Questions tagged [phonetics]
The study of the production and perception of sounds or "phones".
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Do the qualities of a vowel determine its semivowel’s place of articulation?
[j] (the semivowel of [i]) is palatal.
[w] (the semivowel of [u]) is labial–velar.
[ɥ] (the semivowel of [y]) is labio-palatal.
Does the position of the vowel in the mouth play a part in determining ...
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Vowel quality: tongue position vs formant frequencies
I stumbled upon the claim that vowel quality model based on tongue height and frontness has been known to be incorrect – and the so called openess and frontness are actually two formant frequencies.
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About similarity of sounds in Swedish and Danish
In all sources I found there are symbols /ð/ for Danish 'd'. It is something between the English /ð/ and /l/ with a tongue moved a bit back, touching the teeth a bit.
So, actually, I am curious to ...
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What is the difference between double articulations and secondary articulators?
I need to know the examples that makes secondary articulators and double articulations different.
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How many beats is a syllable?
I’ve read some sources that say a syllable is “one beat” but I don’t understand that. Wouldn’t it depend on the tempo of the pulse. I.e, if a tempo is 60bpm can’t you fit different numbers of ...
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What subdiscipline of linguistics studies the relationship between writing and pronunciation?
Most European languages use some variation of the Latin alphabet. However, while most of them seem to broadly agree on what sounds most of the individual letters represent (with some minor differences,...
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Phonemes vs. Distinctive Feature Theories
I'm a high school student who will be going to college to study linguistics next fall. I'm already knowledgeable about some areas, but I'm currently trying to expand my knowledge in phonology. I have ...
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Is there any sound change that can result in /ɞ/?
I am making a conlang where one of the distinctive sounds is /ɞ/. It is a rare vowel sound, and I searched Index Diachronica but couldn't find a sound change that results in it. The sound also does ...
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Is this diagram accurate for [ɾʲ]
I've been having trouble realizing the /ɾʲ/ sound in Irish, and I wanted to know if I am interpreting the IPA correctly.
I find it very difficult to tap the alveolus with my tongue raised to the ...
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How to analyze nasal vowels next to nasal consonants
Let's say a language uses two vowels /A/ and /B/ which differ only by one relevant phonological feature [+/- X] such that /A/ is [- X] and /B/ is [+ X]. Now let's say there's a consonant phoneme /C/ ...
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Phonological rules
If I were to write a rule dictating that /l/ becomes [r] before a front vowel would it be:
/l/ -> [r] / [V, +front],
/l/ -> [r] / [+front]
or
/l/ -> [r] / V [+nasal]
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Voice Onset Time, Onsets, Codas, and Pre- & Post-Aspiration
Whilst we're all familiar with voicing on an intuitive and/or phonological level, the actual acoustic phonetics are somewhat less intuitive to many of us.
The main way of formalising this intuitive ...
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Determining the number of phonemes from set of phones
For this exercise, I'm to determine the number of phonemes from a set of phones and then write their allophonic rules for each phoneme
phones: [b], [ɣ], [β], [l], [t], [d], [g]
However, I think I'm ...
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How exactly are vowel qualities plotted on a neat quadrilateral chart?
How exactly are vowel qualities of a particular speaker, or average qualities of the speakers of an accent, plotted on a neat quadrilateral chart like these (from the Wikipedia articles for Received ...
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Why are mid-open/open vowels considered [- tense]?
I found the following chart (which was taken from Donegan (1976)) on a book and something reminded me of a simple question I always had, but I never came across a definitive answer: why are some open ...
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Was Katherine Hepburn's accent consistently, totally non-rhotic?
According to the data of Nancy Elliot's dissertation on rhoticity in American film actors' speech, Katherine Hepburn was totally non-rhotic speaker, but I found only two r-coloured sounds in her ...
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How can I get fast measuring of jitter and shimmer?
I want to be able to see fast computations of jitter and shimmer. Best would be on the fly but an online/software quick tool would be also good.
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Etymological link between “govern” and “born”
So my question is two-fold. Specific and more general.
I was doing some genealogy research and I was trying to read some Yiddish (I don’t understand Yiddish), and I thought a line said a certain ...
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Why is phonology part of a language, but writing isn't?
I very often see the pretense of something like "writing is not language" which I still don't quite understand.
As I understand, writing is a representation of a language, but not the ...
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What is the difference between traditional and modern IPA?
I have recently come across this while researching the phonetic spelling for "love", and I have come across a website (the website) that had both traditional and modern IPA spellings (with ...
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Synthesize tone contours?
Is there software that I can use to synthesize how a hypothetical tone contour would sound?
I'm aware of "sound from formula" feature in Praat, but I'm unsure how to create the right formula ...
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Allophones of dental fricatives (/θ/, /ð/) in English
I've noticed in my own speech (West Riding of Yorkshire, male, born in the '90s) two different ways I have of pronouncing phonemes /θ/ and /ð/:
The tip of my tongue sits in the gap between my top and ...
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Why does the IPA use four main vowel heights?
Because vowels exist at infinitely precise points on large acoustic and articulatory spectrums (vowel spaces), the study of phonetics uses generalized waypoints to describe them. The International ...
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Can broad and narrow transcription be distinguished by whether a transcription makes use of diacritics?
When doing transcription of English (British or American) in IPA, is broad transcription exactly the kind of transcription which doesn't make use diacritics, and narrow transcription the kind which ...
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Is the vowel quadrilateral in IPA 3 by 2 or 3 by 3?
I found some difference between the vowel quadrilateral from https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/IPAcharts/IPA_chart_orig/pdfs/IPA_Kiel_2020_full.pdf
and the one from
https://pressbooks....
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How are the varying boundaries of phonemes across idiolects and dialects objectively described?
I am taking a language I know nothing about as an example.
In Vietnamese, I am told “hello” is *Xin chào”, pronounced |sin tʃaw|, with a mid tone like saying “aaah” at the doctor, and a falling tone ...
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Can the Kiki/bouba effect be generalized?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
Has the Kiki/bouba effect been generalized in research, in which qualitative associations for phonemic units are explored comprehensively, ...
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What this difference between phonemic and phonetic transcriptions? [duplicate]
Consider the Wikipedia article for phoneme, this is in Norwegian but one can easily translate, I will use this example for asking the question.
Fonemer er vanligvis plassert mellom skråstreker i ...
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Phonemic transcriptions for English compound words
I have a question about the phonemic transcription for compound words in English. Is there a general rule? Specifically,
Should there be space/hyphen/no space between each element in a compound?
How ...
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Establishing criteria for sounds likely to facilitate phonological mergers around them
I know extremely little about the history of sound changes in languages other than English, so that will be the source of my examples. However, I’m asking this question for a more general, cross-...
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What does it mean when a phoneme represented by one IPA is "phonetically" a different IPA?
I have been studying Hungarian and its pronunciation for a long time, using references such as the Hungarian Phonology Wikipedia page and comparing that to the General American Phonology page.
The ...
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Bilabial speech sounds with lower lip inserted between teeth
I have noticed the existence of several phones that can be produced with a place of articulation that I haven't seen discussed before. Basically, the two lips contact each other (as in bilabial sounds)...
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Does knowing separately phonetic features X,Y,... imply that a speaker will know a phoneme characterized solely and completely by X,Y,...?
In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker claims that when babies learn to talk, if they have learned in certain phonemes a set of features, then they automatically learn other phonemes characterized ...
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Origin of vowel-h digraphs that English speakers use to represent phonemes
The majority of English speakers are not proficient in the International Phonetic alphabet or any other phonetic transcription system outside their own orthography. However, we often feel the need to ...
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Why do I hear the p, t, k in Portuguese as aspirated plosives?
First, some of my linguistic background: I'm a native Cantonese Chinese speaker. I speak fluent Mandarin Chinese but with heavy Cantonese accent. I have a working-level proficiency in English, meaning ...
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Unexplained /ɪl/ /ɛl/ phenomenon in American English
(I hope all this background information I’m about to give is relevant.) I’m a teenager from the north side of Chicago with a mostly unplaceable General American accent. I have some general tendencies ...
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I can make a strange clicking sound with my soft palate. What is this?
Not sure if here is exactly the right place to be asking this question, but whatever this is probably overlaps with linguistics/phonetics in some way. The best way I can describe it in words is like ...
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Which English phoneme varies the most among its dialects?
The phonology of English shows extensive variance among its multitude of dialects. Which phoneme(s) shows the most variance throughout the language?
I think the most immediately apparent choice would ...
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Larynx anatomy and effect of configuration of larynx on F2 of vowels
In the bottom-left quadrant of the image below, an antinode ("A") is shown for F2 at a certain point in the larynx. I think the structure just below and to the left of it is the epiglottis ...
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Formant measurements errors in Praat
I am trying to measure formant trajectories in /lV/ sequences.
I started by extracting values at 11 temporal points, but I am getting a lot of incorrect values, as if Praat is struggling to recognize ...
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L-epenthesis/allophony in unexplained circumstances in American English
I've been having trouble articulating this question, so I'm sorry if it's poorly worded.
I'm a teenage English speaker from Chicago. I've recently noticed a seemingly odd allophonic possibility in ...
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The difference between the phonemes /p/ and /b/ in Japanese
Is there any difference between the phonemes /p/ and /b/ in Japanese ?
In English, they are pretty distinguishable.
E.g: 'Bat' and 'pat'
In Japanese, however, I get lost trying to tell which is which.
...
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A better rule for Canadian Raising
I'm a teenager from Chicago with a pretty standard contemporary Midwestern/General American accent (not distinctly Chicago). I'm interested in the phonetic phenomenon of Canadian Raising, in which ...
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What is the term for the duration ratio between the vowel and the coda?
A syllable consists of three parts: The onset, the nucleus (which is usually a vowel), and the coda. The onset and the coda are optional, or may come in consonant clusters, but for the purpose of this ...
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Is there any free API that can translate from French to IPA? [duplicate]
I have invented a language that actually is just French but each phoneme is replaced by another one. So to build an application that can translate from French to that language, I need the phonetics of ...
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What are near-minimal pairs
What are near-minimal pairs? How are they different from minimal pairs? Can Allophones occur in near-minimal pairs?
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Stress, spirantization and other changes in the word "okay"
I'm a teenager from the Midwest. In the English language, many words have significant variance in their range of possible pronunciations. Some words may sound different from speaker to speaker in ...
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Child language acquisition as an explanation for American rounding of the /r/ sound
The English phoneme typically represented by the letter ⟨r⟩ represents a confusing and complicated mess of allophonic realizations, some of which are highly disparate and some of which vary only ...
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Why are intervocalic coronal plosives apparently so unstable in English?
There are a plethora of words in the English language in which the phonemes /t/ and /d/ appear between two vowels, whether they be in adjacent syllables in the same word or in different words as a ...
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Do other languages have correspondences like English's No-Nope and Yeah-Yep?
In the English language, as in others, there are a variety of interjection words. Among these are some comprising an open syllable, like yeah and no. Others end in stop consonants, like yep (or yup) ...
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