The study of the production and perception of sounds or "phones".
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Animal sounds across languages
As onomatopoeia, the words used for animal sounds are often quite similar across many languages. However, there are non-trivial differences, even for something as common as the croak of a frog.
I was ...
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1answer
135 views
Do you have a vowel trapezoid for Spanish?
I am trying to contrast the vowel systems of English and Spanish, and showing two vowel trapezoids seems like a good approach. I've not yet found one yet. Any ideas?
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1answer
53 views
Basic resource on japanese phonetics
Could you recommend a good reference for studying Japanese phonetics?
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2answers
97 views
Understanding Voiced Consonants
I've been having some trouble understanding how is it that what differentiates, for example, /p/ from /b/, is the vibration of the vocal chords, present in /b/, but not in /p/. From what I have read ...
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3answers
149 views
Why are consonants distinguished differently than vowels?
Consonants are distinguished normally by features like place of articulation, manner of articulation, voiced/voiceless, etc. while vowels are usually distingusihed by stuff like tongue's position and ...
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6answers
140 views
Textbook suggestions for syntax, semantics/pragmatics and phonetics/phonology
I am coming to linguistics from a completely non-linguistic background; I was a mathematician. Next year I will start taking some serious (Master's level) linguistics courses and I would like to have ...
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2answers
137 views
How do tones work in music sung in tonal languages, such as Cantonese or Mandarin Chinese?
I have not yet studied tonal languages, so it might be understandable, but when I listen to Chinese music, for example, I'm unable to perceive tones. This makes me think they are partially or ...
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78 views
Historical pronunciation of words in English
This isn't about sound change in general, but the changes that took place in the pronunciation of individual words. Does such a compilation exist? It would be interesting to know how divergent ...
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1answer
76 views
Is audio-processing (auditory) brain cortex activated when human is reading non-phonetic alphabets?
Excuse my virginity in linguistics, but it seems to me that phonetic alphabets are "only" protocols for audio compression into visual input/output media, optimized for human throat sounds.
I suppose ...
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2answers
117 views
Getting familiar with accents
Would it not be nice to have a site from which people can listen to
different phrases in different languages with each phrase having the
following characteristics, in any combination:
Sample ...
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1answer
207 views
Why are only yes/no questions asked with a rising tone?
There is a rule used almost subconsciously by almost all English speakers (and I'm sure it applies to many other languages too) which is that yes/no questions are asked ending with a rising tone, and ...
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1answer
61 views
What is the average delay between reading a period and the next sentence
e.g. while reading quietly and reading out loud. Different people read at different rates, so let's say the delay in terms of beat ratio: if for example every vowel takes one beat on average, how many ...
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45 views
Tool for finding recombinations of syllables that yield words
(I know that the title of this question is quite opaque, but I'm having a hard time explaining what I'm looking for. Perhaps someone can help with that.)
I need a tool which can take a collection of ...
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1answer
69 views
What prevents us from reconstructing PIE “u̯” by analogy with laryngeals?
The current laws for laryngeals presume the following reconstruction rules:
ē is reconstructed as eh1
ā is reconstructed as eh2
ō is reconstructed as eh3
word-initial e- is reconstructed as h1e
...
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2answers
344 views
Is IPA obsolete?
It seems to me that IPA is badly designed and not suitable well for many languages other than English.
Some problems are:
It uses different characters to denote the same sounds. For example, [ʍ] ...
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3answers
313 views
Does English language stand special in terms of phonology?
I am a native Russian speaker.
When I am listening to songs and music in other languages, which I do not know, such as Italian, Romanian, Greek, Bulgarian, and even Japanese, Finnish, Kyrgyz and ...
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1answer
158 views
IPA for phonemes - does this make sense at all?
On the Wikipedia page for the International Phonetic Alphabet, slashes for phonemes are mentioned quite casually, without getting into the discussion of how or if it makes sense to use a phonetic ...
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2answers
169 views
Korean syllable-final ㅅ in Hangul transcription of loanwords
Why are English loanwords ending in /d/ or /t/ systematically transcribed into Hangul syllables ending in ㅅ rather than ㄷ? This seems strange, since when ㅅ is followed by a vowel, the coda is realised ...
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1answer
109 views
Seeking linguistic terms for how pronunciation reflects word boundaries
I'm looking for some correct terminology to use within the fields of phonology and acoustics (I assume).
In spoken language there is generally some kind of very brief pauses, changes of intonation, ...
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1answer
78 views
Is there a way to create synthetic speech with no intonation contours / prosody?
Is there a way to create an utterance in synthetic speech which is devoid of prosody? Or if no such synthetic speech system exists, would there be a way to filter an existing utterance to remove the ...
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1answer
106 views
Intrusive misspelling - does it have any origin?
I've seen many cases when people who speak different languages make a common mistake spelling words. They add an extra sound (usually, a consonant) while there is no historic or linguistic evidence ...
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1answer
195 views
IPA transcription of the American English “bunched” /r/
There are 2 common articulations of /r/ and /r̩/ in American English, one retroflex, and the other dorsal. This phone is called the molar or bunched r. It can be described roughly as a back-palatal or ...
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3answers
114 views
How distinctive must a phoneme be?
How much of a functional load must a phone carry to be considered its own phoneme?
For example, my idiolect of English has a marginally distinctive glottal stop. However, it exists distinctively in ...
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2answers
263 views
Rules for glottal stop insertion across languages
Many languages lack phonemic glottal stops, but regularly insert them. For example:
English invariably inserts glottal stops before utterance-initial vowels, and often before word-initial vowels when ...
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1answer
186 views
Diachronic devoicing of initial lenis plosives in English
I get the impression that in the "classical Received Pronunciation" of English during phonetician Jones's era, the lenis plosives /b/, /d/, /g/ (and probably the affricate /dʒ/ as well) in initial ...
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3answers
112 views
Is it possible to create English phonetics of a given word with correct morphology, and phonology?
Dictionaries contain near 80,000 entries (less or more than that) and most of those entries have phonetic pronunciations written beside them.
However, English might have more than a million words, if ...
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137 views
Are there languages without vowel reduction?
Are there languages without vowel reduction? That is, are there languages in which the vowels in certain syllables are not centralized and/or "de-rounded" and/or shortened because of speaking rate, ...
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1answer
77 views
What exactly does 'post-velar' refer to?
It seems post-velar usually refers to a uvular place of articulation. In the wiki of the Americanist phonetic notation, they are listed as synonyms.
But sometimes the term seems to mean 'everything ...
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2answers
382 views
How can the IPA vowels be memorized?
Memorizing IPA consonants is trivially easy; each symbol represents one sound, and that sound can be described with a variety of parameters about manner of articulation, etc.
The IPA vowels, however, ...
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329 views
Hearing your name in a noisy crowd: what is this called and how might it work?
I can't really formulate it any more lucid than as it is in the title, so.... I'm reading a phonetics text now, but I haven't yet got to the chapter on 'speech perception' so maybe I'll come across at ...
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3answers
157 views
Whispered Voiced Consonents
Is there a difference between voiced and unvoiced consonants when whispering, which as I understand it, does not use the vocal cords? I know it sounds silly to ask because we can all understand ...
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1answer
331 views
Why IPA does not indicate “soft” consonants in English?
I am a native Russian speaker. Sometimes I encounter English speakers who are trying to learn Russian and wonder how to pronounce "soft" consonants.
At the same time while learning English I noticed ...
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109 views
What transcription to reflect Hebrew script and phonetics?
I am currently learning modern Hebrew with simple material (Teach Yourself Hebrew). I would like to use a different transcription than the one offered in this book or in Omniglot to build up my ...
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1answer
150 views
How can I differentiate between syllable-initial [ɣ] and [ə] using Praat or other software?
I am currently studying Amdo Tibetan. In this language the voiced velar fricative [ɣ] is reported to occur as the first sound in some syllable-initial consonant clusters. More specifically, this sound ...
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2answers
162 views
What do the “less-than” and “greater-than” signs mean when used as IPA vowel diacritics?
I was recently reading an academic paper on Amdo Tibetan phonetics and the author uses IPA vowel diacritics that look like "less-than" and "greater-than" signs.
Here is a picture so you know what I'm ...
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50 views
Determining how similar audio is to human speech
I was suggested to cross post this question of mine from Stack Overflow. Hopefully my question is within the bounds of this question board!
I am searching for a method of determining the similarity ...
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2answers
124 views
What do reversed and dotted tone letters mean?
The IPA uses the 5 tone-letters ˥,˦,˧,˨,˩. Unicode also has reversed (꜒,꜓,꜔,꜕,꜖) and dotted tone bars (꜈,꜉,꜊,꜋,꜌; ꜍,꜎,꜏,꜐,꜑). What are these characters used for?
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7answers
486 views
Is there a language whose writing is 100% phonemic?
I was wondering is there a language that has a complete one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes (letters) and the phonemes of the language?
Or rather, is there a language that is 100% ideally ...
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187 views
Are /w/ and /j/ considered to be consonants?
I've heard [w] and [j] are glides and that glides are not considered to be consonants.
I've also seen voiced labiovelar approximant [w] and palatal approximant [j] on the IPA consonant chart.
...
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211 views
Is there an IPA character for the sympathetic sucking in sound?
Is there an IPA symbol for the sound you might make when you burn yourself or someone tells you a story about an injury they have—when you suck your breath quickly through your teeth with your ...
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101 views
Patterns of accent changes by non-native English speakers
I am looking for a list of 'accent changes', or pronunciation inaccuracies, non-native English speakers commonly make when speaking English words. The list would obviously be native language specific ...
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1answer
211 views
Can all languages be “whispered” equally well?
Watching a movie recently I found I couldn't make out the dialogue because it was all whispered.
I turned the volume up, and had no problems hearing everything. It seems to me that all words are ...
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2answers
114 views
Is there a cross-linguistic subdivision of phones in signed languages akin to how all spoken languages have vowel and consonant phones?
After reading Joe Martin's enlightening answer to the question "Are there counterparts to phones and phonetics for signed languages?" I immediately began to wonder how much further spoken and signed ...
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1answer
186 views
Are certain phonological processes more likely to be surface true?
This question occurred to me when studying Optimality Theory phonology. For reduplication in OT, the base of the stem (/reduplicated part) is taken to be the input for the reduplicated morph. However, ...
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1answer
204 views
Consonant length-differences by prominence
In a language I am studying I have just noticed a significant but subtle difference in the length of [f] segments in tonic versus atonic syllables (an ~50ms difference which is statistically ...
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1answer
80 views
Velar vs labial coarticulation
Does anyone know of a citation for /k/ becoming palatal before a front vowel? Or anything that says labials are less likely than velars to become coarticulated with neighbouring vowels?
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117 views
Literature on “broken vowels”
I am looking for any recent studies dealing substantially with "broken vowels,"
or vocoid elements which have a noticeably nonstable formant trajectory, yet for which there are no good phonological ...
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1answer
153 views
Are there any alternatives to Source-Filter theory?
The linear source-filter theory of speech production ( Fant, G. (1970) Acoustic Theory of Speech Production; Stevens and House (1961)) is very useful for understanding speech synthesis and a ...
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1answer
279 views
About the Swedish /ɧ/
Swedish has quite a peculiarity that I haven't found (yet) in other languages. There are some spellings that are pronounced all the same way. Currently the number of these spellings is disputed, but ...
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4answers
315 views
Why do rhotics pattern together?
Looking at the IPA, many different types of sounds are given symbols based of of the Latin R,r: approximants, trills, taps/flaps; both coronal and uvular segments.
Sometimes, these sounds are ...
