Glossonomia

So, zis iz eet! Our show about those two hissy consonants, /s/ and /z/. Phil and Eric chat their way through a discussion of sibilance, and spend a lot of time talking about so-called-gay-speech, and other aspects of what may be perceived as the continuum of masculinity/femininity in speakers, regardless of gender, sexual orientation or affectional preferences.

Show Notes:

Voiced/ Voiceless Apical/Laminal Alveolar Fricative (sibilant)

Formation

Either tongue tip up or down, narrowing behind the upper front teeth; groove down the center of the tongue; pulmonic air pressure

Sibilants, sibilance, hyper-sibilant, hypo-sibilant

Dentalization

Jaw thrust

How to explore/modify degree of sibilance

Garden Hose metaphor:

like putting your thumb over the end of the hose

adjust:

• the size of the hose (make the groove wider, relax your tongue)

• your thumb position (aim the air stream more/less at your teeth or gum ridge; explore laminal or apical articulation; check jaw position)

• turn the water down (less air pressure)

Story of teacher who told me to say "'even 'wan' 'wam 'wiftly and 'ilently".

Symbols s/z

Diacritics:

dental (subscript bridge: a little tooth-like staple shape)

apical (subscript turned bridge)

laminal (subscript box)

Symbol History:

Proto-semitic: bum shape; Phoenician shin: W; Etruscan S, angular 3 shape; Greek Sigma Σ;

The minuscule form of s was ſ, called the long s, up to the fifteenth century or so, and the form 'S' was used then only as upper case, just like 'G' and 'A' were only upper case. With the introduction of printing, the modern form s began to be used at the end of words by some printers. Later, it was used everywhere and eventually spread to manuscript letters as well. For example, "sinfulness" would be rendered as "ſinfulneſſ" in all medieval hands, later it was "ſinfulneſs" in some blackletter hands and in print. The modern usage "sinfulness" didn't become widespread in print until the beginning of the 19th century, largely to prevent confusion of 'ſ' with the lower case f in typefaces which had a very short horizontal stroke in their lowercase 'f'. The ligature of ſs (or ſz) became the German ess-tsett, ß.

Occurrence

-s plurals: when ending is after a voiceless consonant, (or, arguably, at the end of an utterance)

-z plurals: when end is after a voiced consonant or a vowel

-es plurals: Words Ending in 'sh', 'ch', 's', 'x', and 'z'

Pathology: lisps

Laterial Lisp: substitutes voiceless ɬ and voiced ɮ for s and z

Interdental Lisp: substitutes voiceless θ and voiced ð for s and z

Palatal Lisp: substitutes voiceless ç and voiced ʝ for s and z

Whistle /s/: gopher from Winnie the Pooh

So-called-Gay-Lisp

Wikipedia: Two studies (Linville, 1998; Munson et al., 2006) did find that a subset of gay men produce /s/ distinctively; however, the way in which /s/ was pronounced—with a high peak frequency and a highly negatively skewed spectrum—made it more distinctive from other similar sounds, rather than less. That is, this was arguably a hyper-correct /s/.[5][6]

Rogers et al found that what people perceived as "gayer sounding" was longer duration /s/ and /z/ and higher peak frequencies for s,z. He also found that their vowels tended to be more "Distinct", that is, more spread out on the vowel chart.

Gender difference around /s/ pitch exercise

Korean /s/ tense and lax?

Dutch /s/

Sean Connery

RSC /s/

Goodness! It's our lucky thirteenth episode, and Phil and Eric tackle the /ʊ/ vowel and the lexical set foot. We talk about symbols used to represent it in phonetic notation, spellings of the sound, the history of the sound, splits and mergers in various accents of English, and interesting "goodies" about the sound represented by upsilon .

Show Notes:

Description

“short oo”

near-close near-back rounded vowel

Formation

Do it like this: [slide between /u/ and schwa?] Handbook of the IPA defines this as a 'mid-centralization of /u/'.

Phonetic Symbol

Turned omega ʊ [wiki: "horseshoe u"]

closed omega ɷ was voted off the island in1989 called

“In Americanist phonetic notation, the symbol [ᴜ] (a small capital U) is used” --- -Wikipedia

After Jones: /u/ /u:/ Phil feel that this confuses quality and quantity but it has continued as the practice in the UK for a long time

[Therefore: /ʊ/ is not a Cardinal Vowel]

• Vowel Reduction of /u/, especially /ju/ as in stimulus vs. stimulate

Occurrence (from Wikipedia)

In the following transcriptions, an unrounded vowel is represented by the "less-rounded" diacritic [ʊ̜]:

Language Word IPA Meaning Notes

Arabic كتب [ˈkʊtʊb] 'books' See Arabic phonology

Chinese Cantonese 紅 [hʊ̜ŋ] 'red' See Cantonese phonology

Mandarin 紅 [xʊ̜ŋ˧˥] 'red' May be only slightly rounded. See Mandarin phonology

English hook [hʊk] 'hook' May be only slightly rounded. See English phonology

Faroese hvalur [kvɛalʊɹ] 'whale'

French Quebec foule [fʊl] 'crowd' See French phonology

German Schutz [ʃʊts] 'protection' See German phonology

Mongolian[1] өлгий [ʊɮɣiː] 'cradle'

Portuguese European[2] pegar [pʊ̜ˈɡaɾ] 'to hold' Unstressed vowel. See Portuguese phonology

Brazilian[3] saco [ˈsakʊ] 'bag'

Russian[4] сухой [sʊˈxo̞j] 'dry' Unstressed allophone of /u/. See Russian phonology

Swedish ort

[ʊʈ] (help·info) '(geographic) place' Exolabial (compressed). See Swedish phonology

Vietnamese thu [tʰʊw] 'autumn' See Vietnamese phonology

History of English Spelling and Development of pronunciation

foot O.E. fot c.1300

put O.E. putung c.1300

puss O.E. 1530

bush O.E. bysc

full O.E. full

pudding O.E. puduc c.1300

bull O.E. bula

good O.E. god

stood O.E. stod c.1300

wood O.E. wudu

hood O.E. hod

hook O.E. hoc

hoof O.E. hof

cook O.E. coc

nook noke c.1300

rook O.E. hroc (crow)

look O.E. locian

wool O.E. wull

wolf O.E. wulf

roof O.E. hrof

soot O.E. sot

bosom O.E. bosm

could O.E. cuðe pt. of cunnan

should O.E. sceolde c.1200

would O.E. wolde

shook O.E. sceacan (scoc)

push O.Fr. poulser c.1300

cuckoo O.Fr. cucu c.1240

butcher O.Fr boucher c.1300

cushion O.Fr. coissin c.1300

rook O.Fr. roc c.1300 (chess piece)

sugar O.Fr. sucre c.1289

bullet M.Fr. boulette 1550s

woman late O.E wifman

root late O.E. rot

jook Gullah joog 1937 (wicked, disorderly)

took late O.E. toc

Buddha Pali budh 1680s related to Skt. b

What the...??? Is it an episode dedicated to all thing dubya? Why yes: in this wepisode, we, Phiw and Ewic, wallow in what is well-know to be one the the most wonderful consonants in English, nay, in the world. We tackle such topics as Voiced Approximants and Voiceless Fricatives, especially labio-velar ones. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, Eric's recording stopped half-way through, and so we had to re-record the end of the show. This proved to be a good thing, we believe, making the show about 20 minutes shorter, and far more concise (never hard for us to be more concise)!

Show notes:

w = Voiced Labio-Velar Approximant

ʍ = Voiceless Labio-Velar Fricative

Note that some people transcribe the Voiceless Labio-Velar Fricative as 
/hw/.

About Approximants: Peter Ladefoged in Vowels and Consonants

compares "wet, yet, let, ret(ch)"

w- rising 2nd formant (so it's like /u/ )

j - falling 2nd formant (so it's like /i/ )

l- minimized 2nd and 3rd formant, sudden switch to the vowel

r - lowered 3rd formant (similar to /w/, otherwise)

r, w and j are syllable-initial only (assuming that /r/ at the end of syllables is vowel! )

/hw/ dropping is called "Glide Cluster Reduction" Wells p. 228, differentiated from h-dropping

2 ways of looking at it: Phonotactic change (reducing the cluster from 
/hw/ to w) as opposed to a systemic change (losing the phoneme ʍ).

Wikipedia: Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters, and vowel sequences by means of phonotactical constraints.

Note the h-dropping on liquid u as in human, humanity (as we discussed in Episode 10) is also a form of Glide Cluster Reduction. Also note that it is argued that humour [jumə] based on its French roots is archaic, and different from others.

Approximants are "the opposite of stop consonants in that they do not involve any kind of closure of the vocal tract. Instead, there is simply a narrowing at some point. For /w/, the lips are close together and the back of the tongue is raised, but air still flows freely out of the mouth." p. 52, Ladefoged Vowels and Consonants.

Semivowel is a momentary approximant--J.C. Catford's A Practical Introduction To Phonetics p. 67

When preceded by a voiceless stop, you can get ʍ, more or less...

pw- puissant, puissance, pueblo

tw- twill, twilight, twin, twain,

kw- quit, quite, quaff, quail

skw- squeak, squeal, squeeze, squib, squint, squirrel

Non-ʍ "wh" spellings:

who, whom, whosoever, whomever, whole, wholesome, wholly, whore, whooping, whose

/hw/ often dropped in weak forms of which, when, why

Ooooo! It's the goosonomia episoode! Yes, in the eleventh instalment of Glossonomia, Phil and Eric talk for a very long time (1:36) about the [u] vowel. In it, we talk about the evolution of the /u/ sound, and how historical /u/ turned into /aʊ/(as in "house"), while historical /oː/ turned into /u/ (as in "room").

We also discuss:

• goose fronting, especially in California, but also in South Africa

• yod, and its use in /ju/ and /jʊ/

• yod dropping after coronals, as in "tune, duke, nuke, Luke, suit"

• yod coalescence in accents like Cockney (/tju/ becomes [tʃu] for example)

• yod rhoticization in AAVE

• the "yew-hew" merger in places like NYC, Philly and Cork, Ireland

Articles referred to in our conversation:

• Changes in Progress in Canadian English: Yod Dropping

• A Majority Sound Change in a Minority Community: /u/ Fronting in Chicano English by Carmen Fought

• Socio-phonetics and social change: Deracialisation of the GOOSE vowel in South African English by Rajend Mesthrie

The Great Vowel Push Chain Shift, from J.C. Wells' Accents of English

Diagram showing how, when /o/ is fronting in RP, /ɔ/ rises and /u/ is fronted, also from Accents of English.

This is our "Fava" episode: great with a nice Chianti (you can leave the liver out, Dr. Lecter...) Hosts Phil Thompson and Eric Armstrong talk their way through the sounds /f/ and /v/ in this episode. As it is our first episode dealing with fricative sounds, we spend quite a while talking through their nature.

Show Notes

[Don't have any time to go through the show this week and edit the show notes. These are the things Phil and I collected before we began recording; it's a bit messy, but may be helpful when listening along.—Eric]

Fricatives: A sound being made by air being pushed through a narrow constriction in the vocal tract, making a turbulent airstream.

e.g. f θ ʃ s

Most common consonant manner in the world's languages : Fricatives

FORMATION: voiced/unvoiced labiodental fricatives

SPELLING:

/f/

pretty darned simple, f

calf calves, calved

loaf loaves

half halves, halved

knife knives ( but knifed)

wife wives

"ff" off, offal

"gh" cough, draught, enough, laugh, laughter, rough, tough, trough, whooping cough

"ph" alphabet, amphibious, apostrophe, diphthong, nephew, philosophy, phlegm, phonetic,

photo, photograph, pteriodophyte, sphere, sphinx, telephone

"v" Chekov, Krushchev, Nabokov, Godunov, Romanov, Molotiv, Rimsky-Korsakov,

Ustinov,

/v/

"f" of

"ph" Stephen

"v" Vacate, vaccine, vacuum, vain, vale, valentine, Valkyrie, value, Vancouver, vane,

variation, varsity, vein, vengeance, have, hive, live, love, mauve, driving, living, Steven,

stevedore.

"vv" savvy

HISTORY:

of the letters:

FROM WIKIPEDIA:

F The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant, ‹Y›, but was also ancestor to Roman letters ‹U›, ‹V›, and ‹W›); and with another form, as a consonant, digamma, which resembled ‹F›, but indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. (Later on, /w/ disappeared from Greek, resulting in digamma being used as a numeral only.)

In Etruscan, ‹F› also represented /w/; however, they formed the digraph ‹FH› to represent /f/; when the Romans picked up, the letter, they had already borrowed ‹U› from Greek upsilon to stand for /w/. At the this time, the Greek letter phi ‹Φ› represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive, /pʰ/ though it has now come to approximate the sound of /f/ in Modern Greek.

The lower case ‹f› is not related to the visually similar long s, ‹ſ›. The use of the long s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with ‹f›.

FROM WIKIPEDIA:

The letter V ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details.

In Greek, the letter upsilon ‹Υ› was adapted from waw to represent, at first, the vowel /u/ as in "moon". This was later fronted to /y/, the vowel spelled ‹ü› in German.

In Latin, a stemless variant shape of the upsilon was borrowed in early times as V—either directly from the Western Greek alphabet or from the Etruscan alphabet as a middle man—to represent the same /u/ sound, as well as the consonantal /w/. Thus, num — originally spelled ‹NVM› — was pronounced /nuːm/ and via was pronounced /wiːa/. From the first century A.D. on, depending on Vulgar Latin dialect, consonantal /w/ developed into /β/, then later to /v/.

In Roman numerals, the letter V is used t

Word! Shut. Up. This week, Phil and Eric explore the mid-central vowel space, including [ɘ, ɵ, ə, ɜ, ɞ, ɐ] and even discuss the (completely theoretical at this point) new symbol [a]. Yes, we do explore the strut and nurse lexical sets, too.

Show Notes:

Phonemes are “the idea of a sound”, the building blocks we have in our minds that help us construct words. One can say they are the smallest segment of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between words. Phones, on the other hand, is the physical and acoustic realization of that phoneme, “what comes out your mouth.” Different accents can have different phones to represent the same phoneme.

Allophones are variants of a phoneme, based on the context where the phoneme occurs. So there are different allophones of /t/ initially or following /s/: initial /t/ is aspirated [tʰ], while /t/ following /s/ is unaspirated [st=].

Examples of unstressed vs. stressed mid-vowels: about vs. love, probably [əˈbaʊt] vs. [lʌv], depending on your accent.

Vowel quality: “The articulatory features that distinguish different vowel sounds are said to determine the vowel's quality. Daniel Jones developed the cardinal vowel system to describe vowels in terms of the common features height (vertical dimension), backness (horizontal dimension) and roundedness (lip position). There are however still more possible features of vowel quality, such as the velum position (nasality), type of vocal fold vibration (phonation), and tongue root position.”—Wikipedia

Daniel Jones’ map of the Cardinal Vowels, compared to his realization of his RP vowels, marked in red.

The official IPA Vowel Chart, showing the central vowels down the centre line. The newly recommended symbol, small cap A would be placed in the middle between [a] and [ɑ].

Phil’s journey of the central vowels:

ə → ɨ

ɘ → ɤ

Eric’s close-mid exploration (Front-central-back): e → ɘ → ɤ

ə → ɜ

Phil’s open-mid exploration (Front-central-back): ɛ → ɜ → ʌ

Phil’s unrounding of the open-mid vowel (staying back): ɔ → ʌ

Phil’s comparison of the open-mid unrounded vowel with and without tongue root retraction: ʌ → ʌ̙ →ʌ →ʌ̙

[ Phil and Eric then get confused, or at least Eric confuses matters because he thinks Phil is discussing /ɐ/, while Phil means to discuss /a/. ]

Eric thinks that a (aka “type A” for Eric, “print A” for Phil) looks like a typewriter. The top part of it, the hook, looks like the carriage return, while the bowl of the glyph looks like the body of the character. Phil described the hook as like a partridge’s crest. ( I think he was think of the bird, not Danny...)

He thinks ɐ (aka “turned type/print A”) looks like an italic e with a little hook or crest on the upper left.

ə → ɜ → ɐ

Eric thinks of how to find ɐ as a backed version of æ

æ → ɐ

Another variable: lip rounding.

Unrounded vs. Rounded

(barred i) ɨ - ʉ (barred u)

(reversed e) ɘ - ɵ (Brigitte barred-O)

(schwa) ə - ə̹ (schwa with lip rounding)

ɜ - ɞ (“the sideways butt”)

(turned type

Seeing how his daughter, Maja, was studying Spanish and knew a lot more about seseo/ceceo/distinción than we did, Phil chose to interview her for a short briefing on the ins and outs of the “th” sound ipa [θ] in Spanish.

Think about this: hosts Phil Thompson and Eric Armstrong are delving into the sounds represented by the spelling “th” this week. In the course of it, they’ll chat about how the sound is rare in the world’s languages, how it’s formed in various varieties of English around the world, and its use in Spanish.

Show Notes:

The show starts with an Audio Comment from Erik Singer re barred i and they guys’ response.

"th" sounds

In the world's languages, they are fairly rare. 40 languages appear on the WALS "Presence of Uncomon Consonants" map for the /th/ sounds.

Dental, interdental, variability in amount of tongue. Culturally different. Maddieson & Ladefoged in "The Sounds of the World's Languages" studied Americans and Brits, and 90% of the US speakers made interdental articulations, while 90% of the British speakers made dental articulations. Jespersen suggests (in Maddieson/Ladefoged) that articulations are dictated partly by dentition: if you have gaps in your teeth (or none) you may articulate differently.

• "showing the tongue" to aid lip reading in emphatic speech.

IPA Symbol ð:

Eth is used in Old English, Icelandic, Faroese, and Elfdalian. In most languages it represents the voiced dental fricative. Symbol is called [ɛð], while Eth [ɛθ] is a woman's name.

Voicing: voiced

Place: Dental or Interdental

Manner: Fricative

Occurrence: is far more common in English, due to the high frequency of function words with ð sounds in English, such as then, the, they, their, those, etc.

IPA Symbol θ:

Theta symbol is the lowercase Greek letter, which represents the voiceless dental fricative in Greek.

Voicing: voiceless

Place: Dental or Interdental

Manner: Fricative

History: Though the sounds are Germanic in their "roots", almost all Germanic languages have lost /th/ sounds. Only English and Icelandic retain it.

/th/ is part of Castilian Spanish. Known as "Ceceo" [θeθeo] it contrasts with "seseo" . Urban Legend of "Prestige Borrowing"; however, it's not true, as the person credited with documenting the lisp wrote about it 200 years before the use of /θ/ began.

la casa "the house" la caza "the hunt"

distinción /la ˈkasa/ /la ˈkaθa/

ceceo /la ˈkaθa/ /la ˈkaθa/

seseo /la ˈkasa/ /la ˈkasa/

Variations

th-Fronting /f/ and /v/ like in Cockney and other working class accents of Southern English English, AAVE finally

th-Alveolarization /s/ and /z/ like in Parisian French English, African Englishes,

Th-debuccalization /h/ in Scots English (mainly in Glasgow) "three" becomes "hree"

Th-stopping /t/ and /d/ like in Quebecois English, Caribbean English, Nigerian English, and Liberian English, AAVE initially

BUT NOT really in Hiberno-English, some Newfoundland English, NY/NJ English, Indian English, where /th/ becomes more dentalized, so "den/then" aren't homophones.

Icelandic and Danish have lamino-alveolar non-sibilant fricative allophones with teeth fairly far apart. (Sibilance is created "downstream" of the constriction where the turbulence strikes structures beyond the point constriction (e.g. the gum ridge and/or teeth). IPA θ̠ ð̠

Speech Disorders:

Dental/interdental Lisp, as an allophone of /s/ and /z/. "Ethel Thayer; thounds like I'm lithping" —On Golden Pond.

It’s the “Schwapisode” this week! Hosts Phil Thompson and Eric Armstrong get right into the middle of things (or at least, into the middle of the vowel space) to talk about the mid-central vowel, the most popular vowel in the English language.

Show Notes:

Schwa, the term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa#The_term " The word schwa is from the Hebrew word shva (שְׁוָא shewa’, /ʃəˈwa/, modern pronunciation: shva /ʃva/), which designates the Hebrew niqqud vowel sign shva,” “that in modern Hebrew indicates either the phoneme /e/ or the complete absence of a vowel. Also the Hebrew shva is sometimes represented by the upside-down e symbol for Schwa, a misleading transliteration, since the Schwa vowel is not representative of modern Hebrew pronunciation of shva and is not characteristic of earlier pronunciations either (see Tiberian vocalization → Mobile Shwa = Shwa na'). The spelling "schwa" is German in origin."

From the online etymology dictionary: lit. "emptiness."

Schwa is [uh] the [uh] sound that many [uh] English speakers use as a [uh] filler sound. (In other cases, North American speakers use something in the range of [ʌ] or [ɐ]).

SPELLING:

Can be represented by every vowel in the English alphabet.

• like the in about

• like the in taken

• like the in pencil

• like the in eloquent

• like the in supply

• like the in sibyl

Scadoosh and the case of the Schwa—the story of the word used by Jack Black in Kung Fu Panda— by Benjamin Zimmer on Language Log http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=288 (How do we spell this new word? Skidoosh, skudoosh, skedoosh, skadoosh?)

*Digression: Rhotic vs. Non-rhotic accents

"rhotic schwa" aka "schwer" or "flying schwa"

In non-rhotic accents, letter and comma share the vowel schwa on sounds spelled as

• -er in letter

• -or in actor

• -o(u)r in colo(u)r

• -yr in martyr

• -ure in figure

CONTRAST "stressed schwa" (in some accents NURSE, in others STRUT) with "unstressed schwa"

Schwa in "centering diphthongs"

* When the schwa is at the end of a diphthong

near, square, cure, [ north/force, start ]

*Digression: smoothing of square, (near), north/force, start

* Strong forms and weak forms

to before vowels.

Can, from, of, what, want to

photography

Syllabic Consonants -tion -dl

Lenin/Lenon

Rosa's roses

From Fleming & Johnson's Rosa’s roses: reduced vowels in American English in JIPA Journal of the International Phonetic Association (April 2007), 37 (1), pg. 83-9

Ultimately: word-final schwa is much more mid-central, while reduced vowels are generally high.

Jack Windsor Lewis http://www.yek.me.uk/spellings.html English Spellings vis a vis Phonemes has loads of examples of schwa in different contexts, including the exceptions that aren’t schwa.

For example (these should be said with schwa on the -man ending):

barman, chairman, churchman, clergyman, dairyman, dustman, fireman, foreman, Frenchman, freshman, frogman, gentleman, horseman, henchman, infantryman, madman, milkman, penman, ploughman, policeman, salesman, seaman, spokesman, statesman, tradesman, Walkman, woodman

Exceptions with /ӕ/: caveman,

Episode 6 sees Eric and Phil dissecting the final pair of stop/plosive sounds in English: /k/ and /ɡ/. As always, we work our way around the task of describing the sounds, their history, and usage in the course of about an hour and 10 minutes.

Show Notes:

Correction: Phil referred to "Findlay" as derived from Finn's Lea, but it turns out that it's from Gaelic, and that means Fionnlagh – "fair warrior." Bradley would have been a much better example: Brad=broad and Lea=meadow.

voiceless/voiced velar plosive: co-articulation, double action of closing the mouth with the back of the tongue at the soft palate, and closing off the nasal passage by lifting the soft palate at the velo-pharyngeal port.

Let’s take a tour of the anatomy. This will help us to deal with the idea that /t/ is apico alveolar but /k/ is dorsovelar

The Roof of the Mouth

Tectal: an adjective derived from the anatomical term "tectum," a roof-like structure.

Labia/labial: the lips; bilabial with both lips, labio-dental with lower lip and upper teeth, as in /f/ and /v/. (For people with an extreme overbite, one might make a dento-labial sound (upper lip and lower teeth.)

Dental: the teeth (as heard in the “th” sounds, /θ/ & /ð/ )

Alveolar ridge/alveolar: the gum ridge, behind the upper front teeth

Palate/palatal: the hard palate, rising up behind the alveolar ridge. Phil describes a small hole in his palate; Eric, in searching the net for information on this, could only find stuff about "Jacobsen's Organ" aka Vomeronasal organ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomeronasal_organ, an auxiliary olfactory sense organ; it's thoroughly debatable whether it exists in humans at all. Who knows what Phil has? (apparently, he hasn't had any of this since college days...)

Velum/velar: the soft palate, behind the hard palate

Uvula/uvular: the "small grape"-like structure that hangs down from the arch of the soft palate

Pharynx/pharyngeal: the column or space behind the tongue, the "chimney" that goes from the larynx up to the nose

Epiglottis/epiglottal: the flap-like value that protects the larynx during swallowing

Glottis/glottal: the vocal folds (technically the SPACE between the vocal folds, which disappears every time the vocal folds vibrate

Ari-Epiglottal/ False Vocal Folds: [there was some debate between Phil and Eric how Dudley Do-Right sounded, and whether it was ari-epiglottal tension or velar tension...

The Parts of the Tongue

Tip or Apex/apical: front edge of the tongue, the 'rim' of the tongue

Blade or Lamina/laminal: the front part of the tongue, the top surface

Back or Dorsum/dorsal: the back of the tongue, which is subdivided into:

Front, Middle, Back, or, Front and Back —antero-dorsal or postero-dorsal

Root or Radix/radical: the root of the tongue

/k/ and /ɡ/ are different from other plosives because it is made on the back of the tongue, which works in a more gross manner

can be made further forward /ki/ or further back /kɑ/.

Challenge of learning /k/ and /ɡ/ for children because they are made further back in the mouth

The McGurk Effect

Experiment: Can you identify Phil's 3 sounds?

World Atlas of Language Structures: http://wals.info/

WALS shows 2,650 languages and notes 32 missing / ɡ /

Languages that are missing /ɡ/ but not /k/

From Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_plosive ] "Of the six plosives that would be expected from the most common pattern world-wide—that is, three places of articulation plus voicing ([p b, t d, k ɡ])—[p] and [ɡ] are the most frequently missing, being absent in about 10% of languages that oth