Questions tagged [phonetics]
The study of the production and perception of sounds or "phones".
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30 views
Do I pronounce pharyngealized consonants properly?
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 ...
2
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0answers
43 views
How to measure auditory distances of 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 ...
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1answer
50 views
Is that 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
113 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 ...
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2answers
125 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
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1answer
99 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 ...
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1answer
107 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 ...
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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 ...
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1answer
59 views
Relationship between Uvular and Dorsal Consonants phonation
I have a question regarding the physiological production of uvular and dorsal consonants. what are the physiological aspect of both consonants phonation? As uvular consonants articulated with the back ...
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1answer
208 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
134 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, ...
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1answer
40 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 ...
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1answer
58 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 ...
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0answers
71 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
52 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?
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2answers
175 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 ...
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2answers
50 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
121 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
75 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
114 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(...
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2answers
160 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 ...
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1answer
136 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 ...
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1answer
34 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 ...
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2answers
61 views
Source on approximant fortition
I'm starting a project that examines the phonetics of palatal approximant fortition (with a variety of outcomes) in several dialects of Spanish.
There's a great deal of existing Spanish linguistics ...
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0answers
73 views
Examples of languages with complex “formules de politesse”
French uses complex word arrangements to say "best regards" and "yours sincerely" to finish well written letters, i.e.:
Nous vous prions d’agréer, Monsieur, l’expression de nos sentiments respectueux ...
4
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1answer
85 views
Where does Texan English derive its l-vocalization?
My English teacher grew up in Texas and unsurprisingly her native dialect is Texan English. I noticed that when intervocalic /l/ is followed by /i/, the /l/ is elided and /y/ takes its place. For ...
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1answer
88 views
Marking phoneme boundaries - how to decide on the transitions?
I'm currently labelling some singing data, which contains very slow transitions between vowels. The data often have prenuclear glides and diphthongs together. The picture below is an instance (the ...
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0answers
23 views
phoneme-level forced aligners?
I am aware of a few available aligners: P2FA, ProsodyLab Aligner, Montreal Aligner, etc.
Specifically, I'm trying to use the Chinese version so I tried Chinese P2FA. It can align syllables quite well,...
9
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1answer
114 views
Are there languages that can speak of continous things without discretizing them?
All languages I know of discretize qualities when trying to describe them. For example, languages generally sample a few words for describing a range of continous things like feelings ('terrible', '...
5
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3answers
99 views
Formant frequencies of consonants
In the old days, phones were defined by the requisite articulation, both consonants and vowels. As time wore on and science and technology advanced, vowels became better defined by their acoustic ...
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2answers
1k views
Non-African Click Languages
Paralinguistic clicks are quite common across world's languages. But paralinguistic clicks usually appears as ideophones. But why is Africa the only continent that uses click consonants? Are there any ...
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2answers
840 views
Why is vowel phonology represented in a trapezoid instead of a square?
Given that the internal area of the human mouth is approximately a square, why the vowels pronunciation chart is usually represented by a trapezoid?
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4answers
2k views
Is the schwa sound consistent?
The first syllable in "about" (ə'baʊt) is schwa, so is the second one in the "salad" ('sæləd), but iv'e never heard them pronounced the same way.
in salad it sounds more like the i in "trick".
...
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2answers
67 views
British English offglides
The offglide of the English diphthongs /aʊ/ and /əʊ/ is represented by the vowel /ʊ/. In other languages, such as Portuguese and Spanish, they are represented in the same way, but they sound ...
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2answers
149 views
Why do some linguists say vowel length isn't contrastive in Italian?
That's what I get in Caillou & Leite (2009) and the article "Main stress in Italian nonce nouns" by Martin Krämer. The latter brings a case where vowel length is proven to be contrastive (ancóra/...
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0answers
33 views
phonetics name of vibration in the wind pipe [duplicate]
A very angry, sonorant voice may have the vocal lips, wind pipe and whole throat vibrating.
For example, we may see this as phoneme in e.g. imitation of a wolfs growl, "grrr", a game show's bad-...
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0answers
76 views
Phonetic similarity between alveolar and uvular trill
In a few languages of Europe (French,German,Italian),these phonemes are in free variation. To my ears they sound quite distinct,but maybe it is because I lack sufficient knowledge about their acoustic ...
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0answers
24 views
qTA model and lexical tone
I have only recently come across the qTA model and it seemed interesting, but so far it does not fit my connected speech data at all - words with the same tone come out with wildly different pitch ...
0
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1answer
64 views
Is there a difference between foreign and native accents?
As the title says, are there any linguistic differences between accents acquired from birth/childhood and accents ued by adult language learners who speak the language fluently, but still with a ...
0
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1answer
93 views
The TRAP vowel: a or ä?
If my mouth is open and my tongue is completely relaxed, do I make an [a] or an [ä]?
Which one is more common for the TRAP vowel in British English?
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3answers
213 views
What exactly is the definition of a syllable?
I do not consider myself a linguist. I just teach English to Japanese audience. So please excuse my ignorance if this is too basic a question.
What exactly is the definition of a syllable? What I ...
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0answers
21 views
Experience with PENTATrainer?
I recently discovered the PentaTrainer scripts and PentaTrainer2 plug-in for Praat. These are potentially very useful to me and it's great that all of the underlying work has been made available like ...
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1answer
42 views
With SSML phoneme tags using IPA phonetic symbols, how can I insert pauses to slow down pronounciation?
Note
For my text to speech engine (I use Cereproc, William Voice).
The engine can be used on the website here:
https://www.cereproc.com/
and it supports the ssml tags used in this question..
...
4
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1answer
102 views
4
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1answer
158 views
Phonetic similarity between *s* and *j*
I've recently discovered that Latin s at the end of words became the palatal approximant j in Italian. I remember reading that this process is also observed in some Occitan dialects,so it cannot be ...
4
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1answer
150 views
Mechanism of glottal stop - effect on tension in vocal cords
I understand that vocal pitch basically depends on tension in the vocal cords, which I'm visualising in terms of the cords being stretched along their length.
I understand that the glottal stop is ...
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2answers
73 views
What is the most precise/accurate/reliable way of determining whether a speech sound has been reproduced correctly by a person?
What is the most precise/accurate/reliable way of determining whether a speech sound has been reproduced correctly by a person?
I am looking at something like perhaps an inspection of a person's ...
8
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3answers
875 views
What's the difference between /ɪ/ and /i(ː)/?
In English there's the vowel sound /ɪ/ as in "bin" and /i(ː)/ as in "been".
My girlfriend, who is Greek, cannot perceive the difference, but to me they sound very different.
Is the difference ...
2
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3answers
135 views
Identifying phonemic boundaries in Praat
I am trying to segment some connected speech in Praat, and want to get the boundaries between phonemes as accurate as possible. I am finding that in many cases, one sound blends into another and it's ...
