Talk:English phonology

Why isn't the velarized alveolar lateral approximant in here?

The Velarized alveolar lateral approximant, represented by ɫ, should be in the phonology table. Many other wikipedia articles cite English with having this, even the Velarized alveolar lateral approximant page itself. Not only that, but on this very page it uses the "ɫ" symbol when describing words like "rebel" and "pail." If all this says this, why doesn't wikipedia have it on the table? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.98.88.247 (talk) 01:12, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

You've pointed out an error that I've just fixed. The table should only depict phonemes, not all phones. There is a note on the table that mentions that /l/ is velarized in certain contexts. Is this not enough? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 05:56, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

British Non-Regional Pronunciation

A new article has been started at British Non-Regional Pronunciation. That may or may not be the best way to handle what seems to be a fairly new piece of terminology. Those of you interested might like to call by there and record your thoughts. --Doric Loon (talk) 13:08, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

"Lure" realized as [loː] ???

There is a phenomenon in RP where some words can be realized as either (traditionally) /ʊə/ or as (more recently) /ɔː/. Thus, for example, poor can be either /pʊə/ or /pɔː/. In this article's section on "diphthongs" this appears to be covered by the example "lure" (see footnote 2 of this section).

My own native speech is pretty close to RP and I cannot imagine anyone realizing "lure" as [lɔː] or [loː]. The only realization I can conceive of is /ljʊə/. The inserted /j/ completely rules out the monophthongal pronunciation, although I suppose someone with yod-dropping in this particular word might have other possibilities. If this is true, then I must have lived outside the UK for too long :)

Now I don't have access to the source cited to support this (Roach p. 240), but I do wonder whether that source does in fact use the example "lure". Is it possible that it actually uses some other word, such as "poor" or "moor", and that this was changed to "lure" so that all the diphthong examples would begin with "l"? If someone has access to the source, could they check? Cheers, Grover cleveland (talk) 01:28, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

It's been a while since I looked at Roach (2004) but I don't think there's any problem with changing the examples to pair and pure. /l/ does complicate matters. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 04:14, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, my concerns about "lure" would apply equally to "pure". Might I suggest "poor" as a less controversial example? Here is Wells (see especially the second sentence): "[T]here are plenty of RP speakers who pronounce some or all of poor, moor, your and sure with /ɔː/, and they are on the increase. Words in which the vowel is preceded by a consonant plus yod are relatively resistant to the shift from /ʊə/ to /ɔː/, e.g. pure, furious and cure itself..." (Wells, Accents of English 2, p. 287 Google Books link). Cheers. Grover cleveland (talk) 09:43, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Similar thing in GA. Lure and pure are never pronounced /or/, while poor almost always is, even though lure is not palatalized in GA. (Lure comes out "lurr".) kwami (talk) 10:02, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Poor is not "almost always" pore in GenAm. It sounds quite rustic in American. —Angr 11:12, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

All right, in Los Angeles it is /or/. But lure is not. kwami (talk) 11:23, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Actually, in unguarded speech, "poor" has been [ˈpoɹ] in most of the places I've lived in the U.S. Certainly in both Texas and Utah. In the higher registers of English, of course, spelling pronunciations take over and one hears [ˈpʊɹ]. (Taivo (talk) 14:16, 14 December 2008 (UTC))

I'd like to point out that in response to the fact that while yes, words such as "furious" and "cure", tend to be more resistant to being realized with an /o:/ sound in RP and Estuary English, they instead are accounted for by the trend in pronouncing them as /fjʊ:ɹius/ and /kjʊ:/ by an increasing number of anglophones. Mingeyqla (talk) 18:39, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Wow. So is "cure" a homonym of "cue"/"queue" (both for me /kju:/), or are they distinguished by vowel quality? Grover cleveland (talk) 20:41, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

They are distinguished by a final [ɹ] and [ʊ] in "cure" and [u] (or a fronted diphthong variant) in American English. (Taivo (talk) 20:54, 14 December 2008 (UTC))

/kju:/ is different from /kjʊ:/ Mingeyqla (talk) 21:05, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Nonetheless, I foresee a merger in the near future :) Grover cleveland (talk) 06:32, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

But not of the CURE vowel with the GOOSE vowel. The CURE vowel is clearly on its way out in many accents, but what it will merge with is the FORCE/NORTH vowel and (in some words, in American English) the NURSE vowel. —Angr 08:30, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

In America, the two vowels are heading in different directions--in most dialects the "cue" vowel is stable because of the front unrounded on-glide, while the "cure" vowel is lowering. (Taivo (talk) 12:44, 15 December 2008 (UTC))

Historical section is confused

Is the historical section meant to be a comprehensive list of developments in pronunciation since Middle English, or a brief summary? It is currently neither, and the list of developments included seems random. Is the "bad-lad" split (which is included) really more important than the loss of the velar fricative, the foot-strut split, pre-fricative broadening of "bath" and "cloth", or the diphthong shift (none of which are mentioned)? Seems as though something should be done, but I have a six-month old baby calling... Grover cleveland (talk) 05:12, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

/ɪɚ/ vs /ɪɹ/?

I'm not a native English speaker so I can't be sure about these points, but:

In Rhotic dialects, words like pair, poor, and peer can be analyzed as diphthongs, although other descriptions analyze them as vowels with /ɹ/ in the coda.

The "can be analyzed" suggests that there is some arbitrarity in the trascription which doesn't reflect any objective fact about the actual pronunciation. I don't think so: there are dialects where mirror and clearer rhyme (see e.g. the lyrics to "Master of Puppets"), so in those dialects clear is /klɪɹ/. On the other hand, if there are rhotic dialects where they don't rhyme (I don't know whether there are ones), clear is /klɪɚ/ in them. (On the other hand, they're just /klɪə(ɹ)/, /klɪəɹə(ɹ)/, and /mɪɹə(ɹ)/ in non-rhotic dialects.)

As a result, originally monosyllabic words like those just mentioned came to rhyme with originally disyllabic words like seer, doer, higher, power.

Huh? My dictionary transcribes seer as /siːə/ (and I would have been very surprised if it didn't, as it's the verb see /siː/ plus the suffix -er /ə(ɹ)/), but beer as /bɪə/. So, do they rhyme? Which is wrong, the article or the dictionary? (Does that depend on the dialect?) --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 11:37, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Mirror and clearer rhyme as far as I know only in North American English (and not even in all accents there), but there are rhotic accents outside North America where they don't rhyme. In Scottish English, for example, they're /ˈmɪrər/ and /ˈkliːrər/. +Angr 20:11, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Aspirated p's and t's

Just curious as to why Icelandic phonology lists aspirated t's and p's as separate phonemes from t and p, but not this article? Doesn't English also make common distinctions between the two? I.e isn't the initial t in say, Thomas and total, two different sounds? Or the p in pot vs stop. What makes Icelandic so special in this regard? More to the point, why aren't they included here? Peter Greenwell (talk) 15:00, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

In English, aspirated and unaspirated stops are not separate phonemes, as they are in Icelandic. Thomas and total begin with the same (aspirated) allophone of the same phoneme, while pot and stop have two different allophones of the same phoneme. +Angr 18:06, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

At a rather broad level, there are three phones, [tʰ t d]. Historically, [tʰ t] are allophones. In child language acquisition, [t d] are allophones. That is, if we transcribe tie as /tʰai/, and die as /dai/, then for sty we would need to choose between ?/stʰai/ and ?/sdai/, not a happy choice for most people. Or we could transcribe die as /tai/ (as we would in Icelandic), also not a happy choice for most people. So we follow the historical derivation and avoid ?/tʰ/ altogether. kwami (talk) 20:35, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Syllabification

The article currently states, as if it were uncontroversially accepted, that Most languages of the world syllabify CVCV and CVCCV sequences as /CV.CV/ and /CVC.CV/ or /CV.CCV/, with consonants preferentially acting as the onset of a syllable containing the following vowel. English is unusual in this regard, in that stressed syllables attract following consonants This is a strong claim to make, and it appears to be based solely on Wells's article here. Yet even in that article Wells makes clear that he is proposing a new way of syllabifying English words, and that "many analysts" would disagree. This article ought to make clear that this view of syllabification is only one among many others, and that it is far from universally accepted. Grover cleveland (talk) 04:38, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Loanwords

Calling sphragistics, sclerosis, sthenics, phthalic, and thlipsis "loanwords" seems pointless. All of these words have been neutralized and are no longer foreign words. There is an obvious distinction between these words and words like "bwana" and "schvartze". The American Heritage Dictionary defines any word borrowed from another language as a loanword, including words like "very".[1] This means that prize, language, shrimp, pure, beautiful, tube, during, cute, argue, music, view, suit, Zeus, huge, lurid, skill, sphere, scream, square, student, and skewer are all loanwords. The aforementioned Greek loanwords clearly belong in this class. Perhaps the best solution is to use a term other than "loanword" to refer to words like "bwana" and "schvartze". — The Man in Question (gesprec) · (forðung) 20:36, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

"Recent loanword" might suffice. Or loanwords from X language since the __ century/era. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 22:53, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

The distinction I understand to be made here is that between inherited clusters, and clusters which only exist in loanwords. The choice of examples is not relevant. The likes of "Zeus" would be included by virtue of the cluster having arisen during the development of English, even if originally a loanword.

As a non-nativ speaker my opinion may not count, but "sphragistics" thru "thlipsis" are definitely Greek to me! At best I would be willing to concede them to be part of very specialized registers of English, but by that criterion "bwana", "zloty" or "schmuck" would be in just as well (if some not more so).--Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 18:50, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

I think most native speakers would agree that thlipsis is not "English". Certainly 99%++ of native speakers would see a /θl/ onset as foreign, and be utterly unable to come up with an example on their own. /sf/, on the other hand, is fairly common, even if mostly in literary or technical language. Any child who's had geometry in school, or watched documentaries on Egypt has /sf/. That can't be said for most of these obscure loans. kwami (talk) 00:58, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Ah, I see that the OED agrees with me. It marks thlipsis with the symbol "||", which stands for "not naturalized, alien". I think we definitely need to distinguish normal English phonotactics, meaning what people actually use when they speak, from Scrabble hunts for odd sequences that most of us have never heard spoken in our lives. kwami (talk) 01:01, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

There is some degree of arbitrariness to this, tho. If /pr/, /kr/, /pl/, /kl/, /spr/, /skr/, /spl/ are valid, shouldn't that mean that (s)(p/k)(r/l) is valid, and that /skl/, while only occurring in the loanword scleroris, should still be consider'd a part of "normal English phonotactics"? FWIW, Urban Dictionary has a few dozen entries under scl- and skl-, but very few under eg. sth- and many of them acronyms. (Also, tons of onomatopoeia under bw-.)--Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 11:27, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

(outdent) Now that the topic is up, let's also mention that I've seen many sources tangent on an analysis of /ju/ being a difthong rather than constituting onset clusters involving /j/. (Eg. [2] mentioning "Davis & Hammond '95" but without further details). --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 11:27, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't think we should present a theoretical abstraction as reality. Otherwise what's to stop s.o. from giving (s)(p/t/k)(r/l), and claiming that *stleet as a parallel to street is just an accidental gap? (After all, in quick enunciation delete may become [dli:t].)

Onomatopoeia has its own phonotactics in many languages. If we're going there, we'd have to say English is a click language, and that we have syllable obstruents like /S/ and /z/.

You have a good point with /ju:/. Historically that's a diphthong, though it's arguable today. I suggest we separate out those onsets and note that they depend on one's interpretation of /ju:/. kwami (talk) 20:27, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Triphthongs??

The list of phonemes doesn't seem to cover words such as flour and wire. It seems that in both RP and GenAm they must be analysed as separate triphthong phonemes /flaʊə(r)/, /waɪə(r)/. Minimal pairs such as high ring vs. hiring and cow ring vs. cowering show that they cannot be analysed as /aʊ/ + /r/. The case for such phonemes seems at least as compelling as it is for the diphthongs given in leer, lair and lure. Grover cleveland (talk) 01:48, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

In General American, at least, some people definitely pronounce flour and wire as /flaʊɹ/ and /waɪɹ/. For those who pronounce them /flaʊəɹ/ and /waɪəɹ/ (I'm guessing most people), the words are disyllabic. I pronounce cow ring as /ˈkaʊːɹɪŋ/ and cowering as /ˈkaʊɹɪŋ/. Examples of triphthongal English words include meow /mjaʊ/, quote /kwoʊt/, quoit /kwɔɪt/, and in some dialects fjord /fjoʊɹd/. — The Man in Question (gesprec) · (forðung) 03:18, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Oops. I meant /ˈkaːʊɹɪŋ/. — The Man in Question (gesprec) · (forðung) 05:58, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

So it seems that, for your speech, some separate phoneme (whether or not it's a triphthong) is required to explain cow ring vs. cowering. Grover cleveland (talk) 04:36, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

For me, cow ring is /kaʊ.riŋ/ cowering is /kaʊ.r.iŋ/ and cower ring is /kaʊ.r.riŋ/. Our article on Received Pronunciation talks a little about triphthongs. The whole deal may depend on analysis. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 06:31, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

cow ring vs. cowering only shows that syllabification is significant in English, but we already know that. Or do you really mean that grey tape vs. great ape shows that /t ~ ɾ ~ ʔ/ and /tʰ/ are distinct phonemes? A similar example would be yaw rise vs. your eyes. (A better question would be whether in your accent power rhymes neither with plougher nor with par, and whether tire differs from both tier and tar.) --___A. di M. 16:10, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Like I said, it may depend on analysis. If I'd instead transcribed one as /kaʊr.iŋ/ so that there was a /kaʊ.riŋ/-/kaʊr.iŋ/ distinction, then the next question would be whether the /r/ of the latter was in the coda or was part of the syllable nucleus.

I speak California English, so you can't make too much of my pronunciation anyway, though I seem to make a tier /tiːr/ teer (as in one who tees) /ˈtiː.r/ contrast. But I may be saying the words to myself too much. I'll try to use these words in a sentence around my friends. Hopefully they won't laugh at me for talking about a teer tier or a pier pee-er. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 19:36, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

ʊ in final position

Does the sound /ʊ/ ever appear in final position of English words, other than in certain weak forms such as those for "you" /jʊ/ or "to" /tʊ/? Of course words like "cow" and "no" are excluded, because there, /ʊ/ is part of the diphthongs /aʊ/ and /əʊ/-/oʊ/, which are different phonemes. Thank you. --Eduarodi (talk) 05:18, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

No. kwami (talk) 06:14, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. --Eduarodi (talk) 01:12, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

/ˈfiːr.ɪŋ/?

In what accents does that make sense? (In Scotland it does, but then it isn't realized as [ˈfɪəɹɪŋ] there.) AFAICT, in England it doesn't make sense because pairs such as piece~pierce show that NEAR is a different phoneme from FLEECE (so it's /ˈfɪər.ɪŋ/), and in America it doesn't make sense because the homophony of serious and Sirius (rhyme between mirror and nearer, etc.) show that it is the same phoneme as KIT (so it's /ˈfɪr.ɪŋ/). Am I missing something? --___A. di M. 15:58, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Well, this American speaker, if speaking only of his own dialect and unconcerned with British English, would write /ˈfi(ː)r.ɪŋ/ for fearing. The FLEECE vowel is just closer than is the KIT one, realisation-wise. Anyway, are there no instances in BrE of syllable-final FLEECE vowel before onset /r/ to compare? 4pq1injbok (talk) 08:20, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Keyring. ― A. di M. — 2nd Great Wikipedia Dramaout 11:19, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

/sf/ onsets

I've moved the onset /sf/ from the main table to the list of note 4. After all, it shares the property of only occurring in Greek borrowings. Perhaps one might argue for putting in the main table saying that sphere is somehow an everyday integrated word whereas sclerosis and the others are not, but I don't especially buy that (multiple sclerosis is just the ordinary name of that disease to me; and there's 12.1M Google hits for sclerosis, only a factor of 4.5 less than sphere). Anyway that doesn't seem to be the criterion being used elsewhere (schlep, schmuck, etc. strike me as fairly integrated as well). 4pq1injbok (talk) 08:05, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

"Sclerosis" was borrowed directly from Greek. "Sphere" comes from Middle English, from Old French, from Latin (then from Greek), as do half of all common English words—ergo, a native word. — The Man in Question (in question) 09:59, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. If there were something in English phonotactics forbidding /sf/ onsets, the pronunciation of such an old borrowing would have been simplified some way or another long ago. It took much shorter for "tsunami" to lose its initial /t/. ― A. di M. — 2nd Great Wikipedia Dramaout 11:21, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Hm. Checking etymonline, you're right about the path of borrowing of "sphere". But take a look at the forms:

1530s, restored spelling of M.E. spere (c.1300) "space, conceived as a hollow globe about the world," from O.Fr. espere (13c.), from L. sphæra "globe, ball, celestial sphere," from Gk. sphaira "globe, ball," of unknown origin.

Note the "restored spelling". That the older English and old French forms are spelled <sp> speaks strongly to /sp/ being the pronunciation there, with the <h> later introduced among the Classicising changes of the Renaissance, and then spelling pronunciation taking over, sometime within the last five centuries. (Compare for instance Eng. author, which has /θ/ by exactly this process -- older form autor with /t/ through OF from Lat auctorem, the <h> a later introduction and at first just some etymologising spelling.) So I don't think this is evidence for /sf/ being any older than /skl/. 4pq1injbok (talk) 20:23, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

OTOH, if this pronunciation originated in English, we can't say that sphere can have /sf/ because it's a loanword, either. (BTW, I don't consider English phonotactics as forbidding /skl/, either — /pr/, /pl/, /kr/, /kl/, /spr/, /spl/, and /skr/ are all allowed; I think that if no word starting with /skl/ originates from Old English, that's just a lexical fact (i.e. such words just don't happen to exist) rather than a phonotactical one. After all, words such as "psalm", "pneumonia", "mnemonic" and the like all lost an initial consonant due to English phonotactics, which didn't happen to "sclerosis".) ― A. di M. — 2nd Great Wikipedia Dramaout 22:00, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Fair enough, although no Germanic-origin word can have it, excepting later false etymology. Still I don't think it's justifiable to draw a bright phonological line falling between /sf/ and /sfr sθ/ -- it's the same ruleset for (re)adapting Greek borrowings that brought all of these about, and from the point of view of the process it's of not much consequence that an earlier borrowing of sphere was already in Middle English and sthenic was not. Should they all go in the table? (Oh, and I'm with you on /skl/.) 4pq1injbok (talk) 22:16, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Glottal Stop

Missing the glottal stop in American English (Not all dialects) (England too, I think). As in Brittan [brIʔən].76.115.227.56 (talk) 04:34, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Vowel Length

Hi! How about a section on vowel length? Of course, in most or all rhotic dialects there is no phonemic distinction in vowel length. However, you see my last sentence had so many caveats that I just can't drop by the article and make this kind of statement with no citation. I'd urge you and say this is vital because as an English teacher for the Japanese, I run into problems as /u/ and /ʊ/ becoming /ɯː/ and /ɯ/ respectively. Don't take that one example lightly: every other vowel in English presents the same problem, and it's a profound obstacle to knowing what they say. Doesn't that make it seem pretty fundamental, and even more so because some dialects of English actually do have a vowel distinction? (Ejoty (talk) 15:52, 27 May 2010 (UTC))

/tr/ and /dr/

I am astonished at the fact that the pronunciation of /tr/ and /dr/ is not addressed in any article I have found on English phonology. In my own dialect (suburbs of Boston is the best way I can describe it), these combinations are pronounced something like [ʈʂɻ] and [ɖʐɻ], respectively. My impression is that this is also the case in both GA and RP. It seems to me that if this phenomenon is not mentioned in any articles I have found then there must be a reason for it. So my question is, am I wrong and if not then why is this not mentioned? --- Wikitiki89 (talk) - 01:25, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

It is mention'd, note #1 in the section on onset clusters. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 13:58, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I didn't see that. But in my opinion, this is mentioned too briefly. It also says that this occurs in some varieties of American English while the source that is cites states that this occurs in most varieties of English. --- Wikitiki89 (talk) - 15:39, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

There's a lot about English phonology that we could expand on. AFAIK, it's mostly a lack of attention by other editors. My understanding of the phenomenon is that the actual phonetic nature of it depends on speaker and that it's largely idiolectal rather than dialectal (it's hardly even marked). — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 20:12, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Dark L environment

The environment under which L is darkened (outside of dialects in which they are always or never darkened) is not documented. This should be remedied. ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 11:57, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

Totally. Do it! — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 00:24, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Exceptions to syllable-level rules and word-level rules?

The section on syllable-level rules says "Long vowels and diphthongs are not found before /ŋ/ except for the mimetic word boing!" I would add "oink" and "boink".

Also, the section on word-level rules says "/ʒ/ does not occur in word-initial position in native English words although it can occur syllable-initial, e.g., luxurious /lʌɡˈʒʊəriəs/." How about "genre", "gendarme", and "gigue"? Did they enter from French too recently to be called native English words? 75.183.96.242 (talk) 15:45, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

That's the problem with a page that covers a wide range of varieties. Some speakers pronounce those words with an affricate. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 19:42, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

alveolar trill /r/

What about the the rolling /r/? As far as I know it is used in Scottish English, isn't it? So shouldn't it be mentioned here? Buachamer (talk) 12:10, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Could somebody translate this article into English, please?

I regret to say that most of this article (as with many of the linguistic articles in Wikipedia) is virtually unitelligible to the vast majority English speakers. The problem is twofold. First, the article assumes knowledge of linguistics terms of art (rhotic? voiceless dental fricative?) that no one outside the field of linguistics understands. The second problem is the use of phonetic symbols that mean nothing to anyone besides professional linguists. I really don't think that I should be required to learn what amounts to a whole new alphabet to read an article that is ostensibly in English. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 167.102.231.183 (talk) 21:06, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

I see the remedy to the first problem being wikilinks and to the latter being lexical sets. Of course, knowledge of the IPA and intrinsic understanding of terminology provides a potentially richer experience (or more sophisticated critique of low quality articles). We're always open to new ways of framing this kind of specialist knowledge, though I suspect that people unwilling to learn a phonetic alphabet also don't care enough about the topic to learn much about it, anyway. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 21:40, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

voiceless palatal fricative [ç] in English words

Whenever people on the net or wikipedia talk about this sound [ç] appearing in English, they only talk about words like e.g human, hue, huge, humid, humanity, humour etc.

What about words like: heat, heap, heed, heel, helium, haem etc. ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Farazcole (talk • contribs)

There's usually very little if any palatal friction in them; consider also that for many (most?) speakers /iː/ is actually a diphthong [ɪi], so there's little reason to expect heat to have any more friction than hit. A. di M. (talk) 18:11, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

What about those who pronounce [i:] as a monophthong? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.219.106.12 (talk) 18:19, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Technically speaking the h in human isn't necessarily a palatal fricative; there is little acoustic distinction between a voiceless approximant and a voiceless fricative. On top of this, /h/ is often articulatorally placeless so that it adopts characteristics of neighboring vowels. In this sense, it's more palatal next to [i], more pharyngeal next to [ɑ], etc. In that sense it's more [ç]-like in words like heat than in words like heart but less like it than in words like huge. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 20:17, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Oh yes. I know why only hue words are transcribed with a 'ç'. [h] must sound like the voiceless version of the vowel after it. In the word 'hue', the 'h' doesn't sound like the vowel (oo-sound) after it (unlike 'who'), and the [j]-sound that comes after it isn't a vowel, but a semivowel (and some people say hue is [çu:] and not [çju:] ). But in 'heat', the [h] sounds like the vowel after it, so it can be transcribed as [h].

In anology, in dialects that don't have the wine-whine merger, the 'wh' sound as in 'whine' is transcribed as [ʍ] because it doesn't sound like the vowel after it, but the 'wh' sound as in 'who' is transcribed as [h] because it DOES sound like the vowel after it. The whine-wine merger and the hue-you merger are similar to each other. Farazcole (talk) 18:26, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

I think you've got the gist of it. [h] is also described as being a voiceless version of neighboring sonorants so that both hue and whine can be described as having a cluster of /h/ and a sonorant. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 18:48, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

But do 'hue' and 'whine' have [j] and [w] sounds, respectively? Whine is transcribed as [ʍ], not [ʍw], and some people say that hue is [çu:] and not [çju:]. And is there any other allophone of [h], apart from its different sounds due to the sonorants next to it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.217.215.96 (talk) 10:02, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

It kind of depends on speaker. While some people pronounce hue like [çuː], others pronounce it more like [çjuː]. In our Wikipedia transcriptions of English, we do away with [ʍ] altogether, since it looks like m, and transcribe words like whine with /hw/.

A number of people pronounce words like ahead with [ɦ], but other than that I can't think of any other allophones of [h] (in English, anyway). — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:54, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

I think you only MUST transcribe hue with a "ç" if someone pronounces it without a [j], but if someone pronounces hue with a [j] then you can use [h] in IPA or if they say 'heat' then you can use [h] in IPA, because the h-sound sounds like the neighbouring sonorant in the last two cases, but not the first one.

So.... should hue be transcribed as [hju:], [çju:] or [çu:]? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Farazcole (talk • contribs) 19:49, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Do you mean for English? There's too much variation to have one authoritative pronunciation. Otherwise it's kind of up to your personal style. Here are some other options:

[j̊uː]

[ç˕uː]

[hi̯uː]

— Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 20:57, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

But WHY is it written on the page that [h] becomes [ç]-like before [j] if it's MEANT to do that??? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.214.72.199 (talk) 15:03, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

I don't think we've established that [h] is universally, or even crosslinguistically, [ç]-like before [j]. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 15:47, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

By [ç]-like I meant sounding like the voiceless version of [j] or [i] [voiceless palatal approximant). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.214.72.199 (talk) 23:21, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure why. That's how literature explains it. If you want more explanation than that, I can only speculate. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 03:22, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

But on the page it says:

"Although regional variation is very great across English dialects, some generalizations can be made about pronunciation in all (or at least the vast majority) of English accents: The voiceless stops /p t k/ are aspirated at the beginnings of words (for example tomato) and at the beginnings of word-internal stressed syllables (for example potato). They are unaspirated after /s/ (stan, span, scan) and at the ends of syllables. For many people, /r/ is somewhat labialized in some environments, as in reed [ɹʷiːd] and tree [tɹʷiː]. In the latter case, the [t] may be slightly labialized as well.[1] /h/ becomes [ç] before [j], as in human [ˈçjuːmən] or [ˈçuːmən]."

The last bit isn't true because [h] becomes a voiceless palatal approximant, not fully a fricative. It should be :[ç˕].

It depends. And, like I said, there's really very little difference between a palatal fricative and a voiceless palatal approximant. You'll probably find variation within individual speakers on that count. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:24, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Well someone deleted the phrase that [h] becomes [ç] before [j], because some dialects drop the [h]. Even those who don't, not everyone pronounces the h as in hue as a complete fricative. The distinction between voiceless approximants and voiceless fricatives is very difficult anyway. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.214.72.245 (talk) 17:07, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

This article is a mess

There is too much detail in a lot of sections with important overview information missing. Esp. the section on vowels. The chart on vowels shows RP and Australian English (?) but not GA, which should be there (in addition to or in place of Australian). There really really needs to be a chart showing how the vowels of RP, GA and Australian match up with each other.

Lots of stuff is questionable or wrong. Just a sampling:

• Describing /ʃ/ as labialized and presenting it phonetically as [ʃʷ] is misleading at best. It's more like that /ʃ/ is slightly labialized but missing the off-glide normally present in phonemic labialization; hence a transcription like [ʃʷ] is far more wrong than right. If I transcribe a word like "shorts" with [ʃʷ], that suggests that it should be indistinguishable from "Schwartz", which is obviously false. /r/ seems to have more labialization but it's still missing the off-glide.
• Words like "zblood" are totally archaic and the vast majority of speakers have never heard of them. Claiming that they are cases where onsets like /zbl/ occur in English is far more false than true.
• Contrarily, words like "Schwartz" and "schwa" are hardly examples of partially assimilated loan-words. I'd say that these words are well-enough nativized that e.g. /ʃw/ is clearly a possible onset (cf. the slang "schwing", not a loan word).
• There are certainly scholarly analyses claiming that e.g. /tʃ/ is a cluster, not a phoneme. They are minority viewpoints but should be mentioned.
• The section on "Canadian raising" in the US needs updating. Quite a lot of American speakers (perhaps a majority) make a distinction between "writer" and "rider" that is arguably phonemic (if not phonemic, it requires a complicated, multi-stage theory of phonology that is far from universally accepted). For many people (e.g. me) the split between /ai/ and /ʌi/ is probably phonemic (e.g. in my speech, "rider" has /ai/ but "spider" has /ʌi/; "high school" has /ʌi/ as a single lexical item but /ai/ in its literal, compositional meaning).
• The text claims that /ʌ/ is a back vowel in varieties other than RP, which I simply don't believe.

The section on historical phonology is a total mess. This section is in no way, shape or form a summary of historical developments, but just a random collection of tidbits. Why are there four subsections for four particular more-or-less random vowel developments, when all the other equally important (or more important) developments are omitted? Why are fundamental changes like /r/-dropping not mentioned at all?

Overall this article needs major reviewing and rewriting, and evaluation of many of the claims to see if they are actually valid. Benwing (talk) 06:07, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

It does need some work, but we should worry more about citation issues than having "too much detail." While this and related articles are titled "phonology" articles, they also may include detailed phonetics in their scope. I agree with most of what you said, though there are two areas I'd like to provide caveats with:

• /ʃ/ of English (and French) is described in SOWL (p. 148) as having "lip rounding." That there isn't an offglide or onglide seems sort of inconsequential, though it might be important that you compare it to "phonemic" labialization when this is a phonetic feature. There is a real and measurable difference between [ʃʷ] and [ʃʷw] in English and speakers do not distinguish between shorts and schwartz based on the labialization of the first segment but on the presence of a [w] that differs from an extension of labialization in having a greater duration, as well as more velar and labial constriction.
• A while back, there was discussion at Wikipedia talk:IPA for English about the phonemicity of the vowel differences in writer and rider. The editor arguing, as you do, that this lexicalized split (as opposed to absence of neutralization) is common across the United States, could only point to one source that even discussed the possibility of this happening and this source merely speculated about its commonness. Keep in mind also that the multistage phonological explanation for how speakers maintain a distinction between writer and rider without their vowels being different phonemes is not all that complicated as far as multistage rule ordering explanations go. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 14:05, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

"Too much detail" is really shorthand for "lots of random detail of questionable relevance while equally or more important detail and overview is missing, and the result is a big unstructured mess". Complaints of "can this article please be written in English?" (see above) are another way of saying the same thing.

As for your caveats, I partly agree with what you're saying. Yes, there is a certain amount of lip rounding on English /ʃ/, but I believe it's not nearly as much as for /r/ (look in the mirror, esp. if you're American; I can't vouch for RP /r/). The issue of the off-glide is important because simply writing [ʃʷ], you have no idea if someone means this as an extremely narrow description of partial lip rounding with no off-glide, or a slightly narrower version of /ʃʷ/, which is invariably going to be used to describe something that sounds identical to the beginning of "Schwartz" and is hence completely different acoustically. This is a major failing in IPA as most people use it, and it's not clear it's even remediable -- is there an "only somewhat rounded" or a "no offglide" diacritic? Given that even experts get confused over this, and this article is intended for non-experts, I'd wager that writing [ʃʷ] for a word like "shorts" is just going to be totally misleading and confusing. Much better in cases like this is just to describe what's actually going on, e.g. "has moderate lip rounding (but no off-glide)" and omit the misleading IPA entirely.

As for writer vs. rider, yes I don't have references referring to how common this distinction is. As for multistage rules, sure, you could do that, but isn't it a bit strange that documentary linguists when encountering unknown languages almost never propose multistage rules in cases like this, but simply assert that they are different phonemes? This is in fact a pretty textbook example of "secondary split" where an allophonic distinction arises and then becomes phonemicized when the conditioning environment is effaced. I'd wager that the only reason people insist on suggesting multistage rules is because (unlike for unknown languages) there is a prior consensus regarding which phonemes English does and doesn't have, and linguists are desperately trying to squeeze the data into this. Note also that even a multistage rule doesn't account for my speech distinctions of "spider" vs. "rider" or "highschool" (grade 9 to 12) vs. "high school" (higher-track school, school up on a hill, etc.). How common this is, I dunno, but I suspect more than is usually claimed.

BTW another factual error in this page is the claim that "shrew" and "woe" rhymed in Shakespeare's time, cited to Shakespeare himself (can we say WP:OR, boys?). The editor evidently didn't bother to check whether any of the other lines in the cited iambic pentameter rhymed. Benwing (talk) 23:23, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

I haven't noticed that with documentary linguists. I can think of contradictory examples in either regard, such as the halve/have (or banner/banner) distinction in New York (see page 7 of this presentation by Daniel Silverman) and the fairly opaque phonological rules Rotuman. If what you say is true though, part of the distinction might be, as you say, biases in the researchers who may be stubbornly trying to fit related dialects into a single system (something covered a bit at our article on diaphoneme) but it may also be theoretical differences that make it a sort of apples-oranges issue.

Interestingly, the article cited in the previous discussion does account pretty well for your spider/rider issue, an explanation that isn't necessarily mutually exclusive to a multistage account. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 02:24, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

ŋ vs ŋg

Perhaps the article could point out that not everyone pronounces word final 'ng' as just ŋ, in my dialect and I think a lot of other northern english dialects it is still pronounced as ŋg, eg the ng in finger and the ng in running are pronounced identically. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.9.2.9 (talk) 21:30, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Dark L

I don't see a source for the L's to always be dark in North American English. When I say Lol the first L for me isn't a dark L. Is there a credible source for this claim? --Bluesoju (talk) 05:59, 13 April 2011 (UTC)