Phonology

Communication in human language can be signed, spoken, or written. Let’s take a look at the spoken language.

Phonemes and Phonology

Spoken language is made up of sounds, which are organized into patterns that convey meaning. Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that can distinguish meaning. Phonology is the study of how phonemes are organized and used in language.

The human anatomy is such that we can distinguish several hundred phonemes. No other animal has anywhere near this capability.

Exercise: Research how the evolution of the human vocal tract and brain enabled the production and perception of such as massive number of phonemes. What were the selective pressures that led to this capability? How does this compare to other animals, such as birds, that can produce a wide variety of sounds?

Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in a language that can distinguish meaning. Some spoken languages have only a few dozen phonemes. Some have over a hundred. Examples are:

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How do we study these sounds?

Classifying Sounds

Vowels and consonants are classified according to how they are produced in the vocal tract. The place of articulation refers to where in the vocal tract the sound is produced, while the manner of articulation refers to how the sound is produced. For example, the sound /p/ is a voiceless bilabial plosive, meaning it is produced by closing both lips and releasing a burst of air without vibrating the vocal cords.

Tones and stress patterns are also important in phonology, as they can change the meaning of words. For example, in English, the word "record" can be pronounced with stress on the first syllable (RE-cord) to mean a noun, or with stress on the second syllable (re-CORD) to mean a verb.

TODO need the picture showing all the places of articulation

TODO define bilabial, alveolar, velar, glottal, uvular, glottal, plosive, affricate, etc.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

How about we get started just by looking at the fraction of IPA symbols that are used in English:

Basic ideas

There are basically three dimensions to vowels: height (high, mid, low), backness (front, central, back), and roundedness (rounded or unrounded).

CLASSWORK

Let‘s tour the IPA chart online. Turn your device’s volume up.

BTW, there’s another interactive IPA chart in case you’d like to compare.

Sounds Across Different Languages

Time for some fun facts! (Most of these are gleaned from Mithen’s The Language Puzzle.)

There are about 7,000 languages in the world, but only about 200 phonemes are used across all of them.
Some languages have very few phonemes, such as Rotokas (spoken in Papua New Guinea) with only 11 phonemes, while others have many more, such as !Xóõ (spoken in Botswana) with over 100 phonemes.
Some languages have phonemes that are not found in any other language, such as the click consonants found in some African languages.
Some languages have phonemes that are very similar to each other, such as the /p/ and /b/ sounds in English, which can be difficult for non-native speakers to distinguish.
Some languages have phonemes that are very different from each other, such as the /t/ and /k/ sounds in English, which are produced in different parts of the vocal tract.
Some languages have phonemes that are very rare, such as the /ʔ/ sound (glottal stop) found in some Polynesian languages, which is produced by closing the vocal cords.

Evolution of Spoken Language

Did gestures come first?

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Sound changes (vowel shifts, consonant changes, stress shifts, etc.) also occur for reasons of identity marking and efficiency. Here are some interesting examples from [Mithen Ch. 13] that follow the less-effort principle:

Consonant changes (seen more in PIE -> Germanic but not PIE -> Romance)
- Plosives becoming fricatives: /p/ → /f/ (e.g., pater → father), /t/ → /θ/ (e.g., tres → three), /k/ → /h/ (e.g., centum → hundred)
- Voiced consonants becoming voiceless: /g/ → /k/ (e.g., gans → goose), /d/ → /t/ (e.g., dag → day), /b/ → /p/ (e.g., blad → leaf)
- Double consonants to single consonants: /kn/ → /n/ (e.g., knight), /pp/ → /p/ (e.g., happy)
Vowel changes (seen more in PIE -> Romance but not PIE -> Germanic)
- Vowel raising: /a/ → /e/ (e.g., pater → padre), /e/ → /i/ (e.g., deus → dio)
- Vowel lowering: /i/ → /e/ (e.g., filius → figlio), /u/ → /o/ (e.g., lupus → lupo)
End of word erosion (maybe some examples from French)
Vowel fronting: /a/ → /æ/ (e.g., cat), /o/ → /ø/ (e.g., goose in some dialects)
Vowel diphthongization: /e/ → /ei/ (e.g., face), /o/ → /ou/ (e.g., go)
Umlaut effect: fronting of a vowel due to the influence of a following front vowel (e.g., man → men)

For now, though, here’s a short video:

Mapping Sounds to Writing

English is an interesting case study, It is considered to have 44 phonemes: __ vowels and __ consonants. The runic alphabets (Futharks) worked pretty well. Then Latin alphabet was imposed during Roman colonization, which had only five vowels and lacked // and //. But they did the did the best they could mapping Latin letters to sounds for Middle English. But the increasing French influence caused some weird spellings.

Then with the Great Vowel Shift, things got really messy: sounds changed but not the spelling.

Here are some fun examples:

Word	Runic	Middle English IPA	Modern English IPA
meet		?	miːt
meat		?	miːt

Exercise: Keep practicing your IPA skills. Then read aloud the IPA transcription for Middle English.

Like English, a lot of languages have adopted the Latin alphabet, even when the sounds don’t match the letters perfectly. Watch the following video to see if the Latin alphabet is a good fit for Tlingit.

Exercise: How badly does the Latin alphabet fit English? How well does it fit Spanish? Why the difference? What other alphabets are used for English?

Exercise: Research the click sounds of Zulu. How are they represented in the Latin alphabet? How are they represented in the IPA?

Recall Practice

Here are some questions useful for your spaced repetition learning. Many of the answers are not found on this page. Some will have popped up in lecture. Others will require you to do your own research.

What is a phoneme?
The smallest unit of sound that can distinguish meaning.
What is phonology?
The study of how phonemes are organized and used in language.

Summary

We’ve covered:

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