Questions tagged [phonetics]
The study of the production and perception of sounds or "phones".
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In what circumstances is d devoiced in English?
I have noticed that speakers of languages which have /d/ and (unaspirated) /t/ as distinct consonants are sometimes unsure whether my natural pronunciation of the English name "Dan" starts with a /d/ ...
3
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3answers
156 views
Are the nasal portions of prenasalized consonants syllabic?
Prenasalized consonants occur in a number of natural languages. https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Prenasalized_consonant
When I hear someone pronounce a word that begins with a prenasalized consonant, ...
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0answers
73 views
Past of verbs such as “long” and “wing” [closed]
Assuming their past is regular, are they pronounced as /wɪŋd/ and /lɑːŋd/ or does a [gd] surface at the end?
0
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2answers
113 views
Do we have acoustic phonetics alphabet?
After looking for something like this, I have found only IPA as a system that tries to represent human sounds with symbols; but there is an argument that IPA does not actually represents the sounds ...
3
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0answers
84 views
The schwa in [meɪkəθ] for *maketh* in KJV English
This Wiki article seems to suggest that words like makes had lost their final syllable schwa in normal speech already by Chaucer's time (palmeres > palmers is the example they give). The rule, as ...
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2answers
107 views
Why are dental sounds rare?
Dental stops are rare in the languages of the world (other than in Australia). Most languages outside of Australia containing dental stops belong to Indo-European, Uralic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian. ...
13
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3answers
11k views
Is the “p” in “spin” really a “b”?
Daniel Everett claims in Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (Ch. 11) that the English "p" and "b" in "pin" and "bin" are separate phonemes, since they alone distinguish the words "pin" and "bin," whereas ...
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1answer
16 views
annonation file from xwaves to praat
There is a speech corpus (IViE: http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/files/apps/old_IViE/) which provided annoated speech files in the following format:
signal Cambridge_sentences/Q_no_morph/q2cma.d
type 0
...
0
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1answer
59 views
/o/ -> /u/ change in Persian xānum خانم ‘mistress’
Is it correct to describe /o/ -> /u/ change in خانم xānum as nasalisation under the influence of the following /m/? What does general phonetics say about it? One Persian teacher said /m/ has nothing ...
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2answers
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French letters in English
The English language has a great amount of borrowings from French. But why aren't such letters as "ç"(façade) and "é"(café, protégé) changed if they don't exist in the English alphabet and there are "...
0
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1answer
31 views
Praat, R, or something else for phonetic analysis?
I need to do phonetic analysis of several dozen brief tokens. Specifically, I want to extract FFT/LPC profiles of fricatives, and would like to experiment with different algorithms for creating ...
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1answer
215 views
Affrication-like sound in palatal plosive [c]
When I compare the plosive sounds in an IPA table with recordings (like this or this), the sound of [c] stands out to me as noisier and more turbulent than the rest of the series [p, t, ʈ, k, q, ʔ]. ...
1
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1answer
85 views
Why do English words comprising of one syllable and ending with a y sound with a vowel preceding it correspond to German words ending in a g sound?
Few examples:
Lay-legen
Day-tag (I know that the d here shifted to a t due to a sound change described in Grimm's Law)
Slay-(Er)schlagen
I am aware of the fact that German and English share a common ...
2
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1answer
93 views
Why are PIE C+glide clusters so rare?
I noticed that *Cj/*Cy (depending on if one uses IPA or IEist notation) and *Cw sequences are rare in PIE (with most being the result of schwebeablaut or regular ablaut). Among sequences that aren't ...
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3answers
115 views
Long vowels in the world languages
The English language has long and short vowel sounds. Short and long vowels also exist in some other languages. And it's interesting to know when native English speakers come to let it be the Czech ...
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1answer
83 views
Modern phonetics and the word “sure” [closed]
How true is it that there is a modern phonetical tendency in the English language to pronounce the word "sure" rather like"shore", but not a classical "sure"?
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2answers
106 views
Are there any letters in the International Phonetic Alphabet that are considered universal?
English is full of sounds that are difficult for people of other cultures to hear and pronounce. H (for the French), L (for many Asian languages), Th (for pretty much everyone), etc.
What, if any, ...
2
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1answer
99 views
Understanding VOT
I am a third year bachelor student of Linguistics. It would be nice if I don't get mean comments, because I genuinely do not understand what I am about to ask.
I have to write a paper on phonetic ...
0
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2answers
130 views
/i:/ as in feet and /i/ as in city
Please explain the difference between /i:/ as in feet and /i/ as in city and very. I presume it sounds the same except that the 2nd one is shorter. Am I right?
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1answer
68 views
What is the phonetic transcription of the Lithuanian name Austėja? [closed]
I do not know how to transcribe this name.
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1answer
104 views
What does unreleased voiced stop mean?
There is [d̚] in the official IPA chart, and it's very confusing for me. My native language is Korean, whose unreleased stops are either voiceless or nasal.
If a voiced stop is unreleased, that would ...
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1answer
46 views
Are there any standards for the manual modification of fundamental frequencies in Praat?
While analysing pitches with Praat, I'm often faced with the problem, which is, I must modify the F0 data manually since there are always some octave up points or other points which is impossible to ...
9
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2answers
239 views
Do voiceless approximants exist? What is the consensus among phoneticians/phonologists?
Voiceless sounds that are produced with supralaryngeal configurations that would be considered approximants if voiced are attested in languages (i.e. [j̊], [l̥], etc.), but none are found to contrast ...
2
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3answers
87 views
Source of syllable statistics of languages?
I wish to compare the syllable diversity and length distributiin of different languages. En-Fr to start with, phonetically even more than in writing.
I want to check the theory that short word short ...
4
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1answer
196 views
Is the study of triphthongs a must to master English phonology?
Most universities in India are teaching only pure vowels (monophthongs), and diphthongs. Now we find triphthongs. ...
Is the study of triphthongs a must to master the phonology of English? ...
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2answers
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Phonetic distortion when words are borrowed among languages
When languages borrow words from other languages, they sometimes deliberately distort words to make them phonetically easier to pronounce.
For example, when Japanese speakers are taught the word "...
2
votes
2answers
116 views
Phonetic characters of Arabic emphatic consonants
My native language is Korean. I'm not learning Arabic, but I'm curious anyway.
Refer to the following link for the letter names I recorded myself: Arabic pharyngeal consonants
I think I can ...
4
votes
1answer
144 views
How to measure auditory distances between vowels
(Followup to this question, also related to this answer.)
The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (1999: 11–2) defines the values of cardinal vowels as follows:
[T]wo fully front ...
3
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1answer
97 views
Is it possible to recognize place of articulation of consonants through spectrograms?
I am trying to undestand how PRAAT works and to recognize consonants through spectrograms. I Know that it's possible to distinguish fricative consonants from nasal ones (for example) but is it ...
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4answers
139 views
What is the most universally understood way to represent the “ay” sound of “CAKE” substituting the standard a for a single character?
I am making up an imaginary word to be used as a name.
Right now I seem to have it ending in "tata", but want it to be clear it is pronounced as "tay-tah" not "tah-tah"
I admit that I do not know my ...
2
votes
2answers
151 views
Is it possible to speak like a native speaker of English by mastering the phonology?
I know some professors of phonetics teach phonetics(in a country like India) in a laboratory almost similar to that of the native speakers.But when they come out of the class their pronunciation does ...
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0answers
30 views
Are there languages more suitable for loud or crowded situations than others? [duplicate]
I'm an Italian native speaker but I speak English everyday for work.
When I'm with English native speakers I often hear them asking to repeat words, especially if there's a lot of noise around.
I ...
2
votes
1answer
113 views
How many consonant clusters can a human being utter?
Most Indian languages have three consonant clusters.I think that English has got three consonant clusters.Example, strange.
I would like to know which language has got the most consonant clusters.
I ...
5
votes
1answer
141 views
Why were the formants of high and back vowels difficult to obtain? And why not anymore?
I was reading the second chapter of Three Areas of Experimental Phonetics by Peter Ladefoged (1967), in which he summarizes the studies he conducted in the 1950s and 1960s which demonstrated practical ...
34
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4answers
6k views
Why isn't “I've” a proper response?
Suppose someone asked me the question, "Have you completed the project?". A standard response would be "I have". Why does the equivalent "I've" sound so strange and never used as a replacement?
I am ...
0
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1answer
84 views
Relationship between Uvular and Dorsal Consonants articulation
I have a question regarding the physiological production of uvular and dorsal consonants. what are the physiological aspect of both consonants articulation? As uvular consonants articulated with the ...
2
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1answer
224 views
Does the southern pronunciation of Jenny have a triphthong in it?
You know when Forrest Gump yells Jenny's name and it sounds like "Jenneay". I'm wondering if there actually is a triphthong at the end there, of it is a figment of my imagination. I believe the ...
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2answers
144 views
Lengthened voiced stops and the airstream through the nose
I am going through Catford's Practical Introduction to Phonetics, experiments 31-32. After explaining how to produce voiced stops [b], [d], [g] by superimposing a closure upon the voiced air-stream, ...
3
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1answer
48 views
Is there an articulatory explanation to spontaneous nasalisation in New Indo-Aryan?
This question is regarding the phenomenon of spontaneous nasalisation (emergence of nasalisation out of nowhere) in New-Indo-Aryan as it evolved from Middle-Indo-Aryan. This is a well-documented ...
1
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1answer
113 views
What's the relationship between harmonics and formants?
I'm new in speech-processing and there are some notions confused me.
Through Fourier Transform, we can get spectra of specific sound signals, the harmonic frequencies can be shown as the peaks in the ...
4
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0answers
78 views
What's the name for using a letter to represent its name's sound?
It's often whimsical to substitute a single letter for a group of letters phonetically identical to the letter's name.
Such as rewriting "barbecue" as "bar-b-q", or the entirety of William Steig's ...
2
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1answer
54 views
Should I include this piece in the vowel? [spectrogram]
I'm trying to measure vowel length in 'beat", utterance-final. Should I place the marker where it is now or further to the right, as there is some activity there?
2
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2answers
203 views
How can I write an interdental lateral in phonetic transcription?
Inspired by this answer here is my question: How can I write a interdental lateral in phonetic transcription (IPA preferred, but not a necessary requirement, other wide spread phonetic notation ...
2
votes
2answers
62 views
Voicing Into Closure? [segmentation, waveform and spectrogram form Praat]
I'm wondering for how long the voicing persists into closure here, if at all. At about 50% into the closure I would say it's noise only from there on, nevermind F1. But what about the oscillations ...
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0answers
147 views
Why did Moti Lieberman associate 子 with onset, and 了 with coda?
Screenshot's from YouTube. I don't speak Chinese and don't understand the relevance of these ideograms. I emailed him twice, but after 5 months, got no reply.
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2answers
87 views
Is sonority phonological or phonetic?
I've seen several mentions of "sonority" in different works, most of which define it as something like "how loud a particular sound is in relation to other speech sounds".
This seems like something ...
7
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0answers
127 views
How to synthesize French vowels
I am trying to synthesize the French vowels [o] and [ɔ] for running a perception experiment. I have been using the Praat Vocal Toolkit and got pretty nice results with the following formant values: F1(...
2
votes
2answers
187 views
Can medial /t/ and /d/ before syllabic /n/ be distinguished easily?
Addendum (0:00am, June 27th, JST): After reading Draconis' answer, I did a little more research and added my findings below the horizontal line.
Can medial /t/ and /d/ before syllabic /n/ be easily ...
2
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1answer
150 views
IPA Sound used for grapheme 'R' in some English dialects?
A number of years ago, I was working with some friends on conlanging for a fictional society. At the time, we didn’t know about IPA or formalized sound descriptions like “voiceless ...
0
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1answer
37 views
Interactive class exercises with Praat
I’m teaching a seminar crash course in linguistics to first year undergrads next term. It’s just 3 one hour lectures, and should be fun and engaging. I want it to be hands-on, and give students a ...
