Update:
2008-04-01 09:20 AM -0500
TIL
Properties of Vowels
prop-dip.htm
by U Kyaw Tun, M.S. (I.P.S.T., U.S.A.). Not for sale.
Prepared for students of TIL Computing and Language Center, Yangon, MYANMAR.
UKT: Based on
• Properties of Consonants and Vowels,
Kevin Russell, Linguistics Department, University of
Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T 5V5, CANADA
(Since the link no longer works, I have deleted it -- 071110)
• Online Phonetics Course (UNIL), Department of Linguistics,
University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
(This source was downloaded in 2000 or a few years later, and instead of the original
links, you can still get to them from:
http://www.unil.ch/ling/page30184_fr.html -- UKT: 070823)
RBM4M |Top
BG4M-indx
Contents of this page
Pronunciations of some Burmese-Myanmar vowels and English-Latin vowels
Vowel chart
Checked and Free vowels - Burmese-Myanmar {a.that}
Short and Long vowels
- Burmese-Myanmar tones or registers
Chronemes - {auk-mris} and {wat-sa.}
Describing a vowel
IPA vowel diagram and cardinal vowels
UKT notes
• acoustic phonetics
• approximant
• cardinal vowels
• chroneme {auk-mris} and {wat-sa.}
• disambiguation of vowel terms
• glides (semivowel)
• glides as non-syllabic vowels
• glottal stop
• labialisation •
laryngealization (larygealized vowel)
• lip postures
• mora
• rhotic
• Romabama vowels in rimes
• SAMPA
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (SWH)
• semivowel
• syllable weight
• vowel length
Contents of this page
Remember this: "The usual assumption is that
all vowels are syllabic unless otherwise marked.
The off-glides of diphthongs should be marked as
non-syllabic, either using a consonant symbol or
a non-syllabic diacritic."
Before we proceed further, make sure you understand the following terms:
•
glides •
non-syllabic vowels •
semivowels. They are all in my notes.
UKT: "Glides", <y>
{ya.} /j/ and
<w> 
{wa.}
/w/) are semi-vowels
(see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel 070923).
English-Latin <y> acts as a verb in
<my> /maɪ/ and /mɪ/ -- DJPD16-357.
On the other hand, English-Latin <w> never behaves
in the way <y> does. However, it can be part
of a diphthong as in <cow> /kaʊ/ [kaʊ̯].
For a better understanding of the vowels,
Burmese-Myanmar speakers should view "glides"
as {a.wag}-consonants. For transcription of
English <my> and <cow> into Myanmar,
they can be seen as killed {ya.} ({ya.that})
and killed {wa.} ({wa.that}). See in my notes.
Vowels fall into two divisions: free vowels
and checked vowels. "Checked vowels
are followed by consonant" suggests that they are
to be used in Burmese-Myanmar rimes which end in killed consonants. See
Romabama vowels in rimes ending in "killed"
{wag.}-akshara in my notes.
Checked vowels
The following are my own examples of English words with rimes
ending in non-nasal consonants:
<back> /bæk/ -- DJPD16-045
<bag> /bæg/ -- DJPD16-046
<pat> /pæt/ -- DJPD16-399
<pad> /pæd/ -- DJPD16-392
<beck> /bek/ -- DJPD16-053
<beg> /beg/ -- DJPD16-054
<pet> /pet/ -- DJPD16-406
<pedlar> /'ped.ləʳ/ -- DJPD16-401
<bicker> /'bɪk.əʳ/ -- DJPD16-058
<big> /bɪg/ -- DJPD16-053
<pit> /pɪt/ -- DJPD16-414
<piddle> /'pɪd.l̩/ -- DJPD16-412
<book> /bʊk/ -- DJPD16-065
Note the sound of {wa.hswè:} in /ʊ/
<put> /pʊt/ -- DJPD16-436
<pud> /pʊd/ -- DJPD16-434
<buck> /bʌk/ -- DJPD16-072
<bug> /bʌg/ -- DJPD16-073
<putt> /pʌt/ -- DJPD16-436
<puddle> /pʌd.l̩/ -- DJPD16-434
<bog> /bɒg/ -- DJPD16-064
<pot> /pɒt/ -- DJPD16-422
<pod> /pɒd/ -- DJPD16-417
Free vowels
In English, the free vowels are again divided
into short vowels and long vowels.
But under some conditions, there are vowels shorter
than short vowels. See also SAMPA
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/english.htm
which described "free and checked vowels".
The free vowels comprise monophthongs and diphthongs,
although no hard and fast line can be drawn between
these categories. In the examples below, I have
excluded diphthongs such as /aɪ/ and /eɪ/.
<abet> /ə'bet/ -- DJPD16-002
<aroma> /ə'rəʊ.mə/ -- DJPD16-034
<happy> /'hæpi/ (DJPD16 p244)
<bee> /biː/ -- DJPD16-054
<into> /'ɪn.tu/ -- DJPD16-284
<boo> /buː/ -- DJPD16-065
<paw> /pɔː/ -- DJPD16-400
<father> /fɑː.ðəʳ/ -- DJPD16-199
UKT: English speakers in Myanmar should note that /ɑ/
and /a/ are different. /a/ is a front vowel, whereas /ɑ/
is a back vowel. /a/ is more like {a}, but /ɑ/ is
more like {au}. For both vowels the height of tongue
is very low, and they are described as open vowels.
In fact, the tongue body is lower than the normal.
It is at its lowest position, and they can be described
as the most open vowels.
If you are a non-Burmese, try to pronounce the following
taking cues from what has been said above:
• /i/ / iː/
You will notice the tongue rising up, pushing up your finger
you have placed on it. In /iː/ you finger will be
pressed between the palate and the tongue. /ɪ/
is a checked vowel and unless a consonant follows,
its "pronunciation" is irrelevant.
• /u/ /uː/
Your tongue will move, but not upwards, and will never
come up high enough to touch any part of the roof of
the mouth. /ʊ/ is a checked vowel and unless
a consonant follows, its "pronunciation"
is irrelevant.
If you are a Burmese-Myanmar, say:
• {a. a a:}
Your tongue will move, but not upwards. The tongue stays in
the front part of your mouth. {a.} is not a checked vowel.
It is pharyngalized {a} which is not found in English.
UKT: The Burmese-Myanmar's inclusion of vowel {a.}
in the consonantal akshara table as a consonant has
a rational in "the pharyngeal consonant is
also a semivowel corresponding to the vowel /a/".
(Quoted from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonorant 071010.)
• {i. i i:}
Your tongue moves upwards similar to /i/ / iː/.
The tongue stays in the front part of your mouth.
{i.} is not a checked vowel. It is pharyngalized {a}
which is not found in English.
• {u. u u:}
The tongue movements are similar to that of /u/ /uː/
• {au. au au:}
The tongue seems to moving lower and towards the interior.
Now, say the following:
{a.} --> {i.} --> {u.} --> {au.} - Burmese-Myanmar register #1
{a} --> { i } --> {u} --> {au} - register #2
{a:} --> {i:} --> {u:} --> {au:} - register #3
The tongue positions are very similar, except in the heights reached by the tongue.
Now, say them again, but in the following order:
{a.} --> {a} --> {a:}
{i.} --> {i} --> {i:}
{u.} --> {u} --> {u:}
{au.} --> {au} --> {au:}
However if you are native-English speaker say ("sing"):
/ i / --> /u/ --> /ɑ/
Note:
• Since, /a/ is not common in English, and /ə/
is not found in stressed syllables,
don't attempt to sing them.
• The adjective "stressed" is to be noted.
Remember, a word can be monosyllabic or polysyllabic.
In a disyllabic word, for example, there are
two syllables one of which gets prominence.
The prominent syllable is the stressed syllable.
The formation of syllables can be explained
in terms of mora. See
mora and
syllable weight in my notes.
In the akshara systems, the consonant characters have
an inherent vowel imbedded in it, and so all
consonant aksharas are pronounceable. This is not the
case in the alphabetic system, where the letters
have to supplied with vowels to pronounce them. Thus,
{ka.} has a sound of its own /ka/, and even a meaning:
<to dance>. This is not the case with the
English-Latin <k> /k/. To be able to pronounce it,
you have to supply it with a vowel such as <a> /a/.
/k/ -- not pronounceable
/k/ + /a/ --> /ka/ -- pronounceable (a syllable).
UKT: What you can hear online as the sound of /k/
is actually /ka/. I was mislead for a long time
because I had not realised that consonantal-letters
such as <k> cannot be pronounced. I had always
thought that <k> is the same as {ka.}.
Until I realised that Burmese-Myanmar {ka.}
is a syllable (not a letter) because of the inherent vowel,
I could not make any headway in my lifelong attempt
to come up with a reliable way of transcription
of Burmese-Myanmar into English-Latin.
My question all these years, after I came across
the inherent vowel in the section on Devanagari script,
in The Unicode Standard, version 4.0,
Chapter 9, Unicode Consortium,
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch09.pdf ,
is to pin down what the inherent vowel is,
in terms of English-Latin.
Devanagari, as well as Myanmar, needs
a "vowel killer"
{a.that} to form many of the syllables.
We know, what an
{a.that} is, but do not really know what it is
that has to be killed to form a syllable.
For, the present, let's say it is {a.} /a/
-- the "English short [a]".
{ka.} +
{ka.} -->
{ka.ka.}
{ka.} +
{ka.} +
({a.that} to kill the {a.}) --> {kak}
(a
syllable is formed)
{ka.} +
({a.that} to kill the {a.}) + {ka.}
--> {kkat}
(non-syllable: not pronounceable)
{kkat} is
usually written as a vertical conjunct. We find the same process in
Devanagari:
=
-- Myanmar
क् क = क्क -- Devanagari
Insert another akshara, say {ta.} before this non-syllable:
{ta.} 
+ {kka.}
--> {takka.}
(a new
syllable: pronounceable)
So far, so good. But, my question is: Is English
short [a] really the inherent vowel? After studying
all these years, my answer to my question is: the
inherent vowel is NOT [a] at all times. It is represented
by the triangle formed by /a/, /æ/ and /ə/.
I am not much of a phonetician to substantiate my statement.
But, for the present, my aim is to come up with a
user-friendly system of transliteration -- not transcription,
and I will be content to spell the Romabama syllables
with [a] as the inherent vowel in most cases, and also
with [æ]. However, [ə] will not come into the spelling
because it is not an ASCII character. Also please
note that [æ] is a checked vowel, and it must be
followed by a consonant. This would be equivalent to
the use of {a.that} in Burmese. Please note
that I have changed its colour to show that it is
different from /a/ and /ə/.
According to the SAMPA English statement below,
(Vowels in
SAMPA ENGLISH --
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/english.htm )
English does have 3 kinds of vowels: checked, short and long.
I have referred to SAMPA before. And that is exactly
what Burmese has. Yet, English is supposed to be a
non-tonal language, whereas Burmese is. This is because,
in Burmese, phonemic contrasts can be made on the basis
of the tone of a vowel. Probably, register
might be a better term to use in place of tone. However,
instead of being bogged down by arguing what a tonal language is,
I will accept that Burmese has 3 tones or registers:
#1 {a.}, #2 {a}, #3 {a:} in the class of free vowels,
and #4 checked vowel followed by a consonant.
Another observation that I have made is that
the British-English and American-English vowels,
especially the back vowels, tend to be diphthongs,
which is not the case in Burmese. To substantiate
this statement, just ask a native-born Myanmar
to pronounce <oil>, <boy> and <cow>.
You will see that almost all (including myself
at one time) are unable to pronounce the English
diphthongs. Most of them will pronounce:
<oil> pronounced as
/{weing}/
or <wine> /waɪn/ (monophthong)
MLC transcription and dictionary meaning: {weing}
- /[wain]/
- n. wine (Engl wine) -- MEDict479
<boy> pronounced as
/{bweing}/ or <boine> /bɔiŋ/ (monophthong)
<cow> pronounced as
/{kaung}/ (monophthong)
-- This was what most modern Burmese-Myanmar state-scholars
in the US (I was included at one time) could come up with.
It sounded like ending in a {nga.that}. However, we were
fully aware that the ending sound was not {nga.that}
and we tried to "soften" the "nasal" sound,
ending up with something that might be called a {wa.that}.
Even when I was a child (i.e. more than 70 years ago) {wa.that}
was no longer used except in some proper names. However,
it could still be seen in stone-inscriptions, some of them
embedded in the brick walls of monasteries and pagodas.
In these messages, the donor would proclaim the good work
he or she and the family had done, asking the devas (spiritual beings)
and humans to rejoice and to share the merit of the good work:
{nat lu tha-du. hkau sé thau}. The last word {thau}
was usually spelled with a {wa.that}:
{thauw}. A proper name involving a {wa.that} is still
seen in the name of a Myanmar ethnic group:
{pa.ow.} -- MEDict254
I was one of the fresh graduates who came from Burma (now Myanmar)
in the 1950s as "State Scholars" sent by the Burmese government
to study in the US. All of us had a hard time asking
the gas-station attendants to "check the oil".
We were asking was "check the wine, please"!
Yet, again and again I was told that Burmese has
"diphthongs", and my mind was always full of doubts
until I came across one statement on "diphthongs"
from Univ. of Manitoba":
"A tendency to pronounce all tense mid vowels as diphthongs is one of the
most noticeable accent features of English-speakers trying to speak other
languages." -- Properties of Consonants and Vowels, Kevin Russell,
Linguistics Department, University of Manitoba.
So, I ask myself: is this a case of the Western linguists
"hearing" the Burmese vowels, from their own
cultural perspectives? It brought back to my mind
the well known Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
(SWH)
which I understand from my own Myanmar-Buddhist perspective:
"We are prisoners of our own nature"
(corollary of the Second Noble Truth of Buddhism).
And, I will repeat my conclusion unequivocally:
Burmese has no diphthongs. Or, to be on safer grounds,
I will say: Burmese has no diphthongs similar
to those in English <oil>, <boy>
and <cow>.
Contents of this page
There are various levels of realism/idealism
we can use in drawing vowel charts. The actual physical
distribution of tongue body positions is close to
being an ellipse. However the IPA vowel chart makes
the ellipse look closer to being a quadrilateral,
but still preserves much of the relative spacing of the vowels.
UKT: There are some in north America, particularly the US,
who do not like the quadrilateral and draw a rectangle
instead. However, my preference is the quadrilateral
which reflects the tongue's movements more than a rectangle.
Please remember that the vowel quadrilateral is what
we could come up with simple experiments, but there are
instrumental methods which will lead us into a new area:
acoustic phonetics.
This link will take you to my notes (from Wikipedia download 070814)
in which you will find an interesting statement on
human endeavor by Japanese scientists who published
their work in English during Second World War when
Japanese and British were enemies. It is an instance
which shows that Science transcends Politics. It is
unfortunate that Politics and Wars do interfere
with the human quest for Knowledge.
The differences between vowels that we've seen so far
all involve the position of the tongue body. There are other
articulators that function independently of the tongue body
which can also change the vowel sound. Remember also that
there are two "valves", one in the glottal area
and the other in the velar area, that can completely shut or
completely open, or somewhere in between that can control
the flow of air. And as with all physical valves, it takes
time to manipulate them. Because of this time element,
the same vowel will not sound the same across different syllables,
and in different environments.
UKT: It always helps to compare the flow of air
during sound production to the flow of water
inside a system of pipes.
Some quick examples of sound changes:
• As with consonants, the vocal cords may or may not be
vibrating regardless of what the rest of the vocal tract
is doing. Vowels are almost always voiced.
But a few languages have contrastive vl vowels
(that is, the word can mean something different
if your vocal cords aren't vibrating during
the vowel production). English has a few environments
where vowels may be (non-contrastively) voiceless.
• As with consonants, air may or may not be flowing
through the nose, regardless of what the tongue or
lips may be doing. Vowels tend to be oral,
but many languages also have a set of nasal vowels
(e.g., French). English has a few environments
where vowels may be (non-contrastively) nasalized.
Burmese-Myanmar vowels are mostly oral. In fact you
can perfectly say the vowel sequence of the Burmese-Myanmar
vowels {a. a i. i u. u é è: au. au än a:}
with your nose closed.
• The tongue tip may be curled back to perform
a retroflex approximant, whatever the tongue body is doing.
The "R-colouring" that this adds to the vowel
is often called rhoticization. American English
(not British English), tend to be
rhotic in many instances. Many Americans,
will pronounce even the 'china and glass'
with /r/ at the end of the word 'china'
even though there is no <r> in the spelling.
No wonder, many radio and TV announcers pronounce
the word Myanmar with /r/ prominently. However, most
of the Britishers, I have met, do not pronounce it all.
It is the correct pronunciation and
the [r] should be shown as /ʳ/, e.g.
Myanmar /'mjæn.maʳ/
The above is how I would transcribe, but DJPD16
gives a slightly different transcription:
Myanmar /'mjæn.mɑːʳ/ (US)
/'mjæn'mɑːr/ -- DJPD16 p357
The British pronunciation /'mjæn.mɑʳ/
in slightly incorrect because of the {au} /ɑ/
at the end of the word. The US pronunciation is
not only incorrect but "offensive"
to many native-born Myanmar including myself
because the /r/ at the end is very prominent.
UKT historical note: Children are taught
that although there are some words that end
with the letter "H" such as "which"
or "graph" (<ch> and <ph>
are digraphs), there are really no words that end with
an "h" that makes the /h/ sound.
--
http://www.kidzone.ws/kindergarten/index-ends1.htm .
Then, what about the names such as the Jewish name
"Sarah" adopted as a Christian name by the gentiles?
At present, the "h" has been dropped to become Sara.
And then at one time, the British used to spell the name of
the present day Myanmar as Burmah. Even now, you will see
that spelling in the name of a British company:
Burmah Oil Company (founded in 1896
--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmah_Oil_Company_Ltd.
download 070925). I am always under the impression that
the British changed the spelling from Burmah to Burma.
However, I cannot say whether it was officially done,
or has come about by common use.
• And, the most common second constriction gesture of all:
Lip rounding which we have treated in intro-voc.htm. See also
labialization in my notes. Here we will briefly
say that, the vowels depend not only on the tongue positions,
but on lip rounding as well.
Contents of this page
UKT: I was planning to write this chapter just for the English vowels,
until I realised that because I will be comparing English
and Burmese vowels, I have no choice but to look at
the English vowels from the point of view of Burmese vowels
in which the checked vowels form a separate division.
This section is based on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checked_and_free_vowels download 070925
UKT: There is nothing on checked vowels in both
Properties of Consonants and Vowels,
Kevin Russell, and Online Phonetics Course (UNIL).
In phonetics and phonology, checked vowels
are those that usually must be followed by a consonant
in a stressed syllable, while free vowels
are those that may stand in a stressed open syllable
with no following consonant.
UKT: The above requirement that "checked vowels
are followed by consonant" suggests that they are
to be used in Burmese-Myanmar rimes which end in
killed {a.that} consonants.
The terms checked vowel and free vowel
originated in English phonetics and phonology. They are
seldom used for the description of other languages, even though
a distinction between vowels that usually have to be
followed by a consonant and those that do not have
to is common in most Germanic languages.
UKT:
Why do the Burmese-Myanmar word {sa:} for <salt> ,
and that of German "salz" and English
<salt>, "sound" so similar?
Then, why is the Burmese-Myanmar {þa.}/{tha.}
and English <th> both have vl. /θ/
and vd. /ð/ pronunciations? Burmese is said
to be a Tibeto-Burman language, whereas
German and English are Indo-European. Is Burmese
related to them originally, say through
Proto-Indo-European (PIE)?
See, Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language download 071010
Then, there is the question of the ancient Pyus
who were supposedly absorbed by the Myanmars.
"Pyu settlement in Burma undoubtedly goes back to
late prehistory, to the centuries from c. 400 100 BC"
-- Stargardt, J., The Ancient Pyu of Burma, Vol. I,
Early Pyu Cities in a Man-Made Landscape, Cambridge & Singapore
http://www.iias.nl/iiasn/25/theme/25T6.html
Another article of interest is
Pyu city-states in Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyu downloaded 071002
There is evidence that ancient Pyus
were making salt (see U Nyo Win
http://acl.arts.usyd.edu.au/~hudson/halin_salt_nyo_win.pdf
dated 03 Jun 2003). In the monograph, U Nyo Win
mentioned the following terms in connection
with present day salt-making at Halin village
(site of Halin city of the ancient Pyus): {ka:},
{ka:ha.}, {ka.sis}, {ka.theik}, {ka.na:},
{tis-Bwan-sis}, and {tis-Bwan-kya.}.
U Nyo Win was of the opinion that these words
were derived from the Mon language.
We must note that though
{ka:} and {hsa:} are different, POA for {ka.}
is velar and that for {hsa.} is palatal, which are
next to each other. Though, Pyu would be classified as
Tibeto-Burman, was it also related to Indo-European
as in the case of Burmese?
The terms checked vowel and free vowel
correspond closely to the terms lax vowel and
tense vowel respectively, but many linguists prefer
to use the terms checked and free as there is
no clear-cut phonetic definition of vowel tenseness,
and since by most attempted definitions of tenseness /ɔ/
and /ɑ/ are considered lax, even though they behave
in American English as free vowels.
Checked vowels is also used to refer to a kind
of very short glottalized vowels found
in some Zapotecan languages that contrast with
laryngealized vowels. The term checked vowel
is also used to refer to a short vowel followed by a
glottal stop in Mixe, where there is a distinction
between two kinds of glottalized syllable nuclei:
checked ones, with the glottal stop after a short vowel,
and nuclei with rearticulated vowels (a long vowel
with a glottal stop in the middle).
UKT: The requirement that a checked vowel must be
followed by a consonant prompts us to specify
the types of consonants. In Burmese-Myanmar, and
Indic languages, consonants are divided into
three types: the {wag}-akshara, nasal-akshara, and
{a.wag}- akshara. Among the three types,
the {a.wag}-akshara are fricatives, approximants,
and laterals. Of them, approximants when killed do
not really changed the vowel sound. See
approximants in my notes.
The schwa /ə/ and rhotacized schwa /ɚ/ are
usually considered neither free nor checked,
since they cannot stand in stressed syllables at all.
Contents of this page
UKT: The way the various authors of various schools
(Asian, British, European, North-American) describe
the vowels across languages) is very ambiguous, and
unless you are sure of the background of the author,
you can get into serious trouble. That has been my experience. See
disambiguation of vowel terms in my notes.
We aren't finished yet. We still have no way to tell
the difference between the pairs of sounds which occur
near each other in the vowel quadrilateral.
English vowels are described as Tense/Higher and Lax/Lower,
indicating of "intensity" and the "height
of the tongue body". They are not described
in terms of tones. I will now repeat what I have stated before
in light of what I have read in Vowels in
SAMPA ENGLISH --
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/english.htm ):
"The English vowels fall into two classes,
traditionally known as "short" and
"long" but, owing to the contextual effect
on duration of following "fortis" and
"lenis" consonants (traditional "long"
vowels preceding fortis consonants can be shorter
than "short" vowels preceding lenis consonants),
they are better described as "checked"
(not occurring in a stressed syllable without a following
consonant) and "free"."
UKT: In some languages, such as Sanskrit and Hindi,
a vowel has to be described according to its duration.
That Sanskrit had "short and long vowels"
was described in the words of two monks (learned in the Chandas-veda)
who spoke to the Buddha in person --
(Mahisāsaka-vinaya, Vol. ⅩⅩⅥ).
Sanskrit, was the language of the Hindu Brahmins
{braah~ma.Na}, and a proposal to recite the Buddhist cannon laws in
Sanskrit had brought about a sharp rebuke from the Buddha himself.
The Buddha proscribed the use of Sanskrit,
and laid down a Viniya rule in the category of Dukhata
{duk~hkat a-paat}. The episode was the subject of
a research paper Language Problem of Primitive Buddhism,
by Chi Hisen-lin, Journal of the Burma Research Society, XLIII, i, June 1960.
You can read the paper online:
http://www.chibs.edu.tw/publication/LunCong/004/69_90.htm. See
vowel length, in my notes.
(Burmese-Myanmar equivalent of Dukhata from U Mg Gyi p260 - by UKT.).
The following were the Buddha's own words:
Anujānāmi bhikkhave sakāya
niruttiyā buddhavacanaṃ pariyāpunituṃ -- Pali-Latin
{a.nu.za-na-mi. baik~hka.wé tha.ka-ya. ni.roat~ti.ya boad~Da.wa.ss.nän
pa.ri.ya pu.Ni-toän}
-- Romabama transliteration
English has short and long vowels.
Burmese on the other hand has short-short, short and long vowels. Yet, English is not described
as a "tonal language". The three or four kinds of
Burmese vowels, also described as "tones":
1. Low tone, /kʰà/ 'shake' -- {hka}
2. High tone, /kʰá/ 'be bitter' -- {hka:}
3. Creaky tone, /kʰa̰/ 'fee' -- {hka.}
4. Checked tone, /kʰaʔ/ 'draw off' -- {hkap}
/kʰapˀ/
-- Wikipedia, citing "the phonetic descriptions from Wheatley (1987)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_language download 070827
UKT: You may say Burmese has 3 tones. But to say 4,
is not correct, because the example given for
"checked" tone is entirely different
from the first three. The checked vowel is always
followed by a consonant, which in Burmese-Myanmar
is a killed akshara.
My present (071010) view is: Burmese is not a tonal language.
Burmese is a register language. We have
already seen what a register language is, in the last
chapter intro-voc.htm. See also Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_%28phonology%29 download 070920.
In linguistics, a register language is a language
which combines tone and vowel phonation
into a single phonological system. Burmese
and the Chinese dialect Shanghainese are examples.
Burmese is usually considered a tonal language,
but differences in relative pitch are correlated
with vowel phonation, so that neither exists independently.
From the way, we as children have to learn our vowels
as {a. a a:}, the 4 vowel registers can be given as:
register #1: • Creaky /kʰa̰/ 'fee' -- {hka.}
register #2: • Low /kʰà/ 'shake' -- {hka}
register #3: • High /kʰá/ 'be bitter' -- {hka:}
register #4: • Checked /kʰaʔ/ 'draw off' --
{hkap}
The following is "a very idealized (and ruthlessly rectangular)
vowel chart is usually used in the North American tradition" :
http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/linguistics/russell/138/sec3/vcharts.htm
I have given the very table given by Kevin Russell (Last modified: April 9,
1997, Last tinkered with: June 16, 1997, E-mail comments to
Kevin Russell) below:
"In pairs like this, the sound given higher
in the chart is called tense and the one given lower
is called lax. In general, tense vowels
are more "extreme" than lax vowels,
both vertically and horizontally:
• Tense vowels tend to have the position of the tongue body
slightly higher than the corresponding lax vowels.
• Lax vowels tend to be more centralized than
the corresponding tense vowels (i.e., closer to schwa
in the front/back dimension)."
UKT: I have redrawn Kevin Russell's rectangle,
adding a red rectangle to differentiate
the "checked vowels [ɪ], [ɛ], [ʊ], [ɔ]
(always followed by a consonant),
from the free vowels [i], [e], [u], [o].
See Describing English vowels,
http://www.umanitoba.ca/linguistics/russell/phonetics/articulation/describing-vowels.html
(download 070821)
Please note that, what Kevin Russell has given as
"tense vowels" and "lax vowels" are
"free vowels" and "checked vowels"
respectively. Please note that /æ/, a checked vowel is
outside the red rectangle, and so, you should take
my red rectangle only as an approximation.
The tense vowel [o] also has a lax counterpart,
the "open o" which we have so far seen
only in the diphthong [oj]. In many dialects of English,
the historical distinction between [ɔ] and
[ɑ] has been preserved:
• cot /kɑt/ (Russell)
UKT: /kɒt/ (US) /kɑːt/ - DJPD16 p124:
corresponding vowel in Burmese-Myanmar is
{au}
If the English-Latin <cot> is to be transcripted
to Burmese-Myanmar it would be (tentative):
/{kaut}/
• caught /kɔt/ (Russell)
UKT: /kɔːt/ (US) /kɑːt/ /kɔːt/
- DJPD16 p087:
corresponding vowel in Burmese-Myanmar is
{au:}.
If the English-Latin <caught> is to be transcripted
to Burmese-Myanmar it would be (tentative):
/{kau:t}/
In most dialects of Canadian English, all
former [ɔ] words are now pronounced with
[ɑ], creating many new homonyms. [ɔ]
is used only in the diphthong [ɔj] and
by many speakers before [ɹ] (the vowel
in or is in fact between [o] and [ɔ]
-- speakers vary as to which of the two it's closer to).
Hint: The IPA symbols make it easier to remember which vowels are
tense and which are lax. The tense vowels all have normal English letters:
[i], [e], [u], [o]. The lax vowels all have something
weird: [ɪ], [ɛ], [ʊ], [ɔ].
Contents of this page
In the previous two sections, Checked vowels and free vowels,
and Short and Long vowels, I have cautiously suggested
that the Burmese-Myanmar vowels are best described as
short-short, short, and long, or short, medium and long :
CV {a. a a:} and VÇ {a-"killed" consonant}.
I have always realized that the most important feature
of the vowels is the time. See
chroneme {auk-mris} and {wat-sa.} in my notes.
I will just give here what a chroneme is:
A chroneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound
that can distinguish words by duration only of a vowel
or consonant.
-- Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroneme download 071011
Contents of this page
We have seen that vowel can be described in terms of its
"height" and "backness"
as in the vowel quadrilateral of Daniel Jones. We have also seen
that lip rounding is involved in pronouncing the vowels,
and so it should also be described in terms of "roundness".
And, also, since there are lax and tense vowels, vowels
should also be described in terms of "tenseness". The table on the
right is such a description from . Indiana University
and Michael Gasser © 2006
http://www.indiana.edu/~hlw/Appendices/symbols.html download 070912
UKT: Tables such as given on the right, in which
the free and checked vowels are given together,
are very misleading to me.
If we are to represent this in the form of a solid diagram,
we would have to represent it in 4 dimensions, which is
not possible. If we are to ignore the "tenseness",
we can easily come up with a 3-dimensional graph using
three axes: height, backness and roundness.
"Roundness" can be quantified in terms a "ratio"
of two axes by treating the shape of the lips as an ellipse.
Contents of this page
The more I look at the IPA vowel diagram
with the cardinal vowels (see more on
cardinal vowels in my notes), the more
I became curious of experimental procedures
that must have been carried out to place
a person's vowels (i.e. vowels uttered by
a particular human subject, male and female)
in the diagram. How was it derived by Daniel Jones?
Were there experiments carried out in the field
of acoustic phonetics? And would I be able
to understand the mathematics involved?
The physical scientist in me, wouldn't let
me rest until I have at least a cursory look
into what I want to know. Browsing the internet,
I came across "An IPA vowel diagram approach
to analysing L1 effects on vowel production
and perception, by O. I. Dioubina and H. R. Pfitzinger,
Dept. of Phonetics and Speech Communication,
University of Munich, which must have been published
in some journal, sometime around 2001 (my estimate
from O.I. Dioubina's M.S. thesis),
www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/~hpt/pub/DioubinaPfitzinger_ICSLP02.pdf .
The IPA vowel diagram represents an abstract space,
which in its layout and proportions is derived from
the one which had been used in the cardinal vowel
system of Daniel Jones. It is a trapezium, right angles
at top and bottom back and ratio 2:3:4 (base:back:top).
This is the most simplified version of the figure
developed by Jones through a number of stages,
in which articulatory accuracy was progressively sacrificed
for practical convenience in drawing the diagram.
The vowels are plotted on the diagram with reference
to certain fixed points. Daniel Jones proposed a series
of 8 (primary) cardinal vowels spaced around
the outside of the possible vowel area and designed
to act as fixed reference for phoneticians. The space
within the diagram represents a continuum of possible
vowel qualities which have to be identified by
their relationships to the cardinal vowels. According
to Daniel Jones a scale of these 8 cardinal vowels
forms a convenient basis for describing the vowels
of any language.
(UKT: The two languages I am interested in, are
Burmese and English. I am sure English must have been
studied using subjects from different English-speaking countries,
but I am doubtful much has been done with
Burmese-Myanmar subjects.)
The description of vowel qualities with the help of
the vowel diagram requires a phonetician to be able
to position them as certain points on the diagram.
The three basic dimensions, height, backness and rounding,
together with the values of cardinal vowels are
involved in making a decision on the position of the
vowel quality within the space of the diagram.
(UKT: where a vowel is positioned would be bound to be
influenced by the L1 of the investigators. Because of this,
I doubt the descriptions of the Western phoneticians
on the qualities of the Burmese-Myanmar vowels, especially
when they insist that Burmese-Myanmar has diphthongs.)
(UKT: Kevin Russell gives the Canadian vowels
from a study of formants (measurable values
observed from a study of sound waves and spectrum).
The figure on the left is the result of
"flipping" the figure given by the author.
I've re-labeled the blue lines, and the data points.
Click on the figure to see the original graph
given by the author.
This means that a listener can essentially
"hear" the position of the speaker's tongue body.
• F1 is influenced by tongue body height
• F2 is influenced by tongue body frontness/backness).
You will notice that the relative positions of
the 6 important vowels (the 3 front vowels /æ/, /e/, /i/,
and the 3 back vowels /u/, /o/ /ɑ/) to the neutral vowel
/ə/ is the same in F1-F2 diagram and the vowel
quadrilateral. Here is a quantitative method to
describe a sound, a vowel (or consonant), spoken by
a particular subject without having to rely on
phoneticians (and their L1's) to place it in
the vowel quadrilateral of Daniel Jones. Now
what are F1 and F2? They are known as formants,
and if you are in a hurry to know about them,
just jump to
Imitating the Human Voice,
intro-voc.htm. Or, if you can wait, let's go to
Properties of consonants ,
prop-con.htm.
Contents of this page
From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_phonetics download 070814.
It is a subfield of phonetics which deals with acoustic aspects
of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates properties ]
like the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration,
its fundamental frequency, or other properties of its frequency spectrum,
and the relationship of these properties to other branches of phonetics
(e.g. articulatory or auditory phonetics), and to abstract linguistic concepts
like phones, phrases, or utterances.
The study of acoustic phonetics was greatly enhanced in
the late 19th century by the invention of the Edison phonograph.
The phonograph allowed the speech signal to be recorded
and then later processed and analyzed. By replaying the
same speech signal from the phonograph several times,
filtering it each time with a different band-pass filter,
a spectrogram of the speech utterance could be built up.
A series of papers by Ludimar Hermann published in
Pflüger's Archiv in the last two decades of
the 19th century investigated the spectral properties
of vowels and consonants using the Edison phonograph,
and it was in these papers that the term formant
was first introduced. Hermann also played back vowel recordings
made with the Edison phonograph at different speeds in
an effort to distinguish between Willis' and
Wheatstone's theories of vowel production.
Further advances in acoustic phonetics were made possible
by the development of the telephone industry.
(Incidentally, Alexander Graham Bell's father,
Alexander Melville Bell, was a phonetician.) During World War II,
work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (which invented the spectrograph)
greatly facilitated the systematic study of the spectral properties
of periodic and aperiodic speech sounds, vocal tract resonances
and vowel formants, voice quality, prosody, etc.
On a theoretical level, acoustic phonetics really took off
when it became clear that speech acoustic could be modeled
in a way analogous to electrical circuits. Lord Rayleigh was among
the first to recognize that the new electric theory
could be used in acoustics, but it was not until 1941
that the circuit model was effectively used, in a book by
Chiba and Kajiyama called "The Vowel: Its Nature and Structure".
(Interestingly, this book by Japanese authors working in Japan
was published in English at the height of World War II.)
In 1952, Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle wrote
"Preliminaries to Speech Analysis", a seminal work
tying acoustic phonetics and phonological theory together.
This little book was followed in 1960 by Fant
"Acoustic Theory of Speech Production",
which has remained the major theoretical foundation
for speech acoustic research in both the academy and industry.
(Fant was himself very involved in the telephone industry.)
Other important framers of the field include
Kenneth N. Stevens, Osamu Fujimura, and Peter Ladefoged.
Go back acoust-phon-b
Contents of this page
From: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximant_consonant download 070923
UKT: See also the Table of English Consonants in DJPD16-p.x, and you will see
that <y, r, l, w> are classified as approximants.
Approximants are speech sounds that could be
regarded as intermediate between vowels and typical consonants.
In the articulation of approximants, articulatory organs
produce a narrowing of the vocal tract, but leave enough
space for air to flow without much audible turbulence.
Approximants are therefore more open than fricatives.
This class of sounds includes:
• lateral approximants like [ l ] {la.}, as in <lip>, and
• approximants like [ j ] and [ w ] in <yes> and
<well> which correspond closely to vowels and semivowels.
Corresponding vowels:
• Palatal approximants correspond to front vowels,
-- (UKT: English <y> as in <yes> [ jɛs ]
--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatal_consonant 070923)
• velar approximants to back vowels,
-- (UKT: English <w> as in
<witch> [wɪʧ] ;
<wh> in <which> [ʍɪʧ]
--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velar_consonant 070923
Double "u" --
http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/W+(letter)
The 23rd letter of the English alphabet, representing either
a labiovelar semivowel, as in <war> and <wine>,
or part of a vowel diagraph, as in <law> and
<few>. It is essentially a u in consonantal function.
It is not pronounced before r, as in <write>
and <wren>, or in cases like <two> and
<sword>.
UKT: Paragraphs like the above had given me trouble,
because, the w's given above are
for various environments. For example,
• <w> in <war> and
<wine> are onset consonants
and <w> behaves exactly like {wa.}
• <w> in <law> and
<few> are coda consonants following
a peak vowel. Here <w> behaves like a killed {wa.}.
The peak vowel is a "checked vowel".
• <w> in <two> and
<sword> is a medial-former,
has no independent existence. <tw> and
<sw> is best treated as "digraph".
• <w> in <write> and
<wren> has no parallel in Burmese-Myanmar
where every character must either have a sound of its own or
take part in the pronunciation of the "digraph".
It is called double u because
it was written uu or vv, which in ligature
resulted in w. It appeared in the 11th century
to differentiate from v. The North Semitic waw,
and its descendant the Greek digamma probably
had a similar sound to the English /w/. Some
scholars think that the Latin v, representing
the consonant v and the vowel u, was pronounced like
the modern English /w/. In Welsh names w is generally a
vowel, as in Betws-y-Coed and Braich-y-pwll.
Go back approximant-wiki-b
Contents of this page
From: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_vowel download 070929
UKT: I have added the Burmese-Myanmar equivalents in {...}.
Cardinal vowels are a set of reference vowels
used by phoneticians in describing the sounds of languages.
For instance, the vowel of the English word <feet>
can be described with reference to cardinal vowel 1,
[ i ] {i}, which is the cardinal vowel closest to it.
A cardinal vowel is a vowel sound produced when
the tongue is in an extreme position, either front or back,
high or low. The current system was systematised
by Daniel Jones in the early 20th century, though
the idea goes back to earlier phoneticians,
notably Ellis and Bell.
Three of the cardinal vowels, [ i ] {i}, [ɑ] {au}
and [u] {u} have articulatory definitions. [ i ]
is produced with the tongue as far forward and as high
in the mouth as is possible (without producing friction),
with spread lips. [u] is produced with the tongue
as far back and as high in the mouth as is possible,
with pursed lips. This sound can be approximated
by adopting the posture to whistle a very low note,
or blow out a candle. [ɑ] is produced with
the tongue as low and as far back in the mouth as possible.
The other vowels are 'auditorily equidistant' between
these three 'corner vowels', at four degrees of aperture
or 'height': close (high tongue position), close-mid,
open-mid, and open (low tongue position). The
Ngwe language of West Africa has been cited as a language
with a vowel system that has 8 vowels which are rather similar
to the 8 primary cardinal vowels (Ladefoged 1971:67).
These degrees of aperture plus the front-back distinction
define 8 reference points on a mixture of articulatory
and auditory criteria. These eight vowels are known as
the eight 'primary cardinal vowels', and vowels
like these are common in the world's languages.
The lip positions can be reversed with the lip position
for the corresponding vowel on the opposite side of
the front-back dimension, so that e.g. Cardinal 1
can be produced with the rounding for Cardinal 9, etc.;
these are known as 'secondary cardinal vowels'.
Sounds such as these are less common in the world's
languages. Other vowel sounds are also recognised
on the vowel chart of the IPA.
From: Teaching Vowels in Practical Phonetics: The Auditory or Articulatory
Route? by Martin J. Ball, Univ. of Ulster,
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/johnm/ball.htm download 071110
The same pix is in John Laver's Principles of Phonetics.
Vowels are the next most open articulation type after approximants and
fricatives. This means that close vowels can easily be linked to the palatal,
velar, uvular and pharyngeal places of articulation. Students learn their
production by moving the tongue slightly between consonantal and vocalic
versions at each place.
An articulatory system follows the vowel area more closely, and this means
that [i, i, u, o, a, a] are all located on the upper periphery. Other vowels are
labelled as being close-mid, open-mid or open in relation to one of the places
of articulation. Due to the shape of the diagram, the lower left corner vowel
[a] is both an open palatal and an open pharyngeal vowel.
4. Advantages and Disadvantages to an Articulatory System
Only one set of articulatory labels need to be learnt, and the same method of
learning sound production can be applied to consonants and vowels. Further, the
vowel diagram is closer to the vowel area.
However, only production of the upper periphery vowels is easy to learn, as
it is unclear how one learns the values of close-mid, open-mid and open. An
articulatory system aids learning vowel production, but not description:
description of both consonants and vowels is an auditory task - as is using
Cardinal Vowels.
Phonologically, three-vowel systems ([i, a, ul) plot better on the CV system,
as they appear clearly as 'extreme' vowels. Languages having high, mid, and low
vowel phonologies group their vowels as in the CV system rather Um the polar
co-ordinate system. Also it is difficult to arrange central vowels on the polar
co-ordinate diagram, and show their relation to peripheral vowels.
Catford (1977) points out reasons why the CV system appears more natural: if
we plot vowels acoustically (FI by F2), the resultant diagram closely resembles
the CV chart. He also notes that the muscle systems used to move the tongue
within the vowel area give us proprioceptive feedback that high versus low, and
front versus back are natural classes: as shown in CV diagrams.
5. Conclusion
An articulatory system certainly could make the learning of vowel production
easier. The system also brings consistency between vowels and consonants.
However, it does not help in vowel description; and has phonological problems.
It is doubtful, therefore, whether a switch in teaching vowels in practical
phonetics is warranted.
References:
Catford, I. (1977) Fundamental Problems in Phonetics. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
(UKT: not available to me.)
Go back cardinal-vow-wiki-b
Contents of this page
chroneme
{auk-mris} and {wat-sa.}
From: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroneme download 071011
In spoken language, a chroneme is a basic,
theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words
by duration only of a vowel or consonant.
The noun chroneme is derived from Greek
χρονος (chronos, time),
and the suffixed -eme, which is analogous
to the -eme in
phoneme. However, this term does not have
wide currency, and may even be unknown to phonologists
who work on languages claimed to have chronemes.
Most languages have differences in length
of vowels or consonants, but in the case of most languages
it would not be treated phonemically or phonologically
as distinctive or contrastive. Even in those languages
which do have phonologically contrastive length,
a chroneme is only posited in particular languages.
Use of a chroneme views /aː/ as being composed
of two segments: /a/ and /ː/, whereas
in a particular analysis, /aː/ may be a considered
a single segment with length one of its features.
This may be compared to the analysis of a diphthong
like [ai] as a single segment /ai/ or as
the sequence of a consonant and vowel: /aj/.
UKT: Surprasegmental: Burmese-Myanmar
{was~sa.} or {was~sa.pauk} (MEDict480) is represented
by a double dot similar to a <colon>. {:}.
It is represented in IPA as [ː].
For the purposes of analysis of a chronemic contrast,
two words with different meaning that are spoken exactly
the same except for length of one segment
are considered a minimal pair.
The IPA denotes length by doubling the letter or
by diacritics above or after the letters:
American English does not have minimal pairs
indicating the existence of chronemes or may
theoretically be said to have only one chroneme.
Some other dialects such as Australian English
have contrastive vowel length, but it is not analysed
as the consequence of a chroneme.
Many Indo-European languages, including Classical Latin
have distinctive length in consonants,
for example in Italian:
• (vile) /'vile/ -- meaning 'coward'
• (ville) /'ville/ -- meaning 'villas'.
For example Classical Latin, German, and Thai
have distinctive length in vowels. See the examples
in Thai for "enter" and "rice"
given table right-above.
Almost all Uralic languages, such as Finnish, Hungarian
and Estonian have a distinctive moraic chroneme
as a phoneme (also arguably called archiphoneme or
epenthetic vowel/consonant). The etymology of
the vocalic chroneme has been traced to a voiced velar fricative
in the hypothetical Proto-Uralic language,
such that [Vɣ] becomes [Vː]. For example,
taka- "back-", takka
"fireplace" and taakka
"burden" are unrelated words. It is also
grammatically important; the third person marker
is a chroneme (menee "s/he goes"),
and often in the spoken Finnish of the Helsinki area
there are grammatical minimal pairs, e.g. nominative
Stadi "Helsinki" vs. partitive
Stadii "at Helsinki".
In Finnish, Estonian and Sami languages, there are
also two allophonic lengths of the chroneme,
half-long and over-long. For example,
Finnish imperative anna! "give!"
has a short vowel, oma "own"
has a half-long vowel, and Annaa
"at Anna" has an overlong vowel
(without any distinctive tonal variation to
distinguish these three). Estonian and Sami also
have a three-way distinction in consonants,
e.g. lina "bed sheet",
linna (half-long 'n') "of the city",
linna (over-long 'n') "to the city".
Estonian, in which the phonemic opposition is
the strongest, uses tonal contour as a secondary
cue to distinguish the two; "over-long"
is falling as in other Finnic languages, but
"half-long" is rising.
UKT: Pushing farther and farther back into time,
we find that the land mass that is now present day Myanmar
was clearly defined even in the days of Pangaea
or Pangea (παν, pan,
meaning entire, and γαια,
gaia, meaning Earth in Ancient Greek)
was the supercontinent that existed during the Paleozoic
and Mesozoic eras about 250 million years ago, before
each of the component continents were separated
into their current configuration.
See Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea 071011.
Could it be possible that proto-humans with
the ability to speak might have (I emphasize "might have")
originated in Myanmar, and then started migrating
all over the globe? If you can go along with that theory,
I see no reason, why we should not hypothesize
that Pyus and Myanmars had originated in Myanmar,
instead migrating from somewhere else. If that is so,
the way we pronounce our vowels (not the whole
language), would be shared by many peoples all over the globe.
When did the proto-humans with the ability
to speak appear in geologic time? I haven't found
a satisfactory answer yet. But, we should note that the songbirds
(Passeriformes, examples of animals with the ability
to produce different sounds in the throat) appeared
in Europe about 30-34 million years ago. --
http://www.springerlink.com/content/3r80upenjehb3m27/ 071012.
We should also note that, though we are not
very sure whether Neandertals could speak as we do,
they and their "cousins" the Homo erectus
and Homo sapiens (the modern Man) appeared only
in the Pleistocene epoch (1.8 million years
to 11,000 years ago). Because of the stable land mass,
it is very likely that (again, I am emphasizing "very likely"),
the present day Myanmars and the Pyus could have originated
on the very land mass that they are living on today.
Finnish also denotes stress principally by adding
more length (approx. 100 ms) to the vowel of the syllable nucleus.
This means that Finnish has five different physical lengths.
(The half-long vowel is a phonemically short vowel
appearing in the second syllable, if the first -
and thus stressed - syllable is a single short vowel.)
The unstressed short vowels are about 40 ms in
physical duration, the unstressed long vowels about 70 ms.
The stress adds about 100 ms, giving short stressed
as 130-150 ms and long stressed as 170-180 ms.
The half-long vowel, which is always short unstressed,
is distinctively longer than the standard 40 ms.
Japanese is another language in which vowel length
is distinctive. For example, biru is a foreign loan word
(clipped from a longer form) that means 'building'
whereas bīru is a foreign loan word for 'beer'.
Using a notion intuitive to a speaker of Japanese,
it could be said that more than anything, what differentiates
bīru from biru is an extra mora
(or minimal vowel syllable) in the speech rhythm that
signifies a lengthening of the vowel [i]. However,
upon observation one might also note a rise in pitch
and intensity of the longer vowel. It could be said,
also, that vowel lengthening — chronemic contrasts —
nearly doubles Japanese's rather small inventory of
vowel phonemes (though the occurrence of diphthongs
also augments vowel counts). Due to native literacy
practices, Japanese long vowels are often thought of
as sequences of two vowels of the same quality
(rather than one vowel of a greater quantity or length)
since that is how they are sometimes written.
In the case of consonants of Japanese, if treated phonemically,
a medial consonant might appear to double,
thus creating a contrast, for example, between
the word hiki (meaning 'pull' or 'influence')
and hikki (meaning 'writing'). In terms of
articulation and phonetics, the difference between
the two words would be that, in the latter hikki,
the doubled [kk] closes the first syllable [hi-] and
is realized in the glottis as glottal plosive stop(
with some anticipatory articulation evident in
the velum of the mouth, where a /k/ is usually made)
while starting the next syllable [-ki] as a [k] articulated
and realized as the regular velar sound. In effect,
this consonant doubling then adds one mora to
the overall speech rhythm and timing. Hence,
among other contrasts, the word hik-ki is
felt to be one mora or beat longer than hi-ki
by a speaker of Japanese.
References:
• Suomi, Kari. Temporal conspiracies for a tonal end:
Segmental durations and accentual f0 movement in
a quantity language. Journal of Phonetics,
Volume 33, Issue 3, July 2005, pages 291-309.
•
http://www.helsinki.fi/puhetieteet/projektit/Finnish_Phonetics/kvantiteetti_eng.htm
Go back chroneme-wiki-b
Contents of this page
UKT:
• free vowel vs. checked vowel --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checked_vowel 070919
• free morpheme vs. bound morpheme --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_morpheme 070919
• lax vowel vs. tense vowel (occasionally used for consonants) --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenseness 071002
• lenis consonant vs. fortis consonant --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortis_and_lenis 070920
• short vs. long vowel --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length 070920
According to Wikipedia
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortis_and_lenis),
These terms "fortis" and "lenis"
were already used in 19th century German linguistics
to describe languages such as southern German where consonants
such as b, d are voiceless but nonetheless
different from p, t. The terms are
only seldom used in current linguistics.
• stressed syllable -- a term used for a multi-syllabic word.
In such a word the syllable which is more prominent
is called the stressed syllable. It is longer in duration,
higher in pitch, and louder in volume. Usually
in a disyllabic noun, the first syllable is stressed,
but in a disyllabic verb, the stress is on the second.
Except for compounds, stressed syllables in words
with more than 2 syllables never stand next to
each other (stressed syllables and weak syllables
alternate. -- edited excerpt from:
http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/tn24/wordstress/wstresstext.html download 070925
According to Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_%28phonology%29 download 070920,
Burmese is a register language where tone and vowel phonation
are combined into a single phonogical system,
and that there are three or four vowel registers .
However, the way these registers are described in
this article, as "low", "high", "creaky"
and "checked" is ambiguous. "Low" and
"high" can mean the height reached by the tongue body
in the oral cavity during articulation of the vowel.
Therefore, I propose to use the way in which
the Myanmar children are taught to recite the vowels:
{a. a a:} as registers #1, #2, and #3. These belong
to the class of free vowels and do not need a
consonant in the coda. However, register #4 belongs
to the class of checked vowels where the phonation
is a glottal stop, represented in
orthography with a "killed" consonant.
Since Burmese-Myanmar and Pali-Myanmar POAs and
manners of articulations are the same, and since Pali
was a north Indic language, we can use the terms used
for Indic languages. We can say that, register #1
is short-short vowel. Registers #2 is
the short vowel and #3 the long vowel
as found in northern Indic languages. Or,
#1 is short vowel, #2 medial vowel, #3 long vowel.
Go back disambigua-vow-b
Contents of this page
glide (semivowel)
From:
• Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel 070923
• Indopedia,
http://www.indopedia.org/Semivowel.html 071009
• Narada Thera, An Elementary Pali Course,
http://www.vipassana.info/pali_contents.htm 071111
From Wikipedia:
Semivowels (also glides, more rarely:
semiconsonants) are
non-syllabic vowels that form diphthongs
with syllabic vowels. They may be contrasted with
approximants, which are similar to but closer
than vowels or semivowels and behave as consonants.
Semivowels are normally written by adding the IPA
non-syllabicity mark [ ̯ ]
to a vowel symbol, but often for simplicity
the vowel symbol alone is written. ...
From Indopedia:
Semivowels are vowels that function as consonants.
They are typically briefer, less stable and often closer
than the corresponding vowels. Palatal semivowels correspond
to front vowels, velar semivowels to back vowels, and
labialized semivowels to rounded vowels. Examples:
• English y in <yes>
[j], a palatal or unrounded front semivowel.
• English w in <well>
[w], a velar labialized or rounded back semivowel.
• Dutch w is an approximant in all cases,
except in eeuw.
• French hu in huit [ɥ],
a palatal labialized or rounded front semivowel.
From: Narada Thera, An Elementary Pali Course (in Pali-Latin)
UKT: Because, the terms for POA are different from English consonants, I have
given them in format (Narada/English) -- I have based my identification on the
Table of English Consonants given in DJPD16 p.x.
Semivowels: y (palatal/palatal), r (cerebral/post-alveolar), l (dental/alveolar), v (dental and labial/bilabial)
Note: Narada [[ y ]] is English <y>, but Narada [[ v ]] is English <w>. It is to
be noted that Narada has classified <r> and <l> also as semivowels . Because of
this, what are meant by Narada as semi-vowels are approximants. That is, Narada
has classified <r> and <l> as semivowels. [UKT: Please remember,
Pali-Myanmar has no <v>, and we consider <v> of Pali-Latin to be equivalent to {wa.}
mostly. However we find <v> has to be equated to {bya}] .
UKT views: 071112 (I am dating my "views" to show my current
understanding of the subject. Please remember that I am incorporating ideas from
the West as well as from the East (India and Myanmar). Therefore, my
understanding of the subject, is bound to change over time. Please also
note that Wikipedia, my primary source of information is also being updated
continually.
Semivowels are classified as Approximants.
UKT: Because <y> corresponding to {ya.}
is a palatal semivowel, the process of {ya.ping.}
formation changes an akshara into a palatal.
Similarly, because <w> is a labialized velar,
the {wa.hswè:} formation is labialization.
Examples {ka.}, a velar is changed into
• a palatal when it becomes {kya.} -- {ya.ping.}-formation
• a labial when it becomes {kwa.} -- {wa.hswè:}-formation
(I am waiting for input from my peers.)
Go back glide-wiki-b
Contents of this page
From: Kevin Russell, Univ. of Manitoba
http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/linguistics/russell/138/sec3/vowel.htm
The usual assumption is that all vowels are syllabic unless otherwise marked.
The off-glides of diphthongs should be marked as non-syllabic, either using
a consonant symbol or a non-syllabic diacritic. There can even be meaning contrasts
in some dialects between syllabic and non-syllabic:
<naive> [na.iv]
| <knife> [nai̯f]
<employ> [əm.ˈplɔi̯]
| <employee> [əm.ˈplɔ.i]
From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-syllabic_vowel download 070813
with a note saying "this article does not cite any references or sources".
A non-syllabic vowel is a vowel-like sound
that is not the nucleus of a syllable or
mora (i.e. it doesn't make up the most
prominent part of the syllable). In languages such
as Japanese and many Polynesian languages,
every vocalic segment constitutes a separate
syllable or mora. That is, there are no diphthongs.
[ href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disputed_statement">dubious
– discuss]
However, languages such as English have large numbers
of diphthongs. A convenient way to indicate
that a vowel sound is a non-syllabic part of a diphthong
is to write these as approximants, such as <eye>[ aj ]
or <cow> [kaw]. However, phoneticians often object
that the final segments of these diphthongs do not
have the constriction of the consonants [ j ] or [ w ]
as in <yes> [ jɛs ] or <wall>[wɔɫ],
but rather are purely vocalic, and therefore the symbols
< j > and < w > are inappropriate.
In addition, there are languages where a sequence
like [ ao ] is a diphthong, but contrasts with a diphthong [au];
the symbol < w > obviously cannot be used for
both. In such cases the IPA non-syllabic diacritic
[ ̯] can be used; this is
dubbed an <arch>. Beside enabling contrasts like
[ ao̯ ] vs [ au ], this allows a more
precise transcription of standard diphthongs.
For instance, the diphthong in English <bay>
may be transcribed with a near-high vowel as
[ beɪ ̯] rather than [ bej ].
The "w-like" pronunciation of the letter
" ł " (U0142) in standard Polish can be
transcribed as /ʊ̯/ (although /w/ is more common).
UKT: The sentence immediately above reminds me
of the inability of English speakers to pronounce
the Burmese-Myanmar {lhwa.} for <saw>
and {lha.} for <beautiful>. The IPA symbol
that Daw Than Than and I could associate with {lha.}
is /ɬ/ (U026C) mentioned above. Unfortunately
neither of us could speak Polish.
ɫ (U023B) is known as "dark L".
It is found the coda of syllables (similar to {la.that}) :
The following examples are from DJPD16 info panel p136.
(Remember in my writings I am following the lead of
DJPD16. /.../ are for broad transcription and [...]
for narrow transcription.)
<help> /help/ [heɫp]
<hill> /hɪl/ [hrɫ]
Eventually, I will have to look for ways to represent
the {a.that} transliterations of {a.wag}-consonants.
Fortunately, there is an ASCII character suitable
for {ya.that} ý. However, there are no suitable ASCII
characters to represent {ra.that}, {la.that}, {wa.that}
and {tha.that}. Therefore, they will be occupying
the coda as in the case of {wag}-akshara. In the case
of {wa.that}, there is bound to be confusion
with the English diphthong <ao>.
Note that in practice many diacritics, including
the arch, are often left out in broad transcription,
so that <bay> is frequently transcribed
[beɪ] (or even [beː] or [be]). It is
necessary to know the phonology of the language
in order to understand what is meant by such transcriptions.
Non-rhotic varieties of English compensate
for the lack of r-coloring in high vowels by
epenthising a non-syllabic schwa immediately
after the core vowel. Yielding [biə]
for [biɹ], <beer>.
Spanish and Italian both have a non-syllabic [o]
as in bacalao and ciao, respectively
(or invertedly, almohada and Edoardo
respectively). In both these languages the [ao] diphthong
is phonetically distinct from the [au] diphthong,
i.e. the difference is not merely orthographic.
Therefore the diphthong in the Italian Pao.lo
cannot be said to be identical to that in
the Portuguese Pau.lo.
Dialects of Caribbean Spanish that drop an intervocalic /d/
will often put the [ao] diphthong into use, as in:
pa.sa.do→pa.sao. Spanish will also
employ a non-syllabic [e] in words such as,
pe.lear or de.sear.
Go back non-syll-vow-b
Contents of this page
From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop download 071010
The glottal stop or voiceless glottal plosive
is a type of consonantal sound, used in many spoken languages.
The symbol in the IPA that represents this sound is
ʔ (a "question mark without the dot). The glottal stop
is the sound made when the vocal cords are pressed together
to stop the flow of air and then released; for
example, the break separating the syllables of the
interjection uh-oh.
UKT: The glottal stop is simply an IPA invention
to describe a rime ending in a killed akshara.
(Glottal stop can only be found in the coda
following a vowel.) I have not found it represented
in the orthography of the languages I have come across.
It certainly does not belong to the family of
consonantal-aksharas of {ka. hka. ga. Ga. nga.}.
Features of the glottal stop:
• Its manner of articulation is plosive or stop,
which means it is produced by obstructing airflow
in the vocal tract.
• Its place of articulation is glottal which means
it is articulated by the vocal folds.
• Its phonation type is voiceless, which means
it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
(UKT: this is to be expected because once
they are pressed close together, the vocal folds
have no room to vibrate.)
• It is an oral consonant, which means
air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
(UKT: I cannot understand it, because
what is happening to the "glottal valve"
is independent of what is happening to the
"velar valve". You will see my
objection more clearly when you refer to
the "speech-machine model" in
http://www.ling.su.se/staff/hartmut/kemplne.htm
which I have already given in my notes in
the previous chapter intro-voc.htm.)
• Because it is pronounced in the throat;
without a component in the mouth, the central/lateral
dichotomy (UKT: which concerns the tongue body) does not apply.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive,
which means it is articulated by pushing air out
of the lungs and through the vocal tract,
rather than from the glottis or the mouth.
Occurrence :
• Burmese {mris mra:} [mjiʔ
mjà] meaning <rivers>
• English <cat> [kæʔ(t)]
(UKT: I have made the rimes bold, because in Burmese-Myanmar,
the rimes are more important than the peak vowels.)
Go back glottal-stop-wiki-b
Contents of this page
UKT: Labialisation can be seen as the process of {wa.hswè:} formation.
From:
• Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labialization download 070812
It is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized
sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another
sound. The term is normally used to refer to consonants. When vowels involve the
lips, they are usually called rounded.
The most common form of labialisation is rounding of dorsal
consonants such as k, g, and q. With non-dorsal consonants, labialisation
prototypically involves velarization as well, so it might more accurately
be called labiovelarisation. However, this is not always the case,
and labialisation is not restricted to lip-rounding. -- Wikipedia download 070812
UKT: I had never realised that <w> is a semi-vowel, until I was pointed out
in Australia that my pronunciation of <cow> was not correct. However, the
person could never explain to me why it was not. She should have pointed out
that the <w> in it was a semi-vowel but neither she nor I were linguists. I
should have pronounced <cow> /kaʊ/ (DJPD16 p126) not as a pure
/{kaung}/ but with a trace of /{kau:}/.
The labialisation of <k , g> in Burmese-Myanmar is the formation of
medials as shown below:
{ka.} + {wa.} --> {kwa.}
/kʷ/ . See below.
{ga.} + {wa.} --> {gwa.}
In the IPA, labio-velarization of consonants is indicated with a raised w
modifier / ʷ / (U02B7), as in /kʷ/. There are also
diacritics, respectively [ɔ̹],
[ɔ̜], to indicate greater or lesser degrees of rounding. These are
normally used with vowels, but may occur with consonants. For example, in the Athabaskan language Hupa,
voiceless velar fricatives distinguish three degrees of labialization,
transcribed either /x/, /x̹/, /xʷ/ or /x/, /x̜ʷ/, /xʷ/.
The
Extended IPA has two additional symbols for degrees of rounding: Spread
/ɹ͍/ and open-rounded /ʒœ/. It also has a symbol for
labialdentalized sounds, /tʋ/.
If precision is desired, the Abkhaz and Ubykh articulations may be
transcribed with the appropriate fricative or trill raised as a diacritic:
[tv],
[tβ],
[tʙ],
[tp].
For simple labialization, Ladefoged and Maddieson resurrected an old IPA
symbol, [ ̫]. In Shona,/s̫/ and /z̫/ contrast with
/s/ and /z/, and in some dialects with /sw/, /zw/, /s̫w/, /z̫w/] as well.
The open rounding of English /ʒœ/ is also simple (unvelarized).
Labial assimilation:
Labialisation also refers to a specific type of assimilatory process where a
given sound become labialised due to the influence of neighboring labial sounds.
For example, /k/ may become /kʷ/ in the environment of /o/, or
/a/ may become /o/ in the environment of
/p/ or
/kʷ/.
In the Northwest Caucasian languages as well as some
Australian languages rounding has shifted from the vowels to the consonants,
producing a wide range of labialized consonants and leaving in some cases only
two phonemic vowels. This appears to have been the case in Ubykh and
Eastern Arrernte, for example. The labial vowel sounds usually still remain,
but only as allophones next to the now-labial consonant sounds.
Go back labialisation-wiki-b
Contents of this page
Excerpt from: Creaky voice, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngealisation download 071010
More on layngealization in The Phonetic Description of Voice quality,
by J. Laver
http://www.ling.mq.edu.au/ling/units/sph302/papers/laver_1980_phonation.pdf
download 071024, which has been set in HTML by UKT as
Phonation laver-80.htm.
Creaky voice (also called laryngealisation, pulse phonation
(or, in singing, vocal fry or glottal fry)), is a special kind of
phonation in which the arytenoid cartilages in the larynx are drawn together; as
a result, the vocal folds are compressed rather tightly, becoming relatively
slack and compact, and forming a large, irregularly vibrating mass. The
frequency of the vibration is very low (20–50 pulses per second, about two
octaves below normal voice) and the airflow through the glottis is very slow. A
slight degree of laryngealisation, occurring e.g. in some Korean consonants is
called "stiff voice". ...
Go back laryngeali-vow-wiki-b
Contents of this page
Approximate lip postures for four vowels
Robert Mannell,
www.ling.mq.edu.au/speech/phonetics/phonetics/vowelartic/lip_posture.html
This diagram displays the two extreme lip postures
and two intermediate lip postures. The high front cardinal
vowel [i] has a very spread lip posture. The high
back cardinal vowel [u] has a very tightly rounded lip posture.
The low front cardinal vowel [a] has a spread lip posture
but this is a more neutral posture than for [i] because
the lower jaw position for this vowel causes the lips
to be more open. The half-open back cardinal vowel [ɔ]
has a rounded lip posture but the lips are more open
than for [u] because of the lower jaw position.
The actual lip posture for vowels in any particular language
may be similar to that of the closest cardinal vowel
with the same lip posture feature, but often speakers
of many languages adopt a more neutral posture than would be
indicated by these cardinal vowels. Languages that have
lip posture contrasts are more likely to adopt
the more extreme lip posture to emphasise those
contrasts. For example, a language with the vowel phonemes
/i/ and /y/ (such as French) tend to have a strongly spread /i/
and a strongly rounded /y/ to maximise their difference perceptually.
Languages without rounding contrasts, such as English,
may relax the degree of rounding of rounded vowels
and the degree of spreading of spread vowels. In English
the extent to which this is true varies from dialect to dialect.
For example, Australian English is often described
as having rounded vowels which are spoken by many speakers
with less rounding than similar vowels in some other
dialects of English. This impression may be due,
however, to the observation that /ʉː/
in Australian English is less rounded than /uː/
in American English. This difference in degree
of rounding may simply be due to the fact that
the American phoneme is a high back vowel and
the Australian phoneme is a high central vowel.
There is a tendency for front vowels to be less rounded
than back vowels in the absence of a rounding contrast
(although there are exceptions to this tendency).
Go back lip-pos-b
Contents of this page
From:
• Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics) download 070920
• Indopedia,
http://www.indopedia.org/Mora_linguistics_.html download 071009
From Wikipedia
Mora (plural moras or morae)
is a unit of sound used in phonology that determines
syllable weight (which in turn determines
stress or
timing) in some languages. Like many technical
linguistics terms, the exact definition of mora is debated.
The term comes from the Latin word for "linger,
delay", which was also used to translate
the Greek word chronos (time) in its
metrical sense.
A syllable containing one mora is said to be monomoraic;
one with two moras is called bimoraic.
In general, moras are formed as follows:
1. A syllable onset (the first consonant(s) of the syllable)
does not represent any mora.
2. The syllable nucleus (UKT: peak vowel) represents
one mora in the case of a short vowel, and two moras
in the case of a long vowel or diphthong.
Consonants serving as syllable nuclei also represent
one mora if short and two if long. (Slovak is an example
of a language that has both long and short
consonantal nuclei.)
3. In some languages (for example, Japanese),
the coda represents one mora, and in others
(for example, Irish) it does not. In English,
it is clear that the codas of stressed syllables
represent a mora (thus, the word <cat>
is bimoraic), but it is not clear whether
the codas of unstressed syllables do
(the second syllable of the word <rabbit>
might be monomoraic).
4. In some languages, a syllable with a long vowel
or diphthong in the nucleus and one or more consonants
in the coda is said to be trimoraic
(see pluti).
In general, monomoraic syllables are said to be
light syllables, bimoraic syllables are
said to be heavy syllables, and trimoraic
syllables (in languages that have them) are said
to be superheavy syllables. Most linguists
believe that no language uses syllables containing
four or more moras.
Japanese is a language famous for its moraic qualities.
Most dialects including the standard use moras (in Japanese,
onji) as the basis of the sound system
rather than syllables. For example,
haiku in modern Japanese do not follow
the pattern 5 syllables/7 syllables/5 syllables,
as commonly believed, but rather the pattern 5 moras/7 moras/5 moras.
As one example, the Japanese syllable-final n
is moraic, as is the first part of a geminate consonant.
For example, the word Nippon ('Japan' in Japanese)
has four moras (NI-P-PO-N)
From Indopedia
Mora is a unit of sound used in phonology that
determines stress in some languages. Like many
technical linguistics terms, the exact definition
of mora (plural moras or morae) is debated. The term,
meaning "delay", comes from Latin.
In general, morae are formed as follows:
1. The first consonant of a syllable
(the onset) plus the following vowel (the
nucleus (UKT: the peak)) plus the following consonant
or cluster (the coda) represents one mora. Thus, the
English word cat is unimoraic.
2. Consonants serving as syllable nuclei represent one mora.
Thus, the Japanese word sensei teacher
is quadrimoraic (se-n-se-i).
3. Long vowels count as two morae. Thus, the
Abkhaz word k'次ara hole
is quadrimoraic (k'歬a-a-ra).
Japanese is a language famous for its moraic qualities.
Most dialects including the standard use morae as
the basis of the sound system rather than syllables.
ja:モーラ
Go back mora-wiki-b
Contents of this page
UKT: this note is based on Information Panel on Rhotic (DJPD16 p458), and
Treatment of /r/ in the Introduction (DJPD16 p.xiv). These two sections
are important for Burmese-Myanmar speakers since Burmese, unlike American
English and Pali-Latin, is a non-rhotic language. Myanmars found it extremely
difficult to pronounce English words with /r/ in the word-final position. Even
the /r/ as the onset in the syllable is pronounced as /j/ (equivalent of English
[y]) by most people. The /r/ is properly pronounced in Rakhine State. It
is also properly pronounced by Burmese-Buddhist monks especially when reciting
the religious text {kam~ma.wa sa}. See the meaning of {kam~ma.wa} in MEDict024.
In rhotic varieties of English pronunciation the /r/ PHONEME is found in all
phonological contexts.
In BBC pronunciation, /r/ is found before vowels, and never before consonants
or before a pause (see also LIAISON), e.g.:
<red> /red/
<around> /əˈraʊnd/
<there is> /ðər ɪz/
UKT: The statement in DJPD16-458, "/r/ is found ... never before consonants"
is notable. It means that in words such as <rhotic>, the British-English
<h> is not a consonant.
In US English and other rhotic accents, on the other hand, /r/ may occur
before consonants and before a pause, e.g.:
<cart> /kɑːt/ (US) /kɑːrt/
<car> /kɑːʳ/ (US) /kɑːr/
UKT: My conclusion from the above statement:
US-English <h> is a consonant.
In Burmese-Myanmar, {ha.} is considered to be a hard-to-classify {a.wag}-akshara,
and is placed in row 7 together with {a.}.
While the BBC accent is non-rhotic, many accents of the British Isles are
rhotic, including most of the south and West of England, much of Wales and all
of Scotland and Ireland. Most speakers of American English speak with a rhotic
accent, but there are non-rhotic areas including the Boston area, lower-class
New York and the Deep South.
Treatment of /r/
The accent used for British English is classed as non-rhotic -- the
phoneme /r/ is not usually pronounced except when a vowel follows it. The
American pronunciations, on the other hand, do show a rhotic accent, and in
general in the accent described, /r/ is pronounced where the letter [r] is found
in the spelling.
It is necessary to show, in British English entries,
cases of potential pronunciation of /r/, mainly
in word-final position; in other words, it is
necessary to indicate, in a word such as <car>,
that though the word when said in isolation does not
have /r/ in the pronunciation ( /kɑː/ ),
there is a potential /r/ which is realised if
a vowel follows (e.g. in <car owner>)
(UKT: Remember, in slow careful speech, <car>
and <owner> can be quite distinct.). This is
indicated by giving the transcription as /kɑːʳ/ ,
where the superscript /ʳ/ (U028B) indicates
the potential for pronunciation. This is
traditionally known as 'linking r'.
A controversial question is that of so-called
'intrusive r', where the phoneme /r/ is
pronounced when no 'r' is seen in the spelling.
For example, the phrase 'china and glass'
will often be pronounced with /r/ at the end
of the word 'china'; although this type of
pronunciation is widespread in the speech of native speakers
of the accent described, it is still safer not to
recommend it to foreign learners, and it is
therefore avoided in this dictionary.
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With reference to:
1. SAMPA
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/english.htm
2. Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_language download 070917
UKT: The requirement that checked vowels are followed by
consonants (ref 1 SAMPA) suggests that they are
to be used in Burmese-Myanmar rimes which end
in killed consonants. An favorite example given by
Western linguists of Burmese "checked vowel" is:
• Checked /kʰaʔ/
'draw off' {hkap} -- (ref 2 Wikipedia)
Burmese-Myanmar {pa.} is the last member of the voiceless aksharas
of column c1 of {wag.}-akshara: {ka. sa. ta. pa.}. These can
all be "killed" and made to form syllables:
1. {hk_k} /[khe']/ -- "difficult" MEDict059
2. {hk_s} /[khi']/ -- (see /[kis']/ "to pilfer" MEDict018)
3. {hk_t} /[kha']/ -- "to beat or strike" MEDict063
4. {hk_p} /[kha']/ -- "to spoon out" MEDict065
I have not put in the Romabama vowel for the present,
but have given the MLC transcriptions. If I had meant Romabama
to be a transcription, I would have followed the MLC lead,
and indicated the "ending sound" with
a [ʔ or ']. However, Romabama is a transliteration
following the orthography, and I would only have
to "indicate" the vowel with the inherent
vowel {a}, except in the extreme necessity in
the case of killed r2 consonants {sa. ña.} when I have
to give the vowel as {i}. Even then, for the killed {Ña.},
the vowel is given as {æ} to show that the pronunciation
of the rime is entirely different from {iñ}, {aN} or {an}.
My rational for this is to prevent a mis-pronunciation
when the diacritic becomes lost.
The Wikipedia article (ref 2) gives also:
"Burmese is a tonal language, which means
phonemic contrasts can be made on the basis of
the tone of a vowel. In Burmese, these contrasts
involve not only pitch, but also phonation,
intensity (loudness), duration, and vowel quality.
There are four contrastive tones in Burmese.
In the following table the tones are shown marked
on the vowel /a/ as an example; the phonetic descriptions
are from Wheatley (1987)."
Taking Wheatley's examples of tones:
• "Low" /kʰà/ 'shake'
• "High" /kʰá/ 'be bitter'
• "Creaky" /kʰa̰/ 'fee'
• "Checked" /kʰaʔ/ 'draw off' ,
I have derived that "creaky" is register #1;
"low" is register #2, "high" is register #3,
of the "free vowels". "Checked",
of course belongs the class of "checked vowels"
and they must be followed by a killed akshara
to form a rime.
I will have to take issue with the use of the words
"low" and "high", because
these two words are used for the height reached by
the tongue body in articulating the vowels.
In fact these four words have given me endless
trouble in pinning down what the linguists meant
in describing vowels of the Burmese language --
my ancestral language.
Go back
Romabama-vow-in-rime-b
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From: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAMPA download 070917
The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA)
is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit
printable ASCII characters, based on the IPA.
It
was originally developed in the late 1980s for six
European languages by the EEC ESPRIT information technology research
and development program. As many symbols as possible have been
taken over from the IPA; where this is not possible, other
signs that are available are used, e.g.
• [@] for schwa IPA [ə],
• [2] for the vowel sound found in French deux IPA [ø], and
• [9] for the vowel sound found in French neuf IPA [œ].
Today, officially, SAMPA has been developed for all
the sounds of the following languages:
• Arabic • Bulgarian • Cantonese • Czech • Danish • Dutch
• English • Estonian • French • German • Greek
• Hebrew • Hungarian • Italian • Norwegian
• Polish • Portuguese • Romanian • Russian
• Scots • Serbo-Croatian • Slovak • Spanish • Swedish
• Thai • Turkish
The characters ["s{mp@] /{hsing-pâ}/
represent the pronunciation of the name SAMPA in English.
Like IPA, SAMPA is usually enclosed in square brackets or
slashes, which are not part of the alphabet proper
and merely signify that it is phonetic as opposed to regular text.
SAMPA tables are valid only in the language
they were created for. The tables of languages
are not harmonised so there are conflicts between languages.
The result of this problem is that SAMPA cannot
be used as an ASCII representation of the general IPA alphabet.
To solve this problem X-SAMPA was created, which provides
one single table without language-specific differences.
SAMPA was devised as a hack to work around
the inability of text encodings to represent
IPA symbols. However, as Unicode support
for IPA symbols becomes more widespread, the necessity
for a separate, computer-readable system for representing
the IPA in ASCII decreases.
Go back SAMPA-wiki-b1 |
SAMPA-wiki-b2
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From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis 071223
In linguistics, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
(SWH) states that there is a systematic relationship
between the grammatical categories of the language
a person speaks and how that person both understands
the world and behaves in it. Although it has come
to be known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis,
it rather was an axiom underlying the work of linguist
and anthropologist
Edward
Sapir and his colleague and student
Benjamin Whorf. (UKT: Whorf was a chemical engineer by training.)
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From: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel 070923
Semivowels (also glides, more rarely:
semiconsonants) are non-syllabic vowels
that form diphthongs with syllabic vowels.
They may be contrasted with approximants,
which are similar to but closer than vowels or
semivowels and behave as consonants. Semivowels
are normally written by adding the IPA
non-syllabicity mark [ ̯ ]
to a vowel symbol, but often for simplicity the vowel symbol
alone is written.
UKT: The word "closer" in
the above passage is ambiguous and misleading.
Note the word immediately following it: "closer than",
and not "closer to". Here, "closer"
refers to the degree of constriction of the
air-flow.
To illustrate, the English word <wow>
may be transcribed as [waʊ̯]
(or abbreviated to [waʊ]). Even though both
the [w] and the [ʊ̯] are similar to
the vowel [u], the transcription [waʊ̯]
indicates that the initial segment is considered
to be a consonant by the transcriber, while the
final segment is considered to form a diphthong with the
preceding vowel. The approximant
[w]
is more constricted and therefore more consonant-like
than the semivowel [ʊ̯].
UKT: The word <wow> is a triphthong.
triphthong n. Linguistics 1. A compound
vowel sound resulting from the succession of three simple ones and functioning
as a unit, as (wou) in wow. [ tri- (di)phthong ] triph·thon
“gal adj. -- AHTD
Because they are so similar phonetically, the concepts
of semivowel and approximant are
often used interchangeably. In this conflated usage,
semivowels are defined as those approximants that
correspond phonetically to specific close vowels.
The semivowel is considered by some to be the same
as a vowel but the semivowel is very different.
Take "w" for instance, which is a
semivowel but not a vowel. These are
[ j ], corresponding to [ i ];
[w] for [u];
[ɥ] for [y]; and
[ɰ] for [ɯ].
(See approximant for details.) However,
languages such as Nepali, Romanian and Samoan
have additional semivowels such as
[e̯] and [o̯] that correspond to
mid vowels, and which other than being non-syllabic
are not at all like consonants.
Examples from English:
• eye [ɑɪ̯]
• cow [kaʊ̯]
Go back semivow-wiki-b
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From:
• Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_weight download 071112
• Search the Lexicon
http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Syllable+weight
Wikipedia:
In linguistics, syllable weight is the concept that syllables pattern
together according to the number and/or duration of segments in the rime.
In classical poetry, both Greek and Latin, distinctions of syllable weight were
fundamental to the
meter of the line.
UKT: Burmese speech can be interspersed with rhyming phrases when we say
the speech is
{na.Bé-htap}.
For explanation of {na.Bé} see MEDict221.
Syllable weight in linguistics
In linguistics, syllable weight is the concept that syllables pattern
together according to the number and/or duration of segments in the rime.
In classical poetry, both Greek and Latin, distinctions of syllable weight were
fundamental to the meter of the line.
A heavy syllable is a syllable with a branching nucleus or a branching
rime. A branching nucleus generally means the syllable has a long
vowel or a diphthong; this type of syllable is abbreviated CVV. A syllable
with a branching rime is a closed syllable, that is, one with a
coda (one or more consonants at the end of the syllable); this type of syllable
is abbreviated CVC. In some languages, both CVV and CVC syllables are heavy,
while a syllable with a short vowel as the nucleus and no coda (a CV syllable)
is a light syllable. In other languages, only CVV syllables are heavy,
while CVC and CV syllables are light. Some languages distinguish a third type,
CVVC syllables (with both a branching nucleus and a coda) and/or CVCC syllables
(with a coda consisting of two or more consonants) as superheavy syllables.
UKT: The Burmese-Myanmar vowel
{o} is derived orthographically from,
{i} and
{u}.
The derivation is described as {loän:ting-hkyaung:nging} made up of two parts
{loän:kri:ting} (MEDict458) and
{tis-hkyaung:nging} (MEDict181). It probably means that the inherent vowel is changed from {a} to {i}
and then {u} is "drawn". Does it mean that the syllable produced is of the type
CVV? I have to check it with my peers.
In moraic theory, heavy syllables are analyzed as containing two moras,
light syllables one, and superheavy syllables three.
The distinction between heavy and light syllables plays
an important role in the phonology of some languages,
especially with regards to the assignment of stress.
Search the Lexicon
PHONOLOGY: a property of syllables, referring to the quantity
or internal structure of syllables. Syllables can be divided into light and
heavy depending on language-specific requirements (in some languages also
superheavy syllables are distinguished). Initial consonants of syllables are
irrelevant to quantity. Depending on language-specific requirements there can be
an opposition between short and long vowels: V and VC group together as light as
opposed to VV which is heavy. Another distinction commonly found is that between
a short vowel (light) and VV/VC (heavy). Superheavy are VVC and VCC in languages
that distinguish light/heavy/superheavy. Syllable weight plays a determining
role in the distribution of stresses in Quantity-Sensitive stress systems
(see
Quantity-(in)sensitivity). Heavy syllables generally attract stress
regardless of their position in the word. Light syllables are stressed only
according to their position in the word.
There
are at least two approaches to formalizing the concept of syllable weight. In
theories of syllabic constituency the heavy/light distinction can be
characterized as branching vs. non-branching
nucleus
or rhyme. The other approach, moraic theory, assumes
moras.
The distinction light/heavy is made on the basis of mora count. Segments are
assigned one mora or two: light syllables are monomoraic and heavy syllables are
bimoraic. The two types of representation can be illustrated, for example, in a
language that makes a distinction between V (light) and VC/VV (heavy):
Go back
syllable-wt-note-b
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From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length -- download 070921
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration
of a vowel sound. Often the
chroneme,
or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may
etymologically be one such as in Australian English.
While not distinctive in most dialects of English,
vowel length is an important phonemic factor
in many other languages, for instance in Arabic, Czech,
Hindi, Sanskrit, Fijian, Finnish, Japanese,
Hawaiian, Hungarian, Classical Latin, Lombard, German,
Latvian, Old English, Samoan, Thai,
and Vietnamese. It plays a phonetic role in
the majority of English dialects, and is said to be
phonemic in a few dialects, such as Australian English
and New Zealand English. It also plays a lesser
phonetic role in Cantonese, which is exceptional
among the spoken variants of Chinese.
Most languages do not distinguish vowel length,
and for those that do, usually the only distinction
is between short vowels and long vowels.
There are very few languages that distinguish three
vowel lengths, for instance Mixe. Some languages,
such as Finnish, Estonian and Japanese, also have words
where long vowels are immediately followed by more vowels,
e.g. Japanese hōō "phoenix"
or Estonian jäääär "ice edge". ...
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End of TIL file.
