John Wells’s phonetic blog

nice idea
2012-05-22T04:59:02.469+01:00
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AJD is spot-on...[ẽə] in 'bad' is highly r...

2012-05-17T10:48:06.297+01:00

AJD is spot-on...[ẽə] in 'bad' is highly regional in the US. It sounds like something from the East Coast or Northern Cities.

As a Californian, I'm used to /æ/ diphthongizing pre-nasally but [bẽəd] for 'bad' sounds like something someone might say 2,000 or 3,000 miles from here (and I'm not exactly even sure where, exactly).

In a place like California, not only has /æ/ not diphthongized, it's been lowering towards /a/, as noted by those studying the
California Vowel Shift (the exception being pre-nasally). Thus, my realizations are more or less as follows:

[hæ̃ənd] 'hand'
[hæ̃əm] 'ham'
[he(ɪ)ŋ] 'hang'
[he(ɪ)ŋk] 'Hank'
[haːd] or [hæ̞ːd] (lowered [æ]) 'had'

In this context [bẽəd] 'bad' sounds quite "other" indeed! I can thus very easily see how an American (depending on where they're from) might legitimately claim to not have come across [bẽəd] 'bad'. (Though surely at least in a movie sometime?)

I mean it really looks interesting! Very nice writ...

2012-05-16T12:03:37.526+01:00

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2012-05-15T19:48:57.054+01:00
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"I’d’ve stuck" ???

2012-05-15T15:09:20.844+01:00

"I’d’ve stuck"

???

What matters to the teacher is not the symbolism b...

2012-05-15T11:53:42.002+01:00

What matters to the teacher is not the symbolism but the repertoire. And this repertoire is still defined as the structuralists decreed: by difference. That's why, Wojciech, I find your recurring problem with ʌ so very very simple. Difficult yes, but simple.

The spoken English I teach (used to) has a distinct vowel phoneme for STRUT words. I came from a region where this was not so, but my mother insisted on a total distinction between STRUT and FOOT. Since my mother's prejudices are still held by some British speakers, I would still teach the STRUT vowel as a distinct phoneme — except for students living in certain parts of England. Any symbol would do but u is needed for GOOSE words and a would introduce needless confusion. The symbol ʌ has the considerable merit of dissociation — it doesn't invite confusion with BOOK, GOOSE, TRAP, PALM or BATH. So even if some native speakers' STRUT vowels are closer to a that's no reason for not using the strikingly unusual symbol ʌ.

Duchesse, Wojciech, John Cowan I was strangely un...

2012-05-15T11:45:37.093+01:00

Duchesse, Wojciech, John Cowan

I was strangely unengaged — to the point of bafflement when I read this exchange. It's suddenly occurred to me why that was.

I spent my professional life teaching non-native speakers to communicate in acceptable spoken English. For me that entailed a target phonology more or less equivalent to RP — broadly similar to my own accent and a huge number of middle-class British accents which John W. might class as 'near RP' or 'modified RP' and a great many regional accents that speakers have modified in the direction of RP.

For teachers like me, what we find in the standard resources (Jones, Gimpson etc and their successors) is a model based on RP. If students are directed to emulate what Jones etc describe, they almost certainly won't sound like RP speakers. (OK, I've met some exceptions.) But hopefully they will sound 'acceptable' with a foreign variant of that broad RP-like accent. (Yes, of course it's different for American teachers)

So I really, really don't care what phone students use in BATH words. All I want is that they use either a TRAP vowel or a PALM vowel. In the broad accent there's no room for three target vowels, although specific accents might call for a for specific native-speaker vowels.

For me, that's of no interest whatsoever — as long as I'm wearing my teacher's hat, that is. There are two target vowels, therefore there are two phonemes.

The PALM vowel is the same phoneme whether pronounced as ɑ: or a — or any modification. And the TRAP vowel has remained the same phoneme even as speakers from the Queen on down the social scale have moved from æ as described by Jones. When I started teaching, we got by with one symbol with or without a length mark:
TRAP: a or ɑ
PALM : a: or ɑ:
In the structuralist climate of the time nothing mattered but difference. There was a slogan in French — possibly from De Saussure. And people quoted the analogy of chess pieces, which could be of any shape and could be made of any material — short of ice.

An outfit I worked for in Italy placed enormous importance on the symbol æ, for purely pedagogical reasons: to steer learners to a higher-prestige pronunciation that didn't employ Italian a. Pedagogic but snobbish.

The reason for avoiding the symbol ə: is similarly non-phonetic. In English, vowels frequently reduce to ə in the absence of stress. This is an association which teachers want to develop in learners. Many of us were taught the non-phonetic reason for the use of the term schwa in Hebrew grammar.

Besides, the vowel in commA and (for non-rhotics) lettER might well be closer to ʌ in accents that are not very unlike RP. And to cap it all, there can hardly be any non-phonetician non-rhotic native speakers who perceive any similarity between the commA/lettER vowel and the NURSE vowel.

All that matters — with my teaching hat on — is that there are two target vowels, and therefore two phonemes, even in some rhotic accents. Any two symbols would serve to represent them — except that the lettER/commA vowel is associated with teaching items such as ðæt~ðət, and has a distinct name.

Similarly with DRESS. There's only one E phoneme — as long as we perceive the FACE sound as a diphthong. Of course DRESS and FACE must be distinguished in notation but an added i or ɪ or j will do the trick. It's not the end of the world if foreign learners use something close to e for the DRESS vowel provided that they have a distinctive pronunciation for FACE.

Thank you for the info. It sounds pretty user frie...

2012-05-15T09:01:45.426+01:00

Thank you for the info. It sounds pretty user friendly. I guess I’ll pick one up for fun. thank u...

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2012-05-14T06:57:04.017+01:00

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These are always a problem in this area, and many ...

2012-05-13T17:19:51.409+01:00

These are always a problem in this area, and many of you are not making things easier for us.

And if the core questing and answer cannot narrow down their peripheries meaningfully, the redundancies are left for further complications than their answers can be drown from their respective semantic features. So the question is then where linguists and students of linguistics can go for an answer by conventional means of their times and research studies if driven conclusions are far away from such analyzes for correctness. In facebooks? In blogs?

If it is fine among linguists that 'phoneme' is as the primary anatomical-landmark sound-features of the vocal tract that has underlying orthographic representation (though not really in the sense ‘contrastive’ or ‘predictable’, but as the concept of abstractions from concrete sound phenomena) and an allophone as a secondary anatomical-landmark sound-features, the most striking is the take that what constitutes an allophone depends on the linier order of a target phonetic feature and the conditioned tone in question--like why not [l] and [ɫ] phenomenon if so. An answer to this is, yes, but how correctly is our problem since the dark ‘l’ also has the autosegmental realization as an allophone.

Well, good old George William Frederic was not suc...

2012-05-13T09:27:22.656+01:00

Well, good old George William Frederic was not such as madman as some Anglo-Saxon philosophers make him out to be.

Cheers

It's true. I didn't think about it, but I ...

2012-05-12T17:39:28.040+01:00

It's true. I didn't think about it, but I have indeed a Hegelian background. As for whether this language is 'germane' -- well, I'm using it. Habitually even. In my understanding the apparent peculiarities of this kind of philosophical terminology stem from a clarification of what appears only as implications in more traditional philosophical language. Your mileage may vary.

@Darin Flynn: Thank you very much!

IKPA has nothing whatsoever to do with nationalism...

2012-05-12T09:39:41.148+01:00

IKPA has nothing whatsoever to do with nationalism or politics. It is science, phonetics,linguistics and speech pathology, etc. No one would say that Bell proposed Visible speech with British nationalism in mind. IKPA is just as neutral and scientific as Bell's or Sweet's Visible speech except that IKPA is based on the Korean Alphabet that was invented by King Sejong in the 15th entury for the common people who couldn't afford to struggle with the difficult Chinese characters.

As aptly pointed out by Chaaoo6, one can open the...

2012-05-12T09:28:24.442+01:00

As aptly pointed out by Chaaoo6, one can open the IKPA homepage by http://ikpa.snu.ac.kr/
or simply by ikpa.snu.ac.kr.
Further information on IKPA: Type HB Lee IKPA in the internet window.

Thanks to John Wells for posting IKPA(or Korean IP...

2012-05-12T09:23:09.324+01:00

Thanks to John Wells for posting IKPA(or Korean IPA/Lee's IPA). A revised version of IKPA transcription of world languages with due corrections will be mailed to you.

Interestingly, Amis's son Martin also misuses ...

2012-05-11T14:57:51.644+01:00

Interestingly, Amis's son Martin also misuses the term phoneme, in much the same way.

sorry, I meant 'germane' of course, I mean...

2012-05-11T12:23:57.703+01:00

sorry, I meant 'germane' of course, I meant do you feel drawn to this language, be it German or English (in translation)?

Ad Utis 'Well, since we're talking about ...

2012-05-11T12:21:27.788+01:00

Ad Utis

'Well, since we're talking about the philosophical categories 'concrete' (which is *not* the same thing as 'sensual') and 'abstract':

It's the phoneme which is concrete, as it is to be thought as the concretion of its heterogeneous allophones.'

You are using the word 'concrete' in a Hegelian sense; have you, if I may ask, any Hegelian sympathies or inclinations, or does his language feel german to you?

Cited-above Elan Dresher's chapter from the ne...

2012-05-11T08:31:58.795+01:00

Cited-above Elan Dresher's chapter from the new Companion to Phonology (Blackwell, 2011) is a freebie.

"in the sense that my grandson's skin col...

2012-05-11T02:22:45.269+01:00

"in the sense that my grandson's skin color will be a problem for him — some people have irrational prejudices about such things."

Some have rational prejudices, too--if I'm walking down an alley at nighttime and hear strange voices from behind me, my reaction is justifiably going to be more fearful if those voices are speaking AAVE.

Well, since we're talking about the philosophi...

2012-05-10T13:28:02.199+01:00

Well, since we're talking about the philosophical categories 'concrete' (which is *not* the same thing as 'sensual') and 'abstract':

It's the phoneme which is concrete, as it is to be thought as the concretion of its heterogeneous allophones. It would be thus an example of an 'concrete universal'. On the other hand, it is the phone which is abstract, as it is in its very concept an abstraction from concrete sensual phenomena, i. e. identifying two concrete speech phenomena as utterances of the same phone is based on abstracting the 'this is it' of the phon from co-articulation, particularities of articulation/intonation, base frequency etc. etc..

I'd be very interested to learn more about the critique of 'phoneme' among linguists. If there's no 'satisfactory replacement term', then this implies that there's a need for one and that the concept is still 'active'. Is Chomsky and Halle’s "The Sound Pattern of English" still the canonical text? Or is there something which might be more up to date? (I wouldn't mind, if there would be something on the internet, since I have no easy access to university resources.)

Richard I like your observation of the phoneme ...

2012-05-10T12:49:08.373+01:00

Richard

I like your observation of the phoneme

It is perceptual but needs something physical.

with the caveat which you may not accept that the something physical is a selection from the acoustic signal, and interpretation which may well not be shared by a speaker of another language.

I'm not so happy with your take on the allophone

An allophone, as is indicated by the square brackets, is a physical phenomenon independent of the listener. It is an abstraction in the same way as when we measure the length of something as one centimetre,

I think it's more like measuring as one thickness of a pen or one flower stem. It's a graspable unit of perception but not a discrete, constant, objective unit.

For language teachers — though not for phoneticians and phonologists — allophones are units in differing in ways that are not obvious to the native speaker — although native speakers can be trained to perceive the differences.

If you and I choose to teach the pronunciation of English /l/ to suitably advanced and suitably motivated students, we may well choose to teach [l] and [ɫ] as two teaching items. For me, this no longer has any theoretical implications. It's just a practical convenience.

That complementary distribution paradox belongs to the field of phonology, which I think long since turned away from that sort of abstraction to the consideration of acoustic and/or articulatory features.