GalacticCactus Forum
Forums => English & Linguistics => Topic started by: Jonathon on February 21, 2008, 06:57:45 PM
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Check out this Sound Comparisons (http://www.soundcomparisons.com/) site. It's got sound clips of different words from all over the English-speaking world, along with clips of other Germanic words and transcriptions of historic English words. I'm sure something like this has been posted before, but it's interesting nonetheless.
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Pretty cool. :)
You can read all those symbols, right?
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I'm not familiar with all the diacritical marks. I took phonology but not phonetics. Was there something you had a question about?
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Not really. There are just so many! (And I have no idea what the distinction you just made means.)
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Phonology is the study of sound systems in a language. Phonetics is the study of actual speech sounds. So those diacriticals say something about just how the person said the word (extra short vowel, slightly raised vowel, and so on).
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Phonology is the study of sound systems in a language. Phonetics is the study of actual speech sounds.
I still don't see how those are different things.
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Hmm. I'm trying to decide if it's worth explaining, or if the explanation will just be full of technical jargon that won't mean a thing to you. Suffice it to say that phonetic transcriptions use more diacritical marks. But if you want a real explanation, I'd be happy to try to provide one.
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Suffice it to say that phonetic transcriptions use more diacritical marks.
Translation:
Suffice it so say that something you don't understand used more of something else you don't understand.
That's OK. :)
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*laugh*
Sorry about that. I think "diacritical mark" is basically a technical term for "accent mark."
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*hazards a guess*
Phonology is more theoretical, and phonetics more practical?
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In a nutshell, yes.
And you don't have to hazard a guess—I could give you a more detailed answer. I just didn't want to bore anyone to tears.
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Nope, that's all I wanted to know. Mostly I agree with Porter's translation. ;)
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Phonology is the study of contrastive speech sounds, called phonemes. In English, /k/ and /g/ are separate phonemes. Replace one with the other and you get a different word: dock, dog.
Phonetics is the study of how speech is articulated and comprehended. The two contrastive phonemes /k/ and /g/ can sound quite different depending on the speaker, place in the word, and dialect. In my dialect, the phonetic difference between "dock" and "dog" isn't the last consonant, it's the vowel length. The vowel in "dog" is longer, and the last consonant is almost the same in both words. So a phonetician (which I sort of used to be) might look at spectrograms of these words and determine how much longer the vowel is and exactly what the difference is in the final consonant, if any. Phonetically the words might be represented as [d?k] and [d??k] where [?] indicates a longer vowel. But on a more abstract level, that is phonologically, they would be /d?k/ and /d?g/.
now that i've bored everyone to tears...
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And besides, k is the funniest consonant.
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The Buckie accent (from northern Scotland) is just weird. Brother rhymes with breather, bone is somewhat like bane, and what sounds like fit. :blink: The first two make some sense, but the last is strange. But it looks like white rhymes with fight, so obviously there's been a systematic change from /hw/ to /f/.
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In my dialect, the phonetic difference between "dock" and "dog" isn't the last consonant, it's the vowel length. The vowel in "dog" is longer, and the last consonant is almost the same in both words.
What is your dialect? I have the difference in vowel length, but it seems to me that there's still a distinction between the consonants. I think the /k/ in "dock" is aspirated, while the /g/ in "dog" is at least partially devoiced. But I'm not positive about that.
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In my dialect (Shvesterish) dock and dog are nowhere near close. They barely have the same number of syllables.
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I'm in southern Ontario. My final /g/ isn't consistently devoiced, but it is sometimes I think. In "dogs", the final consonant is
not [z]. But judgments about my own speech are not very reliable.
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In my dialect (Shvesterish) dock and dog are nowhere near close. They barely have the same number of syllables.
I'm guessing you pronounce "dock" with the same vowel as "cot," while "dog" has the same vowel as "caught," neh?
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I'm guessing you pronounce "dock" with the same vowel as "cot," while "dog" has the same vowel as "caught," neh?
As do I!
Except that for me, "cot" and "caught" are pronounced exactly the same.
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That's because you suffer from the affliction known as the cot/caught (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_low_back_vowels#Cot-caught_merger) merger.
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I don't know that it's quite right to say that phonetics is less theoretical. It's just that the theories involved are insanely complex. :D
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That's because you suffer from the affliction known as the cot/caught (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_low_back_vowels#Cot-caught_merger) merger.
This affliction has not hampered me in any way.
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Maybe "less abstract" would be better. I think goofy basically said that.
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This affliction has not hampered me in any way.
It has left you unable to distinguish between the man's name Don and the woman's name Dawn. Just try to tell me that this hasn't affected your quality of life.
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*looks Jonathon straight in the eye*
This has not affected my quality of life.
There! That wasn't so hard. :)
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In my dialect (Shvesterish) dock and dog are nowhere near close. They barely have the same number of syllables.
I'm guessing you pronounce "dock" with the same vowel as "cot," while "dog" has the same vowel as "caught," neh?
Pretty much. "Dock" has the same vowel sound as "cot". But "dog" is more complicated. It's kind of like "daw-uhg". The same vowel sound that we use for the first syllable of "coffee"*.
*Actually, that's the native, unmodified Shvesterish version. I've learned to tone it down and conform more to the mainstream pronunciation. I had a Liza Doolittle Experience one summer in North Carolina.
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I was in my final year of linguistics thinking I had a pretty unmarked accent when someone caught me saying candy. I say it something like kiandy. It's pretty slight, but my kids do it too, even the ones that are still mispronouncing other stuff with regularity.
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Where were you raised, pooka? I thought you were from Utah, but that's more of a Northern Cities thing, I think. Of course, I've heard it from my sister-in-law, who is (most recently) from Colorado, so maybe it's spreading.
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It certainly has mine. As a Canadian afflicted with the cot/caught merger, I don't and can't distinguish between Don/Dawn, Otto/auto, cod/cawed, lager/logger, yon/yawn, cock/caulk, and many other words which I don't know because I don't distinguish them.
My first realization I had this merger was when I recorded a Texan for a phonetics paper and was surprised to discover she had one more vowel than I did when she made fun of how I pronounced Loblaws (http://www.loblaws.ca/).
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a difference between phonetics and phonology (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005429.html)
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Great post.