Glossonomia

Eric Armstrong and Phil Thompson whistle a happy tune: this week, we’re exploring the vowel sound found at the end of words like "happy."

Show Notes:

• for some this is perceived as being an /i/ sound, for others an /ɪ/ sound, and for many (especially around where I live) a sound that is neither of those. What's going on here?

• FORMATION: Weak Close-ish Front-ish Unrounded Vowel

• SPELLING: Group A "y" (itchy, angry, silly etc.), "ie" (sortie, boogie, movie), "i" ( Fettucini, linguine, martini, bikini). Historical (especially in verse) price [əi]; Group B "-ee", "-ey", "-ea" Historical face, [e]

• HISTORY: Group A (sunny, taxi, prairie) was [əi] or [e] (coffee, honey, Chelsea) in Middle English. More recent load words are spelled 'i'.

‣ -y endings and -ie and -ies endings

‣ -ier (happier), -iest (happiest), -ying (hurrying)

‣ prefixes before a vowel re- (react), pre- (preoccupied), de- (deactivate), semi/demi- (demigod)

‣ -iate and -ious when they have 2 syllables (appreciate, hilarious)

‣ weak form "he, she, we, me, be," (and archaic "thee"?)

• Some people argue that it's heard in weak "-ing" (gerund/present participle) endings [we disagree, generally]

• In some dialects, days of the week (e.g. "Monday, Tuesday, etc.), though this is now becoming at best "conservative" speech.

• Piers Messum at UCL coined the term "Schwi" (for happy) and "Schwu" (for inflUence) which, I believe, he's no longer advocating.

• 3 way contrast:

‣ Rosa's, roses, Rosie's

‣ [ɹoʊzəz, ɹoʊzɪz, ɹoʊziz]

(schwa, weak /ɪ/, happY)

• Note that there are weak final /i/ vowels that aren't reduced, e.g. "manatee"

• Distribution: both Checked and Free syllables — apart from schwa, only Free weak vowel in English (which may be why some people use [i] )

• Review: checked? free?

PHONETIC NOTATION: It Depends. Either represented "as it's said" (narrow phonetic transcription, so i & ɪ are used with diacritic marks), or with lower case i without a length mark (a phonemic transcription, like one finds in LPD); sometimes represented with barred-i [ɨ], though that's not canonical. So it doesn't have a cardinal number, really. (If one used barred-i, I suppose you could argue that it's Cardinal 17 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_central_unrounded_vowel )

Quite a lot of variation (in accents): Onglides fairly common [əi] or [əɪ]; more conservative (English and US Southern) accents use /ɪ/ , parts of Scotland use [e], Nottingham goes all the way to [ɛ] though this appears to be changing toward [i]. When this change towards [i] occurs, linguists say that the phoneme is getting more "tense" , so it's a case of “happy-tensing”.

• Happy-Tensing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_high_front_vowels#Happy_tensing

Queen's speech is undergoing happy tensing, though a study of her Xmas broadcasts (1957 » 2009) shows that her kit vowel has changed more significantly than her happy vowel, though most people don't seem to notice the difference in her kit sound!

We’re digging into /t/ and /d/ on Glossonomia this week. Hosts Phil Thompson and Eric Armstrong discuss how we make this cognate pair of consonants, voiceless and voiced alveolar stop/plosives.

Today’s Topics include:

• the concept of Lenition (softening), in particular, the terms Fortis vs. Lenis.

• Voice Onset Time (VOT): when does the voicing begin? Normally, /t/ in English is aspirated at the beginning of stressed syllables. In English, initial /d/ in stressed syllables is, essentially voiceless but unaspirated, whereas intervocalic (between two vowels).

• In Phonecian, the word for the letter D was, in fact “door”—daleth.

• T comes from Greek Tau, and Semitic Tav, which resembled a simple cross.

• Spellings: t (Ted, atop, get), th (Thames, Thomas, thyme), pt- (ptarmigan, pterodactyl, pterigoid)

• Wikipedia has a paragraph on the origins of the name Thames, and its Greek influenced Th- spelling

• IPA [th] for aspiration, [t=] for unaspirated; [d]

• There is no perfect phonetic way to notate things; there are many ways to heaven in the phonetic realm

• Apart from English, there are many languages where /t/ is not aspirated

• “Cool” words of the week—prevocalic: before a vowel; postvocalic: after a vowel; intervocalic: between 2 vowels.

• No audible release of final /t/ “but, not, that” IPA [ bʌt ̚ nɒt ̚ ðæt ̚ ]

• devoicing of consonant clusters tr-, -tl, tw-,

• preceding /s/, as in steam, “deaspirates” the /t/, and may reduce the devoicing in stream.

• past-participles: -ed endings following a voiceless consonant are /t/ e.g. hoped is pronounced [ hoʊpt ], following a voiced consonant or vowel are pronounced /d/

• Orthoepy: the “correct” pronunciation of a language, or a tradition of pronouncing words as they are spelled; e.g. often with a /t/ or not

• Intervocalic /t/: In North America typically a voiced tap [ɾ] or [ t̬ ]

• Sound Patterns of Spoken English by Lynda Shockey

• Glottaling, using the glottal stop, as it “Hit me, baby, one more time”

• Assimilation, where the sound is moved to the place of the following consonant

• Glottal reinforcement: /t/ supported by closure in the glottis

• Ejectives: non-pulmonic is “not from the lungs” IPA [ t’ ]: the glottis is closed and the larynx rises to pressurize the [ t’ ] behind the closure at the gum ridge

• geminate or twinned consonants, e.g. hit Ted, either the first is unreleased, or we may use “double tapping” (to release both /t/ sounds)

• Raymond Hickey Irish English Resource Centre slit /t/ and in Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand; Kath & Kim’s grayshsh; JIPA: The acoustic character of fricated /t/ in Australian English: A comparison with /s/ and /ʃ/ by Mark J. Jones and Kirsty McDougall

• Palatal versions of /t/ and /d/ (IPA [c] and [ɟ] )

• Back of tongue sloppiness vs. Front of tongue agility; greater phonetic variation with tongue tip

• /t/ epenthesis, e.g. Prince vs. prints; tense vs. tents; sense vs. cents

• Prescriptions: watch out for [ts] in initial settings “splashy /t/”; skills to be able to do unaspirated /t/ or to have an early voice onset on /d/ (I’d probaby notate that as [d̬]

“Some of the things we’re talking about are questions of precision. ‘Inappropriate Precision’ is what robots do. What dancers do is ‘appropriate precision,’ we hope. And so, dancers of the mouth ought to be equivalently curious about, and in love with, the possibility of precision but only as it achieves the gracefulness, or expressiveness, or wildness that’s required of the artistic endeavour in front of them.”

Next week we’re on to the vowel sound happY.

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This is it. Hosts Phil Thompson and Eric Armstrong chat about the phoneme /ɪ/ and the lexical set ‘kit’. On the way, they discuss the history of the vowel, compare it to the /i/ ‘fleece’ vowel, and /ə/ ‘schwa,’ delve into accent variations of ‘kit’, pin/pen in the American South, and the traditional usage of the terms “dialect” and “acccent” in North American theatre.

Phil, at one point says that “language is a dialect with a navy.” He was, of course, referring to the famous Yiddish quote from Max Weinreich: "A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot" —'A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.'

In this episode, we talk about the stop plosive consonant pair [p] and [b], also known as bilabial plosives, “exploding” consonants made with both lips. In the course of our chat, we talk about twinned or “geminate” consonants, vowels vs. consonants, “the river of speech,” voice onset time (VOT), aspiration, and other topics!

In this episode of Glossonomia, Phil and Eric introduce the new podcast and talk through the “ee” vowel (IPA [i]), found in the lexical set word fleece. We cover the history of the sound and its spellings, how the symbol appears in the IPA, and variations commonly heard. The vowel is also known as “Cardinal 1”, hence the picture of the lip-position from Daniel Jones. You can hear Jones speak the vowel himself on the site of the Phonetics Group of the Universiteit Utrecht.

[This episode was our first, and so the audio quality is not as good as it could be! Please be patient with the echo quality. Hopefully future episodes will sound much better...]