Talk:English phonology

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Phonotactics\Syllable structure\Other onsets

In this section it lists /vl/ as an onset that only occurs in loanwords (with Vladimir as the example) but it exists in the very English word vlog, with it being the base for vlogs, vlogged, vlogging and vlogger. What do you think about moving it someplace else? The cool numel (talk) 21:11, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

It's a recent coinage, so it's considered marginal. Nardog (talk) 20:56, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

The table lists /sfr/, /smj/, /gw, /pw/, /θl/, /vw/ all as onsets even tho as far as I can tell they all occur in very very few words. /vw/ occurs only in an interjection (voila) and /gw/ only occurs in a proper noun (Guam). Isn't vlog just as marginal as sphragisitcs? The cool numel (talk) 14:50, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Some of this was discussed back in 2009: Talk:English phonology/Archive 3#Loanwords. How natural they are depend on how common those specialised words are in your vocabulary: I have a /fθ/ for phthalate, but I didn't remember (or maybe even know) the word thlipsis before looking this page up. Having said that, I do think /vl/ is basically native by now: "vlog" has been around for over a decade. And maybe we should use other examples for initial /gw/ like guava or guano.

P.S. there's also very very few words ending /ln/; it's just that it occurs in one familiar example. So rarity is not by itself an argument. Double sharp (talk) 04:07, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

More about lenis initial obstruent devoicing in GA?

In the whole article the only reference to any sort of devoicing of initial lenis obstruent devoicing in any accent of English is where it says that (phonemically) voiced initials can be "partially or entirely voiced" but in GenAm, there is hardly ever any real voicing in the initials of words like "bus" or "day". Perhaps a footnote in the phoneme chart regarding this, mentioning that they are typically realized as [b̥,d̥,g̥]? Ametalbaby (talk) 02:06, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Vowel phoneme chart for General American

Currently, the vowel phoneme tables show RP as having central vowels for GOOSE, FOOT and a back vowel for START, but GA as having back vowels for GOOSE, FOOT and a central vowel for START. I question whether this is a real distinction: while the position of START in American English varies, I think the Northern Cities Vowel Shift is generally not considered to be default "General American". Would a front vs. non-front setup work better? I also am not sure ɑ ɜ ɔ fit well into the lax/tense binary, given that ɑ functions as the lax counterpart of oʊ in the context of correspondences like "trisyllabic laxing". Does anyone else agree that the GA table should be revised? Urszag (talk) 17:36, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

/x/ and glottal stop /ʔ/

I added the glottal stop /ʔ/ to the chart, but I also added /x/ to the chart in this article. While the glottal stop /ʔ/ and /x/ are not standard phonemes, I decided to be like a comprehensive linguist and added both to both articles. If you want to remove either one or both from either this article, this one, or both, pleade feel free to do so. But if we/these can't stop these marginal phonemes from continuing to occur in English, then I don't know who/what will. JordiLopezboy (talk) 23:11, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

GA Vowels

Is the open back vowel for GA [ɒ] or [ɔ]? The chart shows [ɔ] but links to [ɒ], and the footnote regarding the cot-caught merger makes no mention of the latter. Itstooslim (talk) 16:50, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

The symbol traditionally used to transcribe the (non-merged) GA THOUGHT vowel is /ɔ/, but actual phonetic realizations will vary from speaker to speaker among the different dialects that fall under the ill-defined umbrella of "General American". Many, of course, would pronounce it as [ɑ], and this increases with each successive generation. The symbols displayed in the chart for each dialect are the conventional transcription symbols, i.e. they are not intended to reflect the actual phonetic pronunciation when it differs from the conventional symbol. The links, however are meant to link to the article for the most phonetically accurate phone, i.e. the symbol displayed and the symbol linked to are not necessarily intended to be the same in cases when the conventional symbol differs from the current mainstream phonetic pronunciation. This is strikingly the case for Received Pronunciation, where about half the symbols displayed in the chart link to a different symbol (/ɒ/ links to [ɔ], /ɔː/ links to [oː], etc), as the conventional RP symbols are widely acknowledged to be phonetically inaccurate to modern RP pronunciation.

So the chart does not necessarily need fixing to either the displayed symbol or the article linked to. The sybmol displayed should definitely be /ɔ/, and the symbol linked to should be whatever is most phonetically accurate. In this specific case, I don't have a firm view on whether [ɒ] or [ɔ] is closer to the current median pronunciation of the THOUGHT vowel among GA speakers without the cot-caught merger. Likely some unmerged speakers have a realization closer to the former and other unmerged speakers have a realization to the latter. Indeed, the rise of the Low-Back-Merger Shift means that many merged young speakers now have a realization of their PALM-LOT-THOUGHT vowel in the [ɒ]~[ɔ] range. As far as I am aware, there has been no Geoff Lindsey-esque attempt to produce symbols that are phonetically accurate to modern GA. So I don't have a firm view on which article we should link to.

However, I will note hat the article itself is inconsistent, as the General America table links to [ɒ] but the RP and GA symbols table above links to [ɔ], despite the RP links going to the most phonetically appropriate articles rather than the articles for the transcription symbols. So, we need to decide which symbol is more phonetically appropriate to link to, and change one of the links to match. Offa29 (talk) 17:35, 28 June 2024 (UTC)