Structure in language: sounds

1
Structure in language sounds

• The Language Detective
• Villiers Park
• 9-13 July 2007

2
Sounds and spellings

• What different sounds are represented by the
  letter shape ltfgt in English?
• f in for v in of
• What letter(s) can be used to represent the sound
  /f/ in English?
• ltfgt in for ltffgt in off ltghgt in cough ltphgt in
  phone
• How would you spell the following nonsense words?

3
Transcription activity

• What rules did you apply?
• Where there exceptions to those rules?
• How much variation is there across the group?
• What kinds of generalisations can we make about
  this?

4
Historical note

• In OE, f and v were allophones of the same
  phoneme
• Whats an allophone? Whats a phoneme?
• OE feoll fell ofer over lufian to love
  cræft skill wulf wolf wulfas wolves
• f and v differ only in terms of voicing
• Whats voicing?
• Other voiceless/voiced pairs s and z p
  and b t and d

5
Some Welsh borrowings from English

• actif 'active ffigur 'figure ffocws 'focus
  lefel 'level proffesiwn 'profession tancer
  'tanker cic 'kick'
• What observations can you make about the
  relationship between sound and spelling of
  certain consonants in Welsh, based on the data
  above?
• What are the phoneme correspondences for these
  Welsh letters?
• Is there a general difference between the
  spelling of borrowed words in Welsh and in
  English?
• Which language is likely to have more regular
  correspondences? Why do you think that might be?

6
Welsh pronunciation

• Guess how the following Welsh names are
  pronounced (NB ltchgt /x/) and transcribe them
• Fforest Fach
• Ffestiniog
• Cefn
• Caernarfon

7
Some facts about Welsh

• Welsh is one of the Celtic languages, spoken in
  Wales, and a small colony in Patagonia (in the
  Chubut province of Argentina)
• Related to Breton and Cornish as a P-Celtic
  language
• Establishment of Brittonic area after the series
  of invasions in the 4th - 6th centuries
• Act of Union 1536 and language planning
• no Welsh monoglot speakers were able to hold
  public office

8
1536 Act of Union

• English as language of the courts monolingual
  Welsh speakers could no longer hold public
  office.
• Many areas of Wales were inhabited by speakers
  who only spoke Welsh this meant that there was a
  significant need for people to work as
  interpreters and translators, in order to
  facilitate the operation of government
• This is an example of language planning the
  English government wanted an administrative team
  in Wales who would be emblematic of the new
  regime (partly political, partly concerned with
  projecting or enforcing an identity, partly
  practical)
• Increasing numbers of Welshmen wanted to learn
  English, which became an H language in the
  diglossic community.
• Its associations with working class, non-mobile
  speakers served to develop and reinforce
  stereotypes about the language and its speakers.

9
Transparent orthography

• Compared to English, Welsh orthography is more
  transparent the phoneme-grapheme correspondences
  are more regular
• This has led researchers to investigate whether
  it is easier to learn to read in Welsh than it is
  in English (the answer is yes!)

10
Variation in English indefinite articles

• What is the rule that operates to determine
  whether or not a or an is selected as the
  indefinite article in English?
• Data set pear, apple, orange, school, youth,
  uncle, hotel, university, yard, rope, almond,
  euro
• Sort the set into two (those that take a and
  those that take an)
• Is the rule based on letters or sounds?

11
Sets and the rule

• Those that take a
• Pear, school, youth, university, yard, rope, euro
• Those that take an apple, orange, uncle, almond.
• Where does hotel fit?
• Rule is select a before a (spoken) consonant
  select an before a (spoken) vowel

12
Historical note

• OE had no indefinite articles as such (sense of
  indefinites was expressed by just a bare noun)
  articles arose from OE an one
• an cyning one (unique) king
• Some reanalyses
• OE nædre snake gt ModE adder
• OE ekename also-name gt ModE nickname

13
How do we study sounds?

• Consonant vs. vowel phonetic properties
• Phonology as the study of an abstract system of
  sounds (importance of establishing a set of
  contrasts that can give rise to words of
  different meanings bit vs pit vs lit vs writ
  etc.)
• Phonotactics and the constraints of combinations

14
Phonotactic constraints

• Do you have an r sound in the following words
  if so, where in the word does the sound appear?
• Hope, rope, poor, farm, cat, roar, nurse, square,
  north, force, sport, short, arrive
• All speakers of English have an /r/ in the onset
  of a syllable (rope, roar, arrive)
• Only some have an /r/ in the syllable rhyme
  (poor, farm, roar, nurse, square, north, force,
  sport, short)

15
Does a word have to contain a vowel?

• Spoken vs. written language
• Is ltygt a consonant or a vowel?
• What sounds are represented by ltygt - consider
  fly, youth, rugby, hay

16
Some non-English data Czech and Welsh

• Why might the following words look odd to
  monolingual English speakers?
• Czech trg 'market', vlk 'wolf', strc prst skrv
  krk stick the finger through the throat
• http//members.chello.sk/ceplo/strc.mp3
• Welsh cwm 'valley', cwt 'tail', bwlch 'gap',
  winc 'wink', wns 'ounce'

17
Syllabic consonants

• Some consonants form the sonority peak of a
  syllable
• Most sonority peaks are vowels
• Not all consonants can function as peaks
• Letter shapes that are used to represent spoken
  consonants in one language may be used to
  represent vowels in another
• Some speakers of English have syllabic consonants
  in words like button, bottom and little

18
Why structure matters

• To make generalizations about a language or
  Language, we need to refer to structures (like
  syllables) so we can talk about constraints (i.e.
  what is possible and what is not possible)
• This issue about structure is important at lots
  of levels of the grammar (e.g. in terms of word
  structure and clause structure)
• Some aspects of structure hold true across
  languages, some are specific to particular
  language