exotic dental fricatives

Adam Brown asked me if I knew what percentage of the world’s languages have the sound [θ].

I referred him to The World Atlas of Language Structures, which is now available on-line.

Go to the WALS website, search under “features” and look for chapter 19: Presence of Uncommon Consonants. This chapter covers clicks, labial-velars, pharyngeals, and ‘th’ sounds. (It does not distinguish between voiceless θ and voiced ð.) The database covers 2650 different languages.

Dental or alveolar non-sibilant fricatives are just as rare as labial-velar plosives, occurring in just 43 (or 7.6%) of the languages surveyed, but the distribution of these languages is practically worldwide. They are found in languages as varied in location and family affiliation as Modern Greek, Albanian, Spanish and English (Indo-European), Kabardian (Northwest Caucasian), Mari and Nganasan (Uralic), Burmese and Sgaw Karen (Sino-Tibetan), Lakkia and Yay (Tai-Kadai), Swahili and Moro (Niger-Congo), Dahalo (Afro-Asiatic), Berta and Murle (Nilo-Saharan), Fijian, Yapese and Drehu (Austronesian), Ngiyambaa (Pama-Nyungan), Rotokas (West Bougainville), Aleut (Eskimo-Aleut), Chipewyan (Athapaskan), Acoma (Keresan), Maricopa (Yuman), Cubeo (Tucanoan), Huastec (Mayan), Mixtec languages and Mezquital Otomí (Oto-Manguean), Amahuaca (Panoan), Tacana (Tacanan), Cochabamba Quechua and Mapudungun (Araucanian).

We might also mention Welsh and Icelandic (both I-E, and not included in the database).
Here is part of the map that comes up. The presence of a th sound or sounds is marked by a red circle.
This means that yes, for most learners of EFL the English dental fricatives are difficult, exotic sounds. It’s not surprising that they are sounds that advocates of teaching English as a Lingua Franca want to not bother with (but that, conversely, anyone who aspires to a higher standard than ELF cannot afford not to master).

archive cineradiography

At BAAP last week there was a showing of “Highlights from the UCL Phonetics Film Collection”. As Michael Ashby explained, when the UCL Department of Phonetics moved out of 21 Gordon Square a few years ago he discovered that they had accumulated about 12,000 feet of movie film spanning the years from the early 1920s to the 1970s. Much of this footage is rare or even unique. He is now in the process of researching and restoring the material, as finances allow.
Several of the clips he showed us were x-ray sound films of short stretches of speech, taken during the window of time between the technical advances that made it possible to carry out cineradiography and the realization that exposure to the high doses of radiation involved carried serious health risks for the person being filmed.

Films made by Ken Stevens at Haskins are relatively well known (you can watch one on YouTube here).

But I was unaware of the film made by Paul Menzerath and Robert Janker in Bonn and shown at the second International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in London in 1935. This was the first x-ray sound film and, Michael thinks, probably the first to achieve slow motion. There is one other copy known to be extant. You can watch it here (where however the date is wrongly given as 1937 and Menzerath is not mentioned). As the speaker says, “besonderes Interesse verdient vor allem die Wiedergabe der Sprache” [most of all, the reproduction of speech is of particular interest].

Scottish phonetics

On days two and three of the BAAP colloquium last week there was quite a lot about the phonetics of Scottish English.

• Dominic Watt et al have been studying the surprisingly sharp accent border between England and Scotland. People in Carlisle (west coast) and Berwick (east coast) sound English; those in Gretna and Eyemouth, just a few miles to the north in each case, sound Scottish. However, judged by the (non)application of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule and the degree of VOT, the linguistic border is somewhat blurred in the west, less so in the east.

• Eleanor Lawson et al showed that many cases of /r/ that would be classed auditorily as ‘postalveolar’ are actually “bunched”, not involving a retroflex lingual configuration, not even with tongue raising. (See my blog for 8 Feb 2010.) They also confirmed that middle-class speakers in the Scottish Central Belt (Glasgow–Edinburgh) have stronger realizations of /r/ than working-class speakers, for whom “an audible /r/ articulation seems almost absent”. So the middle class are bunched, the working class are on the way to nonrhoticity.

• Glasgow Asian is by now a distinct recognized accent (used by locally-born people of Indian origin). Jane Stuart-Smith et al found that the resonance of syllable-initial l was less dark in speakers of Glasgow Asian than in those of non-Asian Glaswegian. There was less difference for those with a network of non-Asian friends and those whose religious/cultural practices were ‘modern’ rather than ‘traditional’.

BAAP day one

Seriously, though (cf. yesterday’s blog), there were indeed several interesting presentations at the BAAP meeting. I wasn’t able to attend everything, but among those that especially captured my attention on the first day were

• a study by Esther de Leeuw et al showing that native speakers of German living in Canada produce an l-sound that is darker than that of monolingual German speakers but not as dark as that of Canadian native speakers of English.

• work by Rob Drummond showing that native speakers of Polish living in Manchester can have a STRUT vowel ranging in quality anywhere from Polish a via RP-like ʌ to northern ʊ. The longer they have lived there, the more likely they are to have abandoned the open vowel they were taught at school for the closer vowel that Mancunians actually use. (More here.)

• a plenary in which Sophie Scott discussed the neurophysiology of the brain. Trained phoneticians, and those good at learning languages, tend to have a more developed Heschl’s gyrus and more white matter (connectivity) in the brain areas crucial for language. (More here and in my blog for 15 October 2008.)

More to follow next week.

a new exotic sound

BAAP (the British Association of Academic Phoneticians) has just held its biennial Colloquium here in London. As usual, there were some excellent and thought-provoking presentations.
One particularly interesting contribution concerned linguolabial sounds. Linguolabials, articulated by the tongue tip against the upper lip, are very rare in the languages of the world. Nevertheless linguolabial plosives, fricatives, and a nasal are known to occur in a cluster of languages in the island state of Vanuatu. One of these languages is Tangoa. But until now there had been no reliable report of a linguolabial trill, if we discount an extrasystemic onomatopoeic ideophone alleged to be used in Coatlán Zapotec.

However, Olaf Lipor now reports that a voiced linguolabial trill has recently been discovered to be used contrastively in Caslon and Ki-Flong, languages spoken on the island of San Serriffe. The IPA symbol for this newly attested sound-type is r with the ‘combining seagull below’ diacritic, U+033C, thus [r̼].

you and you

A query reaches Dear Professor Wells.

Hello! My name is xxx. Im from argentina. I wanted to know when i should use the ju: and ju. It has to do with the vowel or consonat followed?

It’s difficult to know how best to answer this kind of query. The grammatical and spelling errors (reproduced here without correction) make it clear that the person making the query has not achieved a very high standard of English, nor indeed of literacy.
What does she mean by asking when to “use” juː and ju? If she wants to know which words I would transcribe with one and which with the other, the simple answer is to look them up in the dictionary. Possibly, though, the query is a more abstract and sophisticated one: how do I determine when to write one, and when the other. The brief answer to this depends on the distinction I draw in English between strong vowels and weak vowels.
Weak vowels are the vowels that can result from the weakening of strong vowels. They are found only in unstressed syllables. The English weak vowels are i, u and ə), plus sometimes ɪ and ʊ.
So if the vowel we are concerned with is in a lexically stressed syllable, we must write it juː — for example beauty ˈbjuːti, acute əˈkjuːt, amusement əˈmjuːzmənt. The same is true if it is in a strong (though unstressed) syllable: for example avenue ˈævənjuː, attitude ˈætɪtjuːd.
You will find ju only in a weak syllable. Examples include valuation ˌvæljuˈeɪʃən and stimulation ˌstɪmjuˈleɪʃən (though in the latter you can also get jə as the weak vowel, thus ˌstɪmjəˈleɪʃən). If the preceding consonant is an alveolar plosive, the j element usually coalesces with it to give a palato-alveolar affricate, as in situation ˌsɪtʃuˈeɪʃən: that is, tju→tʃu. In words where weak (j)u is followed by ə, for example annual ˈænjuəl, Samuel ˈsæmjuəl, the two vowels may combine into a diphthong, and there may be further vowel reductions. Study the entries for words such as actual(ly), gradual(ly).
Or perhaps the query is still more sophisticated, and is triggered by the fact that I transcribe jʊ in stimulus ˈstɪm jʊl əs but ju in stimulate ˈstɪm ju leɪt. This is a by-product of my analysis of syllabification, and I find that in my own pronunciation and that of many others that the back weak vowel is not as tense/high in closed syllables as it can be in open syllables.
But that isn’t something I want to try to explain to someone who not only confuses ‘following’ with ‘followed’ but doesn’t even know how to formulate a yes/no question in English.
At an elementary or intermediate level you can achieve a perfectly acceptable standard of English pronunciation by totally ignoring the distinctions I draw between strong uː, strong ʊ and weak u, ʊ. After all, millions of native speakers (those who come from Scotland and Ulster) ignore them.

FIFA officials

Following on from yesterday’s post about syllabic m...
Beginners tend to look at English phonetics as something static. Each word has its pronunciation. To pronounce a sentence you just string the individual words together, each with its own pronunciation.
But as you move on from the beginner’s stage you realize that this is not enough. Phonetics is dynamic. Connected speech is more than isolated words strung together. To start with, we obviously have to generate an appropriate intonation pattern for the sentence. To do this we have to make decisions not only about tone — arguably, this is one of the least important things we have to decide — but also about which of the lexically stressed syllables to accent. Within each intonation phrase we must choose a syllable to bear the nuclear accent, and possibly other syllables to bear other accents.
But segmental structure, too, is dynamic. We have to pay attention to the phonetic processes of connected speech: form-word weakening, linking, assimilation, elision, syllabic consonant formation, compression. Each of these processes is constrained by the phonetic context, as well as by considerations such as speech rate and degree of formality.
I heard a BBC newsreader recently referring to ˈfiːfrəˈfɪʃl̩z, i.e. FIFA officials. This short phrase is a good example of some of these processes in action.
The citation form or dictionary pronunciation, which mild generativists might call the underlying representation, is
ˈfiːfə əˈfɪʃəlz.(I disregard the weakening within the lexicon that gives us schwas at the end of FIFA and the beginning and end of official. Deep generativists would no doubt derive official from office. Notice that some varieties of English do not categorically weaken the o- of official as RP does.)
In non-rhotic varieties such as RP this phrase is a prime candidate for r insertion. We have a word ending in schwa closely followed by a word beginning with a vowel sound, which is a phonetic environment in which r insertion is likely. So we get
ˈfiːfər əˈfɪʃəlz (by r insertion)Any sequence of schwa plus a liquid is a candidate for syllabic consonant formation, whereby the schwa and the liquid coalesce into a syllabic liquid. So we get
ˈfiːfr̩ əˈfɪʃl̩z(by syllabic consonant formation: the output is syllabic r and syllabic l)
Any instance of a syllabic consonant that is immediately followed by a weak vowel — as for example the syllabic r that we have here — is a candidate for compression, whereby it loses its syllabicity. So we get
ˈfiːfr əˈfɪʃl̩z (by compression)…which is what I heard. QED.
FIFA ends up as a monosyllable, with a final cluster not allowed in a word in isolation.