![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistPart One
Part Three
I haven't forgotten this series! It just took me a few days to write this up. I hope you enjoy it.
Gretchen McCulloch, internet linguist, has been talking a lot about the IPA on Twitter lately (I've been tagged in quote-tweets of both how to type the IPA on an Android phone and the thread of IPA (symbols) as IPAs (beers), and I think what she says about learning the IPA is well-timed for where we're up to:
In the first part of How to Read the IPA, our intrepid heroes set off on their adventures rightwards through the places of articulation for pulmonic consonants.
Or, as it may not-unfairly be known to English speakers, "the easy half." Almost all the places of articulation I've talked about so far, up to post-alveolar, are familiar to native English speakers and usually even have familiar symbols in the chart. Things get a little more interesting from here on out. Or, should I say, in.
Because we're still moving backward. The tip of your tongue has gone from your teeth to the ridge behind them to the place behind that. It couldn't move back any further without curling around on itself! Which, it turns out, is exactly what it does at the next place of articulation, retroflex. Like most of these names, this one's very descriptive if you know Latin. Retroflex means "bent back" or "turned backwards," because that's what your tongue does: the tip of it curves around toward the roof of your mouth at the start of these sounds. Strictly speaking, there are different kinds of retroflex consonants and they don't all involve someone's tongue actually curling around but they all happen at that part of the mouth (because we're talking about places of articulation, remember).
So before we get too far into the weeds I'm going to introduce you to a really cool website called Seeing Speech, which features a clickable IPA chart with teeny videos (of either an MRI, an ultrasound or a simplified diagram) of what it looks and sounds like when someone makes all the IPA sounds. I'd suggest the animation as easiest to follow: it's the classic "mid-sagital view" that you get in all phonetics diagrams, so it's a cross-section of a person's lower head and neck, showing all the vocal tract, as they face towards your left. I'm going to be referring to it a lot, and it's useful to play around with if you're interested in this sort of thing.
As you can tell... oh, wait, here's the chart again
Okay, so as you can tell now, the retroflex symbols look a lot like symbols we've already seen, except they have these litttle rightward-facing curl on the bottom of them. My phonestics lecturer says this makes sense because your tongue curls around like that too.
The only retroflex consonant I know of in English is some accents of Scottish and of Midwestern USian English have the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ as a way of making the sound we usually spell with the letter "r" (the "r" is upside down in this symbol because the sound most English speakers make for this is represented with /ɹ/ because it's a less common sound in the languages of the world than the one written as /r/. I'll get to this later when I talk about manner of articulation. For now, it's enough to say that this symbol is your regular "r" with its retroflex tail.
So here's the animation of that /ɻ/, which like all the consonants is said on its own and then between a few differet vowels because it's good to see what these sounds are like in context.
Since the tongue tip cannot get any further back than retroflex, the middle part of the tongue, usually called the "body," takes over at this point for the palatal consonants, ones made with the middle of the tongue up against the hard palate, the middle of the roof of the mouth. Again English hardly has any -- it does have one very common one, which is /j/ but this isn't an English "j," it's more like a German or Scandinavian one; it's usually thought of as a "y" sound in English (although there's lots of ways to spell it of course).
As with the retroflexes the only palatal in English is also an approximant, which is kind of a pain for my purposes. I'll explain this properly when I get to manners of articulation, which is what "approximant" describes, but briefly: Remember when I said last time that consonants are made by constricting airflow in the vocal tract? Approximants are the least restricted, to the point where /j/ and /w/ are sometimes called "semi-vowels" because they're...well, to vowels in this way. And I think this makes it harder to "feel" the place of articulation the way you can feel /θ/ or /d/ or something. But if you think about making a /j/ sound and then just push your tongue up a bit from where it is to the roof of your mouth, you might feel what this place of articulation is like.
If you want to see what some other palatals are like, try some videos for, e.g. this sound you get in Spanish or this sound you get in German (often spelled "ch").
Just back from the hard palate in your mouth is the soft palate. This needs the back (or "dorsum" or "root") of your tongue to touch it. I thought this sounded really weird explained like that but we do it all the time; you see /k/ and /g/ there at the top of the chart and they make their usual English sounds. Just underneath them is /ŋ/ which is usually spelled "ng" in English.
THis feels like the end of the line for English speakers in terms of where we think our tongues go -- it did for me, anyway. Until I learned Arabic last year. I remember seeing a diagram in my Arabic textbook of where the sounds happen and thinking there are so many back there! Now this makes for a lot of stereotypes about Arabic being "guttural" or "harsh" and lots of hacking and spitting sounds from people pretending to do an Arabic accent, but I'm afraid that's all racist bollocks. I read about a study I can't find now that said people tend to label langauges harsh or guttural if they're associated with people or cultures that their culture doesn't approve of -- I've also heard English speakers talk about German and Welsh like this, while Romance langauges like French and Italian are thought beautiful...funny that. Languages do have different sets of sounds but I think it's important to keep in mind what's really being judged here and it's cultural much more than it's phonetics. While Arabic has a uvular (ق is /q/), the French "r" /ʁ/ is also uvular. So. Hmm. Anyway, this means they're articulated by the base of the tongue at the uvula, that little dangly thing at the back of your throat that cartoon characters have so it can wiggle while they scream and you see a close-up of their open mouth.
Even further back than the uvular consonants are the pharyngeal ones, articulated at the pharynx, which is sort of between the mouth and the esophagus/vocal cords. Arabic has pharyngeal consonants too, though I wasn't any good at them it did help to be able to think of them as pharyngeal. At this point in your mouth, your tongue can't really move enough to make useful phonetic distinctions, so there are only fricatives, in their usual voiceless (/ħ/) and voiced (/ʕ/) pair. I definitely recommend the Seeing Speech videos I've linked to for that one, though if you know any Arabic speakers you can ask them how to say ح and ع instead and then have them laugh at you when you try to copy them and get it wrong, as I did. ح sounds like an "h" to me but my teacher could tell the difference (there are "minimal pairs" here too (words that differ by only one sound) -- she could tell which was a name and which was a number when it's only the difference between /ħ/ and /h/.
So regular /h/ is in our very last category for places of articulation: glottal. Glottal consonants use the glottis, This is the vocal folds that I talked about before as being the source for voicing. An /h/ (which sounds just how English speakers would expect it to from how it's written) sound is produced by keeping the vocal folds spread somewhat, resulting in non-turbulent airflow through the glottis. This probably doesn't tell you any more than you knew before about how to make an /h/, but that's how glottal fricatives work.
There's also the glottal stop (/ʔ/, looks like a question mark but has no dot at the bottom; is also the logo of the best linguistics podcast, Lingthusiasm) of course, which is just what it says: a "stop" or a complete closure (we'll talk more about this next time when we do manner of articulation), a stop in the airflow. So this happens by the vocal folds touching each other. Many British accents involve glottal stops where a "t" would be written and some people I know were chastised for "dropping their t's" as kids but they haven't "dropped" them at all; they're just making a different noise and one that is as good as /t/.
Part Three
I haven't forgotten this series! It just took me a few days to write this up. I hope you enjoy it.
Gretchen McCulloch, internet linguist, has been talking a lot about the IPA on Twitter lately (I've been tagged in quote-tweets of both how to type the IPA on an Android phone and the thread of IPA (symbols) as IPAs (beers), and I think what she says about learning the IPA is well-timed for where we're up to:
Useful caveat about learning the IPA: there are a LOT of symbols, because it's designed to represent all sounds used in human language. Intro linguistics/phonetics courses often prioritize more frequently used IPA symbols, but I find self-taught people are more likely to get discouraged that they have a hard time remembering like, all the mid-central unrounded vowels except schwa They're v infrequent, it's okay. You still "know the IPA" for functional purposes if you have a good grasp on the symbols for the sounds you encounter regularly and know how to use the resources of the IPA to figure out less familiar sounds/symbols.And it's this familiarity I'm trying to offer.
In the first part of How to Read the IPA, our intrepid heroes set off on their adventures rightwards through the places of articulation for pulmonic consonants.
Or, as it may not-unfairly be known to English speakers, "the easy half." Almost all the places of articulation I've talked about so far, up to post-alveolar, are familiar to native English speakers and usually even have familiar symbols in the chart. Things get a little more interesting from here on out. Or, should I say, in.
Because we're still moving backward. The tip of your tongue has gone from your teeth to the ridge behind them to the place behind that. It couldn't move back any further without curling around on itself! Which, it turns out, is exactly what it does at the next place of articulation, retroflex. Like most of these names, this one's very descriptive if you know Latin. Retroflex means "bent back" or "turned backwards," because that's what your tongue does: the tip of it curves around toward the roof of your mouth at the start of these sounds. Strictly speaking, there are different kinds of retroflex consonants and they don't all involve someone's tongue actually curling around but they all happen at that part of the mouth (because we're talking about places of articulation, remember).
So before we get too far into the weeds I'm going to introduce you to a really cool website called Seeing Speech, which features a clickable IPA chart with teeny videos (of either an MRI, an ultrasound or a simplified diagram) of what it looks and sounds like when someone makes all the IPA sounds. I'd suggest the animation as easiest to follow: it's the classic "mid-sagital view" that you get in all phonetics diagrams, so it's a cross-section of a person's lower head and neck, showing all the vocal tract, as they face towards your left. I'm going to be referring to it a lot, and it's useful to play around with if you're interested in this sort of thing.
As you can tell... oh, wait, here's the chart again
Okay, so as you can tell now, the retroflex symbols look a lot like symbols we've already seen, except they have these litttle rightward-facing curl on the bottom of them. My phonestics lecturer says this makes sense because your tongue curls around like that too.
The only retroflex consonant I know of in English is some accents of Scottish and of Midwestern USian English have the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ as a way of making the sound we usually spell with the letter "r" (the "r" is upside down in this symbol because the sound most English speakers make for this is represented with /ɹ/ because it's a less common sound in the languages of the world than the one written as /r/. I'll get to this later when I talk about manner of articulation. For now, it's enough to say that this symbol is your regular "r" with its retroflex tail.
So here's the animation of that /ɻ/, which like all the consonants is said on its own and then between a few differet vowels because it's good to see what these sounds are like in context.
Since the tongue tip cannot get any further back than retroflex, the middle part of the tongue, usually called the "body," takes over at this point for the palatal consonants, ones made with the middle of the tongue up against the hard palate, the middle of the roof of the mouth. Again English hardly has any -- it does have one very common one, which is /j/ but this isn't an English "j," it's more like a German or Scandinavian one; it's usually thought of as a "y" sound in English (although there's lots of ways to spell it of course).
As with the retroflexes the only palatal in English is also an approximant, which is kind of a pain for my purposes. I'll explain this properly when I get to manners of articulation, which is what "approximant" describes, but briefly: Remember when I said last time that consonants are made by constricting airflow in the vocal tract? Approximants are the least restricted, to the point where /j/ and /w/ are sometimes called "semi-vowels" because they're...well, to vowels in this way. And I think this makes it harder to "feel" the place of articulation the way you can feel /θ/ or /d/ or something. But if you think about making a /j/ sound and then just push your tongue up a bit from where it is to the roof of your mouth, you might feel what this place of articulation is like.
If you want to see what some other palatals are like, try some videos for, e.g. this sound you get in Spanish or this sound you get in German (often spelled "ch").
Just back from the hard palate in your mouth is the soft palate. This needs the back (or "dorsum" or "root") of your tongue to touch it. I thought this sounded really weird explained like that but we do it all the time; you see /k/ and /g/ there at the top of the chart and they make their usual English sounds. Just underneath them is /ŋ/ which is usually spelled "ng" in English.
THis feels like the end of the line for English speakers in terms of where we think our tongues go -- it did for me, anyway. Until I learned Arabic last year. I remember seeing a diagram in my Arabic textbook of where the sounds happen and thinking there are so many back there! Now this makes for a lot of stereotypes about Arabic being "guttural" or "harsh" and lots of hacking and spitting sounds from people pretending to do an Arabic accent, but I'm afraid that's all racist bollocks. I read about a study I can't find now that said people tend to label langauges harsh or guttural if they're associated with people or cultures that their culture doesn't approve of -- I've also heard English speakers talk about German and Welsh like this, while Romance langauges like French and Italian are thought beautiful...funny that. Languages do have different sets of sounds but I think it's important to keep in mind what's really being judged here and it's cultural much more than it's phonetics. While Arabic has a uvular (ق is /q/), the French "r" /ʁ/ is also uvular. So. Hmm. Anyway, this means they're articulated by the base of the tongue at the uvula, that little dangly thing at the back of your throat that cartoon characters have so it can wiggle while they scream and you see a close-up of their open mouth.
Even further back than the uvular consonants are the pharyngeal ones, articulated at the pharynx, which is sort of between the mouth and the esophagus/vocal cords. Arabic has pharyngeal consonants too, though I wasn't any good at them it did help to be able to think of them as pharyngeal. At this point in your mouth, your tongue can't really move enough to make useful phonetic distinctions, so there are only fricatives, in their usual voiceless (/ħ/) and voiced (/ʕ/) pair. I definitely recommend the Seeing Speech videos I've linked to for that one, though if you know any Arabic speakers you can ask them how to say ح and ع instead and then have them laugh at you when you try to copy them and get it wrong, as I did. ح sounds like an "h" to me but my teacher could tell the difference (there are "minimal pairs" here too (words that differ by only one sound) -- she could tell which was a name and which was a number when it's only the difference between /ħ/ and /h/.
So regular /h/ is in our very last category for places of articulation: glottal. Glottal consonants use the glottis, This is the vocal folds that I talked about before as being the source for voicing. An /h/ (which sounds just how English speakers would expect it to from how it's written) sound is produced by keeping the vocal folds spread somewhat, resulting in non-turbulent airflow through the glottis. This probably doesn't tell you any more than you knew before about how to make an /h/, but that's how glottal fricatives work.
There's also the glottal stop (/ʔ/, looks like a question mark but has no dot at the bottom; is also the logo of the best linguistics podcast, Lingthusiasm) of course, which is just what it says: a "stop" or a complete closure (we'll talk more about this next time when we do manner of articulation), a stop in the airflow. So this happens by the vocal folds touching each other. Many British accents involve glottal stops where a "t" would be written and some people I know were chastised for "dropping their t's" as kids but they haven't "dropped" them at all; they're just making a different noise and one that is as good as /t/.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-26 12:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-07-05 04:39 pm (UTC)Thank you for this amazing resource!