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A LITTLE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PHONETICS
A LITTLE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PHONETICS
Peter Roach
Professor of Phonetics
University of Reading, UK.
email:
p.j.roach@reading.ac.uk
Website:
http://www.personal.reading.ac.uk/~llsroach/peter/
2002
This book is aimed at first-year students of Phonetics. It is based on a book I wrote which was
published in 1992. The book, which had the title
Introducing Phonetics,
has now been deleted from the
publisher's list. The title was misleading: this is not an introduction to Phonetics but a series of short
explanations of technical terms used in the subject. I have, in fact, written what I hope is a truly
introductory textbook on Phonetics for Oxford University Press in the series
Oxford Introductions to
Language Study
, edited by Henry Widdowson, which was published in 2001. Its title is
Phonetics.
Many of the examples in this encyclopaedia are from English (as spoken in England). Although I
would have liked to use a lot more examples from other languages, English is relevant and familiar for
the majority of users of the book. For further detail of the phonetics of English, please see my
English
Phonetics and Phonology
(Cambridge University Press: 3
rd
Edition, 2000). At the end, I have added a
list of recommended reading.
Since I feel that this little encyclopaedia still has some use, I have updated and rewritten the material
from the earlier book, and hope that it will be useful to students in getting to grips with terminology in
Phonetics. In keeping with the practice in the earlier book, I have printed
in bold type
words which
are defined elsewhere in the book.
I would be grateful for suggestions on how to improve it. The nice thing about books in electronic form
is that improvements and corrections can be made immediately.
Peter Roach
Peter Roach
2
Symbols for English Transcription
(a) Vowels
British English (BBC accent) is generally described as having short vowels, long vowels and
diphthongs. There are said to be seven short vowels, five long ones and eight diphthongs.
• Short vowels:
p
i
t p
e
t p
a
t p
u
tt p
o
t p
u
t
a
noth
er
ɪ
e
æ
ʌ
ɒ
ʊ
ǝ
ǝ
• Long vowels: b
ea
n b
ar
n b
or
n b
oo
n b
ur
n
iː
ɑː
ɔː
uː
ɜː
• Diphthongs:
b
ay
b
uy
b
oy
n
o
n
ow
p
eer
p
air
p
oor
eɪ
ai
ɔɪ
ǝʊ
aʊ
ɪǝ
eǝ
ʊǝ
(b) Consonants
Plosives:
p
b
t
d
k
g
Affricates:
ʧ
ʤ
ch
ain
J
ane
Fricatives:
f
v
θ
ð
s
z
ʃ
ʒ
h
f
ine
v
ine
th
ink
th
is
s
eal
z
eal
sh
eep mea
s
ure
h
ow
Nasals:
m
n
ŋ
su
m
su
n
su
ng
Approximants:
l
r
w
j
l
ight
r
ight
w
et
y
et
p
in
b
in
t
in
d
in
k
in
g
um
Peter Roach
3
See also the IPA Chart at the end of the book.
accent
This word is used (rather confusingly) in two different senses: (1)
accent
may refer to
prominence
given to a syllable, usually by the use of pitch. For example, in the word 'potato' the middle syllable is
the most prominent; if you say the word on its own you will probably produce a fall in pitch on the
middle syllable, making that syllable accented. In this sense, accent is distinguished from the more
general term
stress
, which is more often used to refer to all sorts of prominence (including prominence
resulting from increased loudness, length or sound quality), or to refer to the effort made by the speaker
in producing a stressed syllable. (2)
accent
also refers to a particular way of pronouncing: for example,
you might find a number of English speakers who all share the same grammar and vocabulary, but
pronounce what they say with different accents such as Scots, Cockney or
Received Pronunciation
(BBC accent)
. The word
accent
in this sense is distinguished from
dialect
, which usually refers to a
variety of a language that differs from other varieties in grammar and/or vocabulary.
acoustic phonetics
An important part of phonetics is the study of the physics of the speech signal: when sound travels
through the air from the speaker's mouth to the hearer's ear it does so in the form of vibrations in the air.
It is possible to measure and analyse these vibrations by mathematical techniques, usually by using
specially-developed computer software to produce
spectrograms
. Acoustic phonetics also studies the
relationship between activity in the speaker's vocal tract and the resulting sounds. Analysis of speech by
acoustic phonetics is claimed to be more objective and scientific than the traditional
auditory
method
which depends on the reliability of the trained human ear.
active articulator
see
articulation
affricate
An affricate is a type of consonant consisting of a plosive followed by a fricative with the same place of
articulation: examples are the /
ʧ
/ and /
ʤ
/ sounds at the beginning and end of the English words
'church' /
ʧɜːʧ
/, 'judge' /
ʤʌʤ
/ (the first of these is voiceless, the second voiced). It is often difficult to
decide whether any particular combination of a plosive plus a fricative should be classed as a single
Peter Roach
4
affricate sound or as two separate sounds, and the question depends on whether these are to be regarded
as separate phonemes or not. It is usual to regard /
ʧ
/ and /
ʤ
/ as affricate phonemes in English (usually
symbolised č , j
by American writers); /
ts
,
dz
,
tr
,
dr
/ also occur in English but are not usually regarded
as affricates. The two phrases 'why choose' /
waɪ
ʧuːz
/ and 'white shoes' /
waɪt
ʃuːz
/ are said to show
the difference between the /
ʧ
/ affricate (in the first example) and separate /
t
/ and /
ʃ
/ (in the second).
air-stream
All speech sounds are made by making air move. Usually the air is moved outwards from the body,
creating an
egressive
airstream; more rarely speech sounds are made by drawing air into the body - an
ingressive
airstream. The most common way of moving air is by compression of the lungs so that the air
is expelled through the
vocal tract
. This is called a
pulmonic
airstream (usually an egressive pulmonic
one, but occasionally speech is produced while breathing in). Others are the
glottalic
(produced by the
larynx, with closed vocal folds; it is moved up and down like the plunger of a bicycle pump) and the
velaric
(where the back of the tongue is pressed against the soft palate, or velum, making an air-tight
seal, and then drawn backwards or forwards to produce an airstream). Ingressive glottalic consonants
(often called
implosives
) and egressive ones (
ejectives
) are found in many non-European languages;
click
sounds (ingressive velaric) are much rarer, but occur in a number of southern African languages
such as Hottentot, Xhosa and Zulu. Speakers of other languages, including English, use click sounds for
non-linguistic communication, as in the case of the "tut-tut" (American "tsk-tsk") sound of disapproval.
allophone
Central to the concept of the phoneme is the idea that it may be pronounced in many different ways. In
English (BBC) we take it for granted that the /
r
/ sound in 'ray' and 'tray' are "the same sound" (i.e. the
same phoneme), but in reality the two sounds are very different - the /
r/
in 'ray' is voiced and non-
fricative, while the /
r
/ sound in 'tray' is voiceless and fricative. In phonemic transcription we use the
same symbol /
r
/ for both (the slant brackets indicate that phonemic symbols are being used), but we
know that the allophones of /
r
/ include the voiced non-fricative sound and the voiceless fricative one.
Using the square brackets that indicate phonetic (allophonic) symbols, the former is [
̻
] and the latter [
].
In theory a phoneme can have an infinite number of allophones, but in practice for descriptive purposes
we tend to concentrate on the ones that occur most regularly.
Peter Roach
5
alveolar
Behind the upper front teeth there is a hard, bony ridge called the
alveolar ridge
; the skin covering it is
corrugated with transverse wrinkles. The tongue comes into contact with this in some of the consonants
of English and many other languages; sounds such as [
t
], [
d
], [
s
], [
z
], [
n
], [
l
] are consonants with
alveolar place of articulation.
alveolo-palatal
When we look at the places of articulation used by different languages we find many differences in the
region between the upper teeth and the front part of the palate. It has been proposed that there is a
difference between
alveolo-palatal
and
palato-alveolar
that can be reliably distinguished, though others
argue that factors other than place of articulation are usually involved, and there is no longer an alveolo-
palatal column on the IPA Chart. The former place is further forward in the mouth than the latter: the
usual example given for alveolo-palatal consonants is that of Polish /
/ and /
/ as in 'Kasia' and 'kasza'.
anterior
In phonology it is sometimes necessary to distinguish the class of sounds that are articulated in the front
part of the mouth (
anterior
sounds) from those articulated towards the back of the mouth. All sounds
forward of palato-alveolar are classed as anterior.
apical
Consonantal articulations made with the tip of the tongue are called
apical
; this term is usually
contrasted with
laminal
, the adjective used to refer to tongue-blade articulations. It is said that English
/
s
/ is usually articulated with the tongue blade, but Spanish /
s
/ (when it occurs before a vowel) and
Greek /
s
/ are said to be apical, giving a different sound quality.
approximant
This is a phonetic term of comparatively recent origin. It is used to denote a consonant which makes
very little obstruction to the airflow. Traditionally these have been divided into two groups:
semivowels
such as the /
w
/ in English 'wet' and /
j
/ in English 'yet', which are very similar to
close
vowels such as [
u
]
and [
i
] but are produced as a rapid glide, and
liquids
, sounds which have an identifiable constriction of
the airflow but not one that is sufficiently obstructive to produce fricative noise, compression or the
diversion of airflow through another part of the vocal tract as in nasals. This category includes laterals
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