Questions tagged [phonetics]
The study of the production and perception of sounds or "phones".
698
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1answer
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Labialised /r/ in RP
Is /r/ in RP labialised in all positions?
For example: In words like real, free, proud, tree, brother, borrow, dream, throw etc.
Is it labialised in all positions (like intervocalic, post-...
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0answers
26 views
Oral posture and articulatory settings
It seems that there is a lot that remains to be discovered about the vocal tract and that, in any case, it would be horrendously complicated to try to derive the setup of all the articulators just ...
3
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2answers
1k views
American production of /ɾ/ in other languages
Why is it common for Americans who study foreign languages to keep producing /ɾ/ as a retroflex sound, even though [ɾ] is present in their pronunciation of native words like city and water?
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15 views
Need speech corpora for stop-vowel (CV, CVC and VCV) for acoustic phonetics research
I'm looking for a controlled-setting, open-source speech corpus for CV, VCV, CVC syllables. C = stop consonant, and V = all vowels in American English.
More consonantal contexts (fricatives, stops) ...
0
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1answer
59 views
What is the maximum possible number of formants?
I'm planning to make my own virtual singer software, like Yamaha's Vocaloid. Contrary to Vocaloid which composes voice syllable-wise, my software should compose voice phoneme-wise.
As a consequence, ...
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2answers
102 views
Do the DRESS vowel (/e/) and SQUARE vowel (/ɛː/) have the same vowel quality in contemporary RP?
I understand that the SQUARE vowel is now often realized as the long monophthong /ɛː/ instead of the traditional diphthong /eə/ in contemporary RP. The DRESS vowel is now also closer to the open-mid ...
2
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1answer
44 views
Determining tongue root position
As far as I'm aware, languages which do not have contrastive tongue root advancement/retraction can still differ in terms of tongue root position. Are there any acoustic measurements that can be used ...
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1answer
92 views
What's the right phonetic transcription of the word man?
Is it [mɛən] or [mæən] ?
I've seen both of them in some videos; however, I'm not really sure Which one of them truly represents the sound (with the æ raising).
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108 views
How to pronounce /r/ after /θ/ [closed]
/r/ after /θ/ is very hard for me to pronounce. How do I pronounce it correctly? When I pronounce /θ/, the tip of my tongue comes between the top and the bottom teeth, after producing /θ/, my tongue ...
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1answer
67 views
What should the phonological rules be for this alternation?
I'm a graduate student from Korea. :) May I ask you guys a question about phonology?
In the data, divinity and divine, what are the phonological rule and phonological mechanisms for the alternation ...
3
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2answers
91 views
How to analyze these data with Optimality Theory?
I'm a graduate student from Korea. As a novice in the field of phonology, I've been confused about analysis using Optimality Theory for a long time. Could you guys help me with this question?
In ...
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0answers
57 views
Are there any recent studies on vowels of PRS?
Consonants and their phenomena are well studied for PRS (Puerto Rican Spanish). However, vowels and their phenomena are less well known. Known vowel phenomena in the dialect are unstressed/final vowel ...
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0answers
48 views
How to represent modern Mayan languages using Hieroglyphics
So I have been looking at the Mayan hieroglyphs here. There are two broad classes basically: phonetic glyphs and non-phonetic glyphs.
Meanwhile I am looking at the List of Mayan Languages (current ...
3
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0answers
43 views
What (if anything) can be inferred about the way a vowel is articulated from the fact that it has well defined higher formants?
I've been experimenting with analysing vowels in Praat. Sometimes it shows a clear F4 (which seems to mean that F4 has a narrow bandwidth - I don't know whether amplitude comes into it as well) and ...
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1answer
43 views
Displaying formants in real time
Is anybody aware of an app that will show vowel formants in real time (or more or less)? I know there are apps that will give you a spectrogram, but I can't read the output quickly or accurately ...
1
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1answer
56 views
Voice pitch changing between languages
I speak English natively, but I have learned Spanish to a high level of proficiency and speak Latvian (still learning) with my wife who speaks Latvian natively and English with native proficiency (...
2
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1answer
95 views
How to write phonology rules using features?
Is there a way to write the following phonology rule using features?
The /u/ becomes [ɯ] word-finally when preceded with an unrounded vowel with 1 or more intervening consonants. .
2
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1answer
92 views
Are there correlations between specific geographic and phonetic features? [duplicate]
Langauges that are closer to eachother geographically tend to share features.
However, can it be said that language communities in distant but geographically similar regions tend to have similar ...
6
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2answers
577 views
does F3 correspond to any articulatory features?
when describing vowels, increased F2 implies that the tongue is more front, and increased F1 implies that the tongue is more low. Does F3 correspond to anything, articulation wise?
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1answer
114 views
Why does the NATO Spelling alphabet contain words with more than two syllables
I always wondered why the NATO Spelling Alphabet has words with three syllables in it. I know it was extensively researched, so there must be a reason, but it seems odd to me.
One syllable seems ...
3
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2answers
187 views
Is the reduction or disappearance of alveolar trill [r] a cross-linguistical phenomenon?
The sound [r] has become several other sounds, such as in English [ɹ], French [ʁ], Norwegian [ɾ] etc., while it is still widely found in the languages world-wide.
Besides, are there any assumed ...
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2answers
39 views
Where to download phonetic word list for Dutch/ Nederlandse fonetische woordenlijst downloaden
I cannot find phonetic word lists / dictionaries online for Dutch.
Please provide me with a url.
What do you use?
What is available?
2
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1answer
189 views
Dental plosives without top teeth
I have practically never had my front right tooth because of skateboarding, and even before that I crawled off onto a parking block - after that I learned Vietnamese without retroflexing the S. Now im ...
0
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1answer
63 views
Dental plosive with no apical obstruction
Can I have a paper which describes dental plosives by the two rows of teeth as opposed to contacting the dental area with the tongue ?? I mean the air needs obstructed and the posterior most place of ...
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1answer
62 views
Where to download phonetic word list for English
I need phonetic word lists / dictionaries for English.
I did not assume that this would be hard to find online.
What do you use?
What is available?
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2answers
196 views
What is a natural class in phonology? How to use phonological features to identify classes?
What are natural classes in phonology? Can phonological features make a set of segments a natural class?
For example, is there any way to make a natural class out of the set:
[k, x, q,χ]?
What ...
3
votes
1answer
211 views
What are partially voiced stops (as in Danish)?
In researching the Danish language, I've read about a series of stops [b̥ d̥ ɡ̊]. What are those? Apparently they are different from the commonplace voiced stops [b d ɡ] and the voiceless stops [p t k]...
2
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2answers
291 views
Has the Russian way of pronunciation been affected by frost?
I am a student learning both English and Russian, and I find the Russian pronunciation to be very different from the English one. A few months ago I made a detailed post on the Linguistics SE to ...
2
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1answer
105 views
Equivalent “окающие и акающие" translation in the English language?
It's a question from phonetics and it's (I hope you recognized it) from Russian language “окающие и акающие, секающие и шекающие".
I've tried versions like “retaining the unstressed “o” and “a” and ...
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4answers
178 views
Does [s] before [b] always become [z]?
There is a Persian word اسبابكشی asbābkeši and it is quite difficult to stick strictly to the transcription saying there is [s] before [b]. The assimilation of [s] to [z] before a voiced stop is ...
0
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2answers
118 views
What is this Cree sound in IPA?
https://nehiyo.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/uy-uyiwak.mp3
I have been trying to find an equivalent to this sound. The language is Canadian Plains Cree. It's not "i" as in bite or fight.
Is there an ...
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3answers
202 views
What do these subscripts/superscripts mean in IPA?
Here is an example of a sentence from the Glossika course in Taiwanese Hokkien:
The "Phonics" line is the IPA line. (The "Typing" line is the Tâi-lô romanization; I don't know where the "...
6
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1answer
328 views
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
votes
3answers
191 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
76 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
142 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
89 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
115 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. ...
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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 ...
2
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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
...
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2answers
119 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 ...
4
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2answers
2k views
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
49 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 ...
7
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1answer
221 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]. ...
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1answer
90 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
votes
1answer
100 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 ...
0
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3answers
133 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
88 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"?
0
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2answers
119 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
votes
1answer
115 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 ...
