languages]
- [http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/ipa-lab.htm IPA Lab] Chart with sound files at University of Victoria. (Works with QuickTime.)
- [http://www.paulmeier.com/ipa/charts.html Flash version of IPA charts, with sound samples]
- [http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/ipa/full/ Another set of IPA sound samples]
Charts

- [http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/fullchart.html IPA chart source]
- [http://www.linguiste.org/phonetics/ipa/chart/ IPA Chart] in Unicode and XHTML/CSS ----
- [http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPANumberChart96.pdf IPA number chart], at University of Victoria.
Unicode
Official Unicode PDF files:
- [http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0250.pdf Unicode chart for main IPA letters]
- [http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U02B0.pdf Unicode chart for IPA modifier letters]
- [http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0300.pdf Unicode chart including IPA diacritics] ----
- [http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-unicode.htm International Phonetic Alphabet in Unicode]
- [http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/ipachart.html Unicode-HTML codes for IPA symbols:] Tables of symbol names and HTML codes at PennState.
Personal extensions of the IPA

- [http://venus.unive.it/canipa/ ^canIPA] : Luciano Canepari's system (500 base symbols)
References

- Albright, Robert W. (1958). The International Phonetic Alphabet: Its background and development. International journal of American linguistics (Vol. 24, No. 1, Part 3); Indiana University research center in anthropology, folklore, and linguistics, publ. 7. Baltimore. (Doctoral dissertation, Standford University, 1953).
- Ball, Martin J.; Esling, John H.; & Dickson, B. Craig. (1995). The VoQS system for the transcription of voice quality. Journal of the International Phonetic Alphabet, 25 (2), 71-80.
- Canepari, Luciano. (2005a). "A Handbook of Phonetics: ‹Natural› Phonetics." München: Lincom Europa, pp. 518. [https://ssl.kundenserver.de/s83009615.einsundeinsshop.de/sess/utn1541a7584d7471b/shopdata/0002_New+titles/product_details.shopscript ISBN 3-8958-480-3] (hb).
- Canepari, Luciano. (2005b) "A Handbook of Pronunciation: English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Esperanto." München: Lincom Europa, pp. 436. [https://ssl.kundenserver.de/s83009615.einsundeinsshop.de/sess/utn1541a7584d7471b/shopdata/0002_New+titles/product_details.shopscript ISBN 3-89586-481-1] (hb).
- Duckworth, M.; Allen, G.; Hardca

Voiceless velar fricative

The voiceless velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is x. The sound is rare in, but not completely absent from, English. To give English speakers an example of the sound with which they might be familiar, consider the sound represented by "ch" in Scottish loch or Hebrew Chanukah.

Features

Features of the voiceless velar fricative:
- Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
- Its place of articulation is velar which means it is articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate (the velum).
- Its phonation type is voiceless, which means the vocal cords are not vibrating during the articulation.
- It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
- It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
- The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

Varieties of

In English

Standard English does not have , except for a few loan words such as Scottish loch and Hebrew Chanukah . Where it occurs, it is nearly always represented by a "ch." Many speakers, especially in the United States, do not (often cannot) make this sound, and are sometimes not even aware of its existence; these speakers replace it with in words such as "chutzpah" or "challah," or in words such as "loch" or "leprechaun." These alternative pronunciations are considered acceptable by most authorities. Some dialects in England, particularly London and Liverpool, may have where other dialects have , as in cat. In London it is a younger, lower-class pronunciation.

In other languages

The sound is a somewhat common sound cross-linguistically and very common in Assamese.

Armenian

In Armenian, is spelled Խ.

Czech

In Czech, as in other slavic languages using the roman alphabet, "ch" is pronunced as voiceless velar fricative. Unlike in Polish, the difference between the sound of "ch" and the sound of regular "h" are still being clearly differentiated. In some words, the difference in the pronunciation of "ch" and "h" is even crucial for the identification of the word (e.g. Czech "vrch" and "vrh", meaning "(the) top", "(a) throw", respectively).

Dutch

Standard Dutch has no g-sound as in "garden". They use a voiceless velar fricative or a voiced velar fricative instead. The word for "laugh" in both German and Dutch is "lachen", with ch to be pronounced as .

Esperanto

Esperanto has an , spelled Ĥ.

Georgian

Georgian has an , spelled ხ.

German

German has the voiceless velar fricative and it is spelled with "ch", as in ach (the interjection Oh!). The Germans call this sound ach-Laut. This is the sound represented by "ch" when it follows "a", "o", "u", or the diphthong "au". The sound represented by "ch" following "e", "i", "ä", "ö", "ü", the diphthongs "eu" or "äu", or the consonants "l", "n" or "r" is a different consonant, the voiceless palatal fricative. The sounds are allophones that are just starting to become separate phonemes, a rather interesting situation. See German phonology.

Polish

In Polish, as in other slavic languages using the roman alphabet, "ch" is pronunced as voiceless velar fricative, though in modern Polish the sound of "ch" blends with the sound of regular "h".

Russian

Russian uses the cyrillic letter Kha (Х, х) for the voiceless velar fricative.

Welsh

Welsh represents the voiceless velar fricative with "ch".

Phoneme

In human language, a phoneme is a set of phones (speech sounds or sign elements) that are cognitively equivalent. It is the basic unit that distinguishes words and morphemes. That is, changing an element of a word from one phoneme to another produces either a different word or obvious nonsense; whereas changing an element from one phone to another, when both belong to the same phoneme, produces the same word with an odd or incomprehensible pronunciation. Phonemes are not the physical segments themselves, but mental abstractions of them. A phoneme is a family of phones, called allophones, that the speakers of a language think of, and hear or see, as being the same. In sign languages, the phoneme was formerly called a chereme (or cheireme), but usage changed to phoneme when it was recognized that the mental abstractions involved are essentially the same as in oral languages. A "perfect" alphabet is one that has a single symbol for each phoneme. Phonemics, a branch of phonology, is the study of the systems of phonemes of languages. Although it is fundamental to most phonological theories, some linguists reject the theoretical validity of the phoneme. Some think that phonemes are more a product of literacy (i.e., the need to categorize the phonetics of a language in order to write it down systematically with a minimum number of letters). Other critics charge that the mind processes sub-phonemic elements of speech (e.g., features) in meaningful ways. A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones or separate phonemes relies on finding so-called minimal pairs: words that differ only in the phones in question.

Background and related ideas

The term phonème was reportedly first used by Dufriche-Desgenettes in 1873, but it refered to only a sound of speech. The term phoneme as an abstraction was developed by the Polish linguist Jan Niecislaw Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski during 1875-1895. The term used by these two was fonema, the basic unit of what they called psychophonetics. The concept of the phoneme was elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoi and other of the Prague School (during the years 1926-1935), as well as in that of structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield. Later, it was also used in generative linguistics, most famously by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, and remains central in any accounts of the development of virtually all modern schools of phonology. The phoneme can be defined as "the smallest meaningful psychological unit of sound." The phoneme has mental, physiological, and physical substance: our brains process the sounds; the sounds are produced by the human speech organs; and the sounds are physical entities that can be recorded and measured. For an example of phonemes, consider the English words pat and sat, which differ only in their initial consonants. This difference, known as contrastiveness or opposition, is sufficient to distinguish these words, and therefore the P and S sounds are said to be different phonemes. A pair of words that are identical except for such a sound are known as a minimal pair; this is the most frequent demonstration that two sounds are separate phonemes. If no minimal pair can be found to demonstrate that two sounds are distinct, it may be that they are allophones. Allophones are variant phones (i.e., sounds) that are not recognized as distinct by a speaker, and are not meaningfully different in the language, and yet are perceived as "the same". This is especially likely if they consistently occur in different environments. For example, the "dark" L sound at the end of the English word "wool" is quite different from the "light" L sound at the beginning of the word "leaf", but this difference is meaningless in English, and is determined by whether the sound is at the beginning or end of a word. A native English speaker might have a hard time hearing the difference at first, but in Turkish the difference between "light" and "dark" L is sufficient to distinguish words. That is, they are two separate phonemes in Turkish, but allophones of a single phoneme in English. The phonemic relationship of two sounds may not be obvious to a non-native speaker, which is why minimal pairs and an understanding of phonetic environments are important. For example, in Korean, there is a phoneme /r/ that is a flapped r between vowels, and is an l-sound next to other consonants. These sound very different to an English speaker, who is attuned to hearing them because the differences are meaningful in English. However, the native speaker has learned from an early age to filter out the difference, as they are not meaningful in their language. In Korean, for instance, it is impossible to distinguish the two words "ram" and "lam", despite the fact that both R and L sounds occur in the language. The exact number of phonemes in English depends on the speaker and the method of determining phoneme vs. allophone, but estimates typically range from 40 to 45, which is above average across all languages. Pirahã has only 10, while !Xóõ has 141. Depending on the language and the alphabet used, a phoneme may be written consistently with one letter; however there are many exceptions to this rule — see Writing systems below. Some languages make use of pitch for the precise same purpose. In this case, the tones used are called tonemes. Some languages distinguish words made up of the same phonemes (and tonemes) by using different durations of some elements, which are called chronemes. However, the chroneme is not employed by the majority of scholars working on languages with distinctive duration, and the term itself may not even be recognized by most linguists. Usually, long vowels and consonants are represented either by a length indicator or doubling of the sound in question. In sign languages, phonemes may be classified as Tab (elements of location, from Latin tabula), Dez (the hand shape, from designator), Sig (the motion, from signation), and with some researchers, Ori (orientation). Facial expressions and mouthing are also phonemic.

Notation

A transcription that only indicates the different phonemes of a languages is said to be phonemic. Such transcriptions are enclosed within virgules (slashes), / /; these show that each enclosed symbol is claimed to be phonemically meaningful. On the other hand, a transcription that indicates finer detail, including allophonic variation like the two English L's, is said to be phonetic, and is enclosed in square brackets, [ ]. The common notation used in linguistics employs virgules (slashes) (/ /) around the symbol that stands for the phoneme. For example, the phoneme for the initial consonant sound in the word "phoneme" would be written as . In other words, the graphemes are <ph>, but this digraph represents one sound . Allophones, real speech variants of a phoneme, are often denoted in linguistics by the use of diacritical or other marks added to the phoneme symbols and then placed in square brackets ([ ]) to differentiate them from the phoneme in slant brackets (/ /). The conventions of orthography are then kept separate from both phonemes and allophones by the use of the markers < > to enclose the spelling. The symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and extended sets adapted to a particular language are often used by linguists to write phonemes of oral languages, with the principle being one symbol equals one categorical sound. Due to problems displaying some symbols in the early days of the Internet, systems such as X-SAMPA and Kirshenbaum were developed to represent IPA symbols in plain text. As of 2004, any modern web browser can display IPA symbols (as long as the operating system provides the appropriate fonts), and we use this system in this article. The only published set of phonemic symbols for a sign language is the Stokoe notation developed for American Sign Language, which has since been applied to British Sign Language by Kyle and Woll, and to Australian Aboriginal sign languages by Adam Kendon. However, there are several phonetic systems, such as SignWriting.

Examples

Examples of phonemes in the English language would include sounds from the set of English consonants, like and . These two are most often written consistently with one letter for each sound. However, phonemes might not be so apparent in written English, such as when they are typically represented with combined letters, called digraphs, like <sh> (pronounced ) or <ch> (pronounced ). To see a list of the phonemes in the English language, see IPA for English. Two sounds that may be allophones (sound variants belonging to the same phoneme) in one language may belong to separate phonemes in another language or dialect. In English, for example, has aspirated and non-aspirated allophones:aspirated as in , and non-aspirated as in . However, in many languages (e. g. Chinese), aspirated is a phoneme distinct from unaspirated . As another example, there is no distinction between and in Japanese, there is only one phoneme in Japanese, although the Japanese has allophones that make it sound more like an , , or to English speakers. The sounds and are distinct phonemes in English, but allophones in Spanish. (as in run) and (as in rung) are phonemes in English, but allophones in Italian and Spanish. An important phoneme is the chroneme, a phonemically-relevant extension of the duration a consonant or vowel. Some languages or dialects such as Finnish or Japanese allow chronemes after both consonants and vowels. Others, like Italian or Australian English use it after only one (in the case of Italian, consonants; in the case of Australian, vowels).

Arguments against the phoneme

Rather than a basic mental unit of language, some think that the phoneme may well be a perceptual artifact of alphabetic literacy (see the terms Phonemic awareness and Phonological awareness). If not that, it may be an epiphenomenal aspect to listening removed from face-to-face encounters, that is, text-like listening (qv phone and feature). It could be said that the unit of the phoneme is a necessary construct if we wish to set a dynamic, complex spoken language into static, written form expressed at a sub-syllabic level, though the model is a simplification and no where near phonologically or phonetically complete. The phoneme has the theoretical weakness from the perspective of phonology in that it uses, in part, lexical criteria to determine something that is supposed to be phonological (i.e., minimal pairs of words to point out phonological categories). Much of phonology, while accepting the phoneme as possible model or unit of language for description, has largely moved past the segmental phoneme as a basic unit of speech, of speech processing or of language acquisition. This is because the concept of the 'feature' is viewed as beneath the level of the phoneme while also spanning across segments. Meanwhile, attempts at capturing a phonological picture of the psychological control and structure underlying real speech flounder on the inadequacies of the phoneme for such purposes (that is, the phoneme can not account for co-articulation or assimilation of controlled speech, among other phenomena). However, the term, though variably defined and delimited, remains a widely and uncritically accepted concept in foreign language teaching and native literacy (especially for alphabetic languages, such as English).

Restricted phonemes

A restricted phoneme is a phoneme that can only occur in a certain environment: There are restrictions as to where it can occur. English has several restricted phonemes:
- , as in sing, occurs only at the end of a syllable, never at the beginning. (In many other languages, such as Swahili, can start a word.)
- occurs only at the beginning of a syllable, never at the end. (A few languages such as Arabic allow /h/ at the ends of words.)
- In many American dialects with the cot-caught merger, occurs only before /r/, /l/, and in the diphthong .
- In non-rhotic dialects, /r/ can only occur before a vowel, never at the end of a word or before a consonant.
- Under most interpretations, and occur only before a vowel, never at the end of a syllable. However, many phonologists interpret a word like boy as either or .

Neutralization, archiphoneme, underspecification

Phonemes that are contrastive in certain environments may not be contrastive in all environments. In the environments where they don't contrast, the contrast is said to be neutralized. In English there are three nasal phonemes, , as shown by the minimal triplet, However, these sounds are not contrastive before plosives such as . Although all three phones appear before plosives, for example in limp, lint, link, only one of these may appear before each of the plosives. That is, the distinction is neutralized before each of the plosives :
- Only occurs before ,
- only before , and
- only before . Thus these phonemes are not contrastive in these environments, and according to some theorists, there is no evidence as to what the underlying representation might be. If we hypothesize that we are dealing with only a single underlying nasal, there is no reason to pick one of the three phonemes over the other two. (In some languages there is only one phonemic nasal anywhere, and due to obligatory assimilation, it surfaces as in just these environments, so this idea is not as far-fetched as it might seem at first glance.) In certain schools of phonology, such a neutralized distinction is known as an archiphoneme (Nikolai Trubetzkoy of the Prague school is often associated with this analysis.). Archiphonemes are often notated with a capital letter. Following this convention, the neutralization of before could be notated as |N|, and limp, lint, link would be represented as |lɪNp, lɪNt, lɪNk|. (The |pipes| indicate underlying representation.) Other ways this archiphoneme could be notated are |m-n-ŋ|, , or |n
- |. Another example from English is the neutralization of the plosives /k, g/ following /s/. Phonetically, the unaspirated tenuis plosive in sky is closer to English /g/, which is partially voiceless in initial position, than to aspirated /k/. This can be heard by comparing the sky with this guy; also, in the speech of young children who are not yet able to produce consonant clusters, they often pronounce sky as what sounds like to adult ears. That is, /k/ and /g/ are constrastive word initially, But not after an /s/, Thus one cannot say whether the underlying representation of the plosive in sky is /skai/ without aspiration, or /sgai/ without voicing. This neutralization can instead be represented as an archiphoneme |G|, in which case the underlying representation of sky would be |sGai|. Another way to talk about archiphonemes involves the concept of underspecification. Phonemes can be considered fully specified segments while archiphonemes are underspecified segments. In Tuvan, phonemic vowels are specified with the features of tongue height, backness, and lip rounding. The archiphoneme |U| is an underspecified high vowel where only the tongue height is specified. Whether |U| is pronounced as front or back and whether rounded or unrounded depends on vowel harmony. If |U| occurs following a front unrounded vowel, it will be pronounced as the phoneme ; if following a back unrounded vowel, it will be as an ; and if following a back rounded vowel, it will be an . This can been seen in the following words: It should be noted that not all phonologists accept the concept of archiphonemes. Many doubt that it reflects how people process language.

Non-phonemes

Prothesis, epenthesis and paragoge due to phonotactics add sounds into words without adding meaning. Nevertheless, the sound is added, and thus the phoneme status may be ambiguous. For example, Spanish prothetic e- must be added before consonant clusters, e.g. estres.

Phonological extremes

Of all the sounds that a human vocal tract can create, different languages vary considerably in the number of these sounds that are considered to be distinctive phonemes in the speech of that language. Ubyx and some dialects of Abkhaz have only two phonemic vowels, and many Native American languages have three. On other extreme, the Bantu language Ngwe has fourteen vowel qualities, twelve of which may occur long or short, for twenty-six oral vowels, plus six nasalized vowels, long and short, for thirty-eight vowels; while !Xóõ achieves thirty-one pure vowels—not counting vowel length, which it also has—by varying the phonation. Rotokas has only six consonants, while !Xóõ has somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-seven, and Ubyx eighty-one. French has no phonemic tone or stress, while several of the Kam-Sui languages have nine tones, and one of the Kru languages, Wobe, has been claimed to have fourteen, though this is disputed. The total number of phonemes in languages varies from as few as eleven in Rotokas to as many as 112 in !Xóõ (including four tones). These may range from familiar sounds like , , or to very unusual ones produced in extraordinary ways (see: Click consonant, phonation, airstream mechanism). The English language itself uses a rather large set of thirteen to twenty-two vowels, including diphthongs, though its twenty-two to twenty-six consonants are close to average. (There are twenty-one consonant and five vowel letters in the English alphabet, but this does not correspond to the number of consonant and vowel sounds.) The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels . The most common consonants are . A very few languages lack one of these: standard Hawai‘ian lacks , Mohawk lacks and , Hupa lacks both and a simple , colloquial Samoan lacks and , while Rotokas and Quileute lack and . While most of these languages have very small inventories, Quileute and Hupa have quite complex consonant systems. The ways that sounds are pronounced can vary slightly from language to language even if the same IPA symbol is used. For example, the Finnish word maat ("countries") sounds different from the British English (Received Pronunciation) word mart even though both are transcribed as IPA [http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/hyfl/projektit/vokaalikartat_eng.html#sweswedish_vowels]; the Spanish word sin ("without") has a somewhat different vowel from the American English seen though both are transcribed as .

Writing systems

In a phonemic writing system, a given symbol represents a single phoneme and each phoneme is represented by a single symbol. This may differ from a phonetic orthography, which only requires that the spelling be unambiguously determined by the pronunciation, and the pronunciation unambiguously indicated by the spelling. English spelling is the classic example of an nonphonemic, and indeed unphonetic, spelling system. Welsh and Irish are, by contrast, among the more predictable orthographies among languages using the Latin alphabet. In French, rules to predict pronunciation from spelling are quite simple and have few exceptions, as long as there are some clues such as context or part of speech, but guessing spelling from pronunciation is quite difficult, especially because of the many silent letters. Italian, Spanish and especially Finnish have a very close letter-to-phoneme correspondence. Karelian has a perfectly phonemic spelling system, as it has no standard language, but it has a complete spelling system. However, the split between phonemic and nonphonemic orthographies is exaggerated. All languages are written with conventions that represent both meaning and pronunciation. This is true at both ends of the scale: Chinese characters are first and foremost symbols of words, but they have some phonetic information as well. At the other extreme, there are a few orthographies which are perfect phonemic representations of an artificial national standard, but since they make no effort to represent variation in pronunciation within the language, they too are conventional. Other languages fall somewhere in between. Although English is often given as an example of an unphonetic orthography, its system is nowhere near to being as purely conventional a system as Chinese writing is. English spelling conveys etymological information, but also vast amounts of phonetic information. Spanish is often given as an example of a phonetic orthography, but it has numerous imperfections including silent letters. It is, at least, possible to tell the correct pronunciation of any written Spanish word. Another phonemic orthography is Serbian. Its phonemicity was established by Serbian "Webster" Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. He followed a strict phonemic principle, which is best told by his own words: "Write as you speak and read as it is written.". Hindi, a descendant of Sanskrit, is an example of phonetic language written with a non-Roman Alphabet.

External links

- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm What is a phoneme? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnAllophone.htm What is an allophone? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhone.htm What is a phone? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneticallySimilarSegm.htm What is a phonetically similar segment? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAMinimalPair.htm What is a minimal pair? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsComplementaryDistributio.htm What is complementary distribution? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnEnvironment.htm What is an environment? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsContrastInIdenticalEnvir.htm What is an contrast in identical environments? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsContrastInAnalogousEnvir.htm What is an contrast in analogous environments? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/ComparisonOfMorphemeMorphAllom.htm Comparison of morpheme-morph-allomorph & phoneme-phone-allophone? (SIL)]
- [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Phonology.htm What is phonology? (SIL)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=phoneme Phoneme (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=allophony Allophony (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=transcription Transcription (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Grapheme-phoneme+conversion Grapheme-Phoneme Conversion (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Phoneme+restoration Phoneme Restoration (Lexicon of Linguistics)]
- [http://moodle.ed.uiuc.edu/wiked/index.php/Phonemic_awareness phonemic awareness] Category:Phonetics Category:Phonology zh-min-nan:Im-sò· ko:낱소리 ja:音素

Iroquoian languages

The Iroquoian languages are a Native American language family. The family includes the languages of the Iroquois Confederacy (including the extinct Mingo language), as well as Cherokee. Every language in this family has at least one nasal vowel phoneme. Cherokee's is a nasal schwa, written in transliteration as 'v' (e.g. "Hv?" sounds like "Huh?" nasalized, and means the same thing).

Family division

The Iroquoian family is composed of eleven languages. I. Northern Iroquoian : A. Tuscarora-Nottoway :: 1. Tuscarora :: 2. Nottoway : B. Proto-Lake Iroquoian :: 3. Huron-Wyandot ::: dialects: :::
- Huron :::
- Wyandot :: 4. Laurentian (languages or dialects) (?) :: i. Iroquois Proper (a.k.a. Five Nations Iroquois) ::: 5. Onondaga ::: 6. Susquehannock (a.k.a. Andaste, Conestoga, Andastoerrhonon, Minqua) ::: a. Seneca-Cayuga :::: 7. Seneca :::: 8. Cayuga ::: b. Mohawk-Oneida :::: 9. Mohawk :::: 10. Oneida II. Southern Iroquoian : 11. Cherokee What has been called the Laurentian language appears to be actually more than one dialect or language. Many different groups making up the Wyandot and the Neutral have very little linguistic documentation. Among these are the Tionontati (a.k.a. Khionontateronon, Petun, Tobacco Nation), the Wenro, and the Erie (a.k.a. Nation du Chat). These groups were called Atiwandaronk meaning "they who understand the language" by the Huron, and thus are grouped as a dialect related to Huron. The Meherrin peoples may have spoken an Iroquoian language, but there is not enough data to determine this with certainty. Nottoway, Huron-Wyandot, Susquehannock, and the Laurentian languages/dialects are now all extinct. The last speakers of Susquehannock were all murdered by the Paxton Boys lynch mob.

Genetic relations

Some linguists group the Iroquoian languages with the Siouan languages as the Macro-Siouan family, but this larger family is not recognized by a consensus of linguists. For information regarding Proto-Iroquoian see Floyd Lounsbury's article on pages 334-343 in Volume 15 of the Handbook of North American Indians and Marianne Mithun's article on pages 259-282 of the Extending the Rafters: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Iroquois collection edited by Jack Campisi, Michael Foster, and Mithun. An article that is a bit more technical but also good is Blair Rudes' treatment of Proto-Iroquoian vowels in the Spring 1996 edition of Anthropological Linguistics.

Culture

The Iroquois were made up of a group or league of tribes that settled much of the land which presently spans from western New York to western Ohio. They were not nomadic but preferred to live in villages of many multi-roomed longhouses, built with saplings and bark or thatch. These longhouses could be up to 300 feet long. Villages were occupied for about 25-50 years. The Iroquois relied greatly on domestication of plant foods, but also supplemented their diet with hunting and gathering. Food such as corn, squash, beans, and other crops were cultivated, often on large fields where forest had been cut and burned for planting. It can be stated that they practiced a system of shifting horticulture. They spent much time on cultivation, harvesting, the preparatration of maize, and storing food. They stored their crops in various types of pottery jars. Pots were specialized by being much sturdier, constructed to withstand thermal stress, but were sensitive to mechanical stress. Iroquian pottery could also be used for a variety of reasons or uses. They were great for preparing maize. Excavated grains, pottery and other evidence suggests that a typical Indian meal consisted of soup made from different plants and animals, with corn as a staple in their diets.

Bibliography

- Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). Languages. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-1604-8774-9.
- Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
- Chilton, Elizabeth. “Farming and Social Complexity in the Northeast.” North American Archaeology. Ed. Timothy R. Pauketat and Diana Dipaolo Loren. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005. 138-160.
-

Labial consonant

Labials are consonants articulated either with both lips (bilabial articulation) or with the lower lip and the upper teeth (labiodental articulation). English [m] is a bilabial nasal sonorant, [b] and [p] are bilabial stops (plosives), [v] and [f] are labiodental fricatives. Bilabial fricatives and the bilabial approximant do not exist in standard English, but do occur in many languages. For example, the Spanish consonant spelt b or v is pronounced as a voiced bilabial approximant between vowels. Lip rounding, or labialisation can also accompany other articulations. English [w] is a labialised velar approximant. Labial consonants are divided into three subplaces of articulation:
- bilabial consonants
- labiodental consonants
- linguolabial consonants

Close front compressed vowel

The close front or near-close near-front compressed vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. There is no symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound.

Features

- Its vowel height is near-close, which means the tongue is not quite so constricted as a close vowel.
- Its vowel backness is near-front, which means the tongue is positioned almost as far forward as a front vowel.
- Its vowel roundedness is compressed, which means the corners of the mouth are drawn slightly together and the lips may be compressed horizontally, but do not protrude.

Occurs in

- Central Swedish: ut or , 'out' The Central Swedish (near) close (near) front compressed vowel is commonly transcribed as . It only occurs long. There is no diacritic in the IPA to indicate compression, but since the Swedish back vowel and Norwegian central vowel are also labially compressed, is frequently chosen as an ad hoc transcription. Another possibility would be to transcribe it as a near-front vowel with an old alternate labialization diacritic, . When the long u in Central Swedish is diphthongized, the offglide is tellingly a bilabial approximant rather than a . Note that this contrasts with Swedish close front rounded vowel which when diphthongized has a prototypically rounded offglide, . Other dialects of Swedish have instead a close central compressed vowel. The close back vowel is also compressed. See close back compressed vowel. Category:Vowels

Close back compressed vowel

The close back compressed vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. There is no symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound.

Features

- Its vowel height is close, which means the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.
- Its vowel backness is back, which means the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.
- Its vowel roundedness is compressed, which means the corners of the mouth are drawn slightly together and the lips may be compressed horizontally, but do not protrude.

Occurs in

There is no official diacritic for compression. An old diacritic for labialization, , will be used here as an ad hoc symbol.
- : oro or , 'unease', 'worry'
- : 空気 (kuuki) , 'air', 'atmosphere' The long /u/ in Swedish is frequently diphthongized, and the glide is tellingly the bilabial approximant rather than the prototypically rounded . has a similar vowel. These languages also have close central compressed vowels and close front compressed vowels. The Japanese vowel is perhaps a near-back vowel. Since there is no diacritic for compression, the transcription is commonly used; this captures both the lack of rounding common to back vowels and the somewhat fronted articulation (unrounded vowels tend to be more front than rounded vowels). When Japanese follows /h/, the consonant tellingly assimilates as a bilabial fricative . Category:Vowels

Category:Vowels

Category:Phonetics ko:분류:홀소리

Hörschhausen

Die Gemeinde Hörschhausen liegt im Landkreis Daun in Rheinland-Pfalz. Sie hat 153 Einwohner und eine Fläche von 2,38 km².

Daten

- Postleitzahl: 54552
- Kfz-Kennzeichen: DAU

Weblinks

- [http://www.hoerschhausen.de/ Hörschhausen] Kategorie:Ort in Rheinland-Pfalz

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