Consonants and vowel

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Consonants and vowel

• January 20 2003

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Review where weve been

• Weve listened to the sounds of our English
  and assigned a set of symbols to them.
• We abstracted away from pitch loudness and
  duration.
• We hope to better understanding our languages
  sounds by analyzing them as being composed of a
  sequence of identifiable sounds each of which
  occurs frequently in words of the language.

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• Frequently If a sound occurs in just 2 or 3
  words we dont take it seriously (glottal stop
  velar fricative)
• We do this against the background knowledge that
  the inventory of sounds in English is not
  necessary as human languages go they are what
  they are against a much wider backdrop of
  possible linguistic sounds.

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• We also attempt to physically characterize these
  sounds acoustically and articulatorily.
  Consonants are easier to characterize
  articulatorily vowels acoustically.
• We are particularly interested in those ways in
  which the English of Speaker 1 is different from
  the English of Speaker 2 again working against
  the background knowledge of variation.

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• We also characterize differences of sounds across
  sound contexts we say notice the different
  sound that occurs in front of a voiceless
  consonant in height.
• Looking ahead to phonology we will attempt to
  get a handle on variation in sounds in two ways
• 1. Two sounds are similar if (roughly) we can
  characterize one of them as a variant of the
  other used in a particular context (under the
  influence of that context so to speak)
• Two sounds are distinct (hence different) if two
  distinct words differ only with regard to these
  two sounds in otherwise identical positions

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• We try to characterize the inventory of sounds in
  a language knowing that that language chose one
  set of sounds when a vast range of other
  possibilities might have been chosen.

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Symbols

• We assign symbols to these sounds in addition
  we want to characterize them as best we can
  articulatorily and acoustically.
• Sounds can be divided into two major groups
  consonants and vowels or set along a continuum
  known as the sonority hierarchy

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Sonority hierarchy

• Vowels
• Glides
• Liquids
• Nasals
• Obstruents
• Fricatives
• Affricates
• Stops

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Consonants

• Consonants obstruents sonorants
• Obstruents (oral) stops affricates and
  fricatives
• Sonorants nasals and liquids (lr)

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Consonants have a point of articulation

• The crucial points of articulation for English
  consonants are
• Labial
• Labio-dental
• Dental
• Alveolar
• Post-alveolar/palato-alveolar/alveopalatal
• Retroflex (r only)
• Palatal (y ñ)
• Velar
• Laryngeal

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• Obstruents
• 6 stops
• 9 fricatives
• 2 affricates
• Nasals (4)
• 4 other sonorants (what are they)
• 2 glides

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(No Transcript)
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Vowels

• Vowels are harder to characterize articulatorily
  but we try!
• The fact that its harder is reflected in the
  fact that there is more than one way in which
  its done. IPA is one way American is another.

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IPA
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Two systems side by side
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A phonetic chart based on the first two formants
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From http//hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/m
usic/vocres.html
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/i/ green
/ae/ hat
/u/ boot
graphics thanks to Kevin Russell Univ of
Manitoba
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Hi /haj/
FORMANTS
we were away a year ago