Talk:Phonetics

When you say :

The English language is pretty close to average, using 13 vowels and over 30 consonants.

I believe you are refering to the number of phonemes in English, not phones. RoseParks

Yes, and phonetics really does study phonemes, in addition to phones, contrary to what the initial paragraph claims. GregLee 02:15, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Peter Ladefoged

Needs a reference to Peter Ladefoged's A Course in Phonetics.

Unusual sounds

I'm impressed by the work on creating a taxonomy for practically every noise the human vocal apparatus can make. However, out of curiosity, I'd like to ask: what would be the proper phonetic descriptions of:

• the Bronx cheer or raspberry, like an unvoiced bilabial trill, except the tongue is put between the lips before air is blown;
• the sound Donald Duck makes, which (as far as I can tell by doing a Donald Duck imitation myself) is an unvoiced sound made by the voice artist vibrating their tongue against their (mostly back) teeth?

-- The Anome 10:33, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

Phonetics, generally, does not go into the realm of extra-linguistic sounds. However, Pike (1943) (mentioned in the biblio) does go into many sounds that do not occur in language (like twisting the tongue upside-down, etc.). But, I will give this a shot:

• The raspberry is an voiceless exolabio-lingual trill, that is the tongue is vibrating against the protruded lower lip. It is inter-labial. I dont think that you need to specify that it is interlabial because I cant seem to produce this sound by drawing my lower lip inward. (can anyone do this?)
• The Donald Duck sound, I am not sure that I can make very well, and I dont know how Clarence Nash made the sound (I dont have any Donald Duck recordings): so beware my description. From what I can do, it seems that this is a voiceless lateral lingual trill. I put my tongue behind against the back of my teeth (of course you can anchor the tongue behind this, too), but it does not vibrate there. Rather the vibration is along the sides of the tongue dorsum. The tongue appears to be hitting the sides of the back molars. The inside of the upper cheeks also vibrate, probably from the turbulent air coming out from between the back molars. The air pressure must rather forceful (as is the case with other trills). You can get something like this (although more brief) if you articulate a very forceful ejective lateral affricate. Anyway, something like that.

Hopefully, someone else has some thoughts about this. peace — ishwar  (SPEAK) 17:56, 2005 Jun 13 (UTC)

Your descriptions sound good to me, Ishwar, but then I don't do the DD sound either.

Raspberries could be notated or [oops - with the under-ring too, of course] (that is, with the "seagull" diacritic). (There are theoretical assumptions between choosing the alveolar or bilabial trill as the base symbol: is this sound essentially coronal, or labial?, but that's not important here.) I don't think specifying the lower lip is required in the notation, because I can't imagine a contrast between an upper- and lower-labial trill, but of course you'd want to note it in the verbal description.

I can't think of any official way to notate the DD sound. I doubt it's ejective, since it can be held for quite a long time, which suggests that the airstream mechanism is pulmonic. I think, tho, that there's a certain odd, maybe strident, phonation that's essential to the sound. Or maybe that's just DD's general voice quality, and so doesn't need to be indicated for the individual phonemes? (Like I said, I can't do DD.) However, there may be an ad-hoc way to write it that would get the point across: labial flaps are sometimes seen as an ad-hoc wedge diacritic over the corresponding fricative or approximant (approximants would be better, since they're not fricated), so why not use the same over a lateral fricative like , maybe with a length sign (or a double wedge, one above the other) to show it's not a flap? Another possibility: I've already seen linguists extend the belt of to other lateral symbols, for example to notate a voiceless retroflex lateral fricative. Why not assume it to mean 'voiceless lateral fricative' instead of just 'voiceless fricative', and extend it further to the trills? That is, belt-r for a voiceless lateral fricative trill? It would require some explanation, but might work. That's assuming the thing's alveolar, of course: with laterals, I believe that's an issue of where the tongue seals off the oral cavity, not where the air escapes, so we wouldn't need to come up with a symbol for a velar trill, which the IPA has deemed impossible (for a central consonant, of course). If it's just postalveolar or retroflex, we could use a retraction diacritic (underbar). As for it being forceful, that's probably just a requirement for making the sound at all. However, if you wish to specifically notate it as being forceful, there's a symbol for that (an underscript ") in the Ext-IPA.

Well, I know the question wasn't about notation, but sometimes trying to work that out makes you focus on the essense of a phone. kwami 20:34, 2005 Jun 13 (UTC)

yes, these are some good points mentioned by user kwami. In naming the raspberry sound, you dont need to be as specific as I have been: you could just call it a labiolingual trill (or a linguolabial trill). (the lower articulator is usually indicated by a prefix, i.e. labio- or linguo-.)

Although I have described the Donald Duck sound as a consonant (i.e. a lateral lingual trill), when "doing" Donald Duck this vibration is really used as a strange type of phonation, much like the vibration of the vocal folds. Donald Duck's real "consonants" are made by changing the shape of the lips & oral cavity (which is why it sounds like he is really speaking a language). So, I guess if we extend the study of phonetics to Cartoon Land, we will need to add Donald Duck voice to the other kinds of phonation (i.e., creaky voice, modal voice, breathy voice, whisper, etc.). Concerning my note about the lateral affricate, I think that if you articulate a voiceless lateral affricate with enough force, you start to get lateral vibrations. And it helps if the affricate is ejective (because you can usually push the air up harder & faster with the larynx than with the lungs).

Thanks for the fun question. — ishwar  (SPEAK) 23:14, 2005 Jun 13 (UTC)

I had asked someone else about his thoughts on these. He suggests that a raspberry using the lower lip could be called a sublamino-(exo)labial trill and a raspberry using the upper lip could be a apico-labial trill. On Donald Duck, he, too, notes that he has never been able to do a decent, but he agrees with my description. He says that for him the tongue body is so bunched up that he cant make anything except labial sounds (like saying "oh boy!"). He makes the sound as you do by placing the tongue one the backs of the upper teeth, but suggests that maybe a better Donald Duck can be made with the tongue anchored against the palate. peace — ishwar  (SPEAK) 00:49, 2005 Jun 14 (UTC)