Sounds intriguing! An introduction to phonology

[Music] Hello, and welcome to the second episode of the Linguistics HKY Podcast. I'm Dr Rebecca Mitchell, and today I'm going to talk you through an introduction to sound systems, otherwise known as phonology. The reason I'm starting with phonology is because in any spoken language, as opposed to a signed language, speech sounds are the smallest meaningful units of communication. There are central building blocks of the language, plus if you skip sounds, then you miss out on quite a few concepts that you're going to need to know about later on. For example, when talking about things like social linguistic variation, or how we know how people really spoke in Shakespeare's time. The first thing we need to do really is to distinguish between types of sound. Sounds are around us all the time, and if you strain your ears, you might be able to hear my neighbour's son trying to play the Harry Potter theme tune on his trumpet. Not all sounds, however, are meaningful in speech, and in linguistic sounds which are meaningful, like the three which make up the word ten to e, na, or call phonemes. Actually, the ancient Greek philosopher Christopus caught on to this idea more than 2000 years ago, when he identified so-called "right-able" and "non-right-able" sounds. In linguistics, the study of sounds overall is phonetics, which looks really at how the human body produces and processes sounds, and then phonology, on the other hand, looks more at how those sounds are organised in a specific language to make up words. Now, not all languages have the same phonemes. For example, Arabic has a "b" phonem, but not a native "p" and Hawaiian doesn't have "sert" or "g". Different languages also have vastly different numbers of phonemes. British English, for example, which I speak, has 44, while, say, Spanish has only 24, but then there's a language called "ta" spoken in Botswana and Namibia that's got 158 phonemes, so that's 158 distinct speech sounds, with which you can make words. Then at the other extreme, you've got rotokas from Papua New Guinea, which has got 11, so it varies enormously from one language to another. I'm not going to cover all the possible phonemes in all the world's languages, because there are hundreds and we'd be here all day, but I am going to talk about how some of the more common ones are produced. Please don't take it personally if your favourite phonem doesn't get a mention today. Okay, now this is going to be quite a practical session, so I hope you're ready. A phonem can have slightly different pronunciations depending on where it is in a word, although most of the time we don't notice it. If we take, for example, the words "leaf" and "feel". If you say those words to yourself now, you might notice that the "L" isn't quite the same in both words. We've got "feel" in which your tongue curls back a little more on the "L" sound, and we call that a "dark L" feel. Then we've got "leaf" where your tongue appears to be a little further forward in your mouth, and we call that a "clear L", and those two are those two different versions of a phonem are called "aliphones". So they're both the type of "L" sound, a "le", but they're a little bit different because of where they are in the word. Another example is the "per" in "pot" and "spot". If you hold your hand in front of your mouth and say those words one after the other, you'll feel a slightly stronger puff of air with the "p" with the "per" in "pot" than in "spot". This is because a "per" isn't as strongly aspirated when it comes after a "sir". It doesn't have that strong puff of air. When we get to slightly different pronunciation variants like this, we say they're in complementary distribution. That is the context where they use a specific and don't overlap. We don't, for example, say "leaf" with a "dark L", which would sound like "aliph". Different languages, however, tolerate different sound patterns or combinations. So while you wouldn't find a "dark L" at the beginning of a word in British English, you wouldn't port your keys, for example. You also wouldn't find a word like "spot" in Spanish because there are no native words in Spanish, beginning with "sir" and a consonant, and quite often Spanish learners of English, when confronted with a word like "spot", tend to put what we call an epithetic "e", at the beginning, so that it sounds a bit more like "a spot", because that's a phonological rule that they've carried over from their own language. When we have two words which differ only in one phoneme, such as, for example, "cog" and "log", we refer to them as "mineral pairs", and a minimal pair test is used, for example, by linguists, trying to document and describe a lesson in language, to find out if the speaks of the language perceive the two sounds as being the same phoneme or two different ones. Mineral pairs aren't just found in spoken languages, but in sign languages as well, which I'll cover in another episode. Now there are a number of languages I can think of, where the word for language is the same as the word for tongue. We've got "all" in portuguese, did you hear the "dark L" there, by the way? And "zaban" in Persian. And that's often the body part that we most associate with "speed", but in fact, there are some sounds like "muh", which don't use the tongue at all. And also an awful lot more goes on behind the scenes when we're speaking than we realise, unlike with pretty much all linguistic phenomena, it's just instinctive and we don't really think twice about it. So speech really begins very deep down in your body with the diaphragm, which is a thin sheet of muscle under the lungs, which helps you breathe in and out, and we need it for other things like childbirth and going to the toilet and whatnot. And the air from your lungs then passes up to the larynx, sometimes known as the voice box, which is where sound is produced. The larynx contains muscular bands, which are often referred to as vocal chords, but they're not really chords, they're more like a system of folds over which the air passes. If you put your fingers on your throat under your chin and swallow, then you can feel your larynx move up slightly, and that's the location where sound comes from. You also feel it vibrate if you make a sound like "uh" the specific phonemes that you produce depend on how the airflow from your lungs is processed as it passes through your throat and mouth. For example, does it pop out suddenly from your lips like when you say "per" or does it hiss out between your lip and teeth if you say "fer" we'll look at those in a bit more detail in a minute. The vocal tract is really quite complex and it goes all the way from the diaphragm up to the nasal cavity. If you pronounce a phonem like then the sound is partly produced in your nasal cavity. Not all languages use the same parts of the vocal tract when they produce sounds and that often affects people's perception of a particular language. English speakers often describe languages like Arabic for example as being through to your guttural languages and that's because they have certain sounds which are produced at the root of the tongue which is a long way down your throat relatively speaking and you can't see it if you look in at the back of your throat in a mirror. As English speakers we don't have equivalence of those sounds so they tend to be the sounds which are hardest to articulate for English speakers learning languages like Arabic or Somali. Also when we're learning a foreign language we do just find it hard to articulate certain sounds in that language but we often find it difficult to distinguish certain sounds from each other at all. I'm thinking for example of types of "duh" in Hindi types of "d" which are pronounced with the tongue in different positions. There's a dental "duh" and a retroflex "duh" where the tongue sort of curls backwards but for a non-initiate saying English speaking learner it's very hard to tell them apart let alone actually reproduce them. Rather annoyingly there was actually a time in the first year or so of our lives when all of us were able to distinguish far more sounds than we can now. Babies have a tremendous ability to recognize all kinds of different sounds who numerous different languages but unfortunately after the first year of life or so that kind of tails off and then we become very attuned to the phonological system of our parents' language or whichever language we hear around us the most. Anyway let's just explore consonants a bit more. There's a lot more to them that meets the eye in fact and when we describe a consonant we think deeply about where it's produced, how it's produced and whether it's voiced or not. A voice phonem comes about when the vocal folds vibrate. If you put your finger and thumb on either side of your foot and say "s" and then "s" and then "s" and then "s" and then "s" you should be able to hear your throat vibrates slightly on the "s" and the "s" and that's because they're voiced phonemes. By the way all vowels are voiced and if you try to say any vowel without your throat vibrating you won't be able to make any sound at all. Have a go and for an extra challenge see if you can say "few" and "view" while breathing in. Can you voice the "veh"? I'd be interested to know. You probably can't. Speaking while breathing in is called "ingressive speech" and it's fairly uncommon but it is found in certain languages including Finnish. Let's have a think now about some of the ways in which we can produce consonants. It's basically all to do with the airflow. Stopps or plosives happen when the air is stopped or explodes from your mouth like with "peh" or "peh". If you try saying those two with your hand in front of your mouth you should feel a puff of air especially with "peh". Frickatives involve friction as you can probably guess like with the sound "peh" and "chuh" is what's called an "affricate" as it starts off as a stop and then the air is released to make the sound. Africates are effectively a mixture of a plusive and a fricative. "meh" and "neh" are nasal so when you say them you can feel a vibration somewhere between the back of your nose and the roof of your mouth. "la" is what's known as a lateral "ol" because the air escapes literally along the sides of your tongue when you say it. I hope you're all trying these at home by the way. And then we have approximants which is where the tongue gets close to the roof of the mouth but doesn't actually touch it. The southern British English receive pronunciation "ar" between two vowels or at the beginning of a word as a good example like in the word "sorry" but in many languages an "ar" is a "trill" "r" or a "tap" "r" which and that's found in Italian, Russian, Tagalog and many other languages. We've also got a "yuvilla" "ar" which is found in in French for example and German actually. Now where we produce a consonant also matters. We've got bilabial consonants for example and they involve both lips like "buh" "libio dental consonants" involve the lip and teeth like "fuh" and interdental consonant involves the tongue and teeth as in "fuh" and if you put your tongue behind your top teeth you can feel a bony ridge which is the alveolar ridge and anything involving that part of the mouth is an alveolar consonant. Technically the "tuh" in British English is an alveolar sound but going back to alaphones again is not always necessarily a pure alveolar sound. It depends on the other phonemes and the word around it and the speed of delivery. For example if you were to pronounce the word eighth the "tuh" would appear to be a lot further forward in your mouth that's because your mouth is getting ready to pronounce the next sound which is an interdental "thuh" sometimes for example in the word "button" the "tuh" is glottalized that means that sounds if it's being swallowed towards the back of the mouth. I might say "button" if I'm speaking very slowly and deliberately or "button" if I'm speaking at a more normal pace and you can hear in the second rendition of "button" that the "t" appears to have been swallowed a little. Palitals involve the main body of the tongue coming into contact with the roof of the mouth, the hard palate. A well-known example of a palatal is the "nye" sound in Spanish which is written with the "n" with the tilde over it like in the weather phenomenon El Niña. We can also mention Vila consonants like "ke" or "ng" which are pronounced towards the back of our mouths and then in British English we've got only one so-called glottal sound that's pronounced in the throat which is "her" "h". I've already mentioned that many languages use the throat much more than this. I'm thinking of Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew or Cuchitic languages such as Somalian, Eroma for example. These languages have "yuvila" and "ferindal" sounds. "ferindal" sounds a bit as if you're trying to say "ge" and "her" at the same time. Sort of like "geh" have a "go" and "yuvila" consonants are ones I've alluded to the French "re" sound is a particularly well-known one. Some of the most niche speech sounds in the world are the so-called "click" consonants and the "koi" sound languages in southern Africa are most famous for these. 60% of the consonants in "koi-koi" are "clicks" and the sound language has 45 clicks. They're pretty unusual because they're what's called non-pulmonic consonants so that means that their sounds whose airflow doesn't depend on the lungs essentially. Next time you hear someone making a disapproving "tut" sound, you can inform them that they're doing a dental click, although obviously that might annoy them even more. The dental click is also used in isolation and a number of cultures to say "no" such as in Malta, where instead of actually using the word for "no" a speaker might instead tilt their head back and make a dental click. Another click sound that most of us familiar with is a lateral click. A bit like the sound you make typically when you're riding a horse and the click sort of escapes along the sides of your tongue. A highlight of a linguistics conference I once attended in Botswana was a man reciting a poem in one of the local languages which was a click language and the range of sounds was absolutely extraordinary from clicking, squeaking and cracking sounds to hollow and nasal ones and even ones which sound like a cork popping out of a bottle. Now almost all languages of the world have fewer vowels and they have consonants and anyone who's listened to European Portuguese could be forgiven for thinking had no vowels at all. That's what I thought when I first heard it before I started learning it and in that case it's because vowels and unstressed syllables tend to be drastically reduced. For a while in academic circles there were various claims that the cabardian language of the corks has had no vowels at all but that turned out to be a red herring. Anyway according to linguists in the ancient world although fewer in number than consonants vowels are pretty important as they were the minimum unit of speech which could be free standing and which could form a meaningful syllable or even a word on its own. And if you think about it that's true. We've got the pronoun 'I' and we've got the interjections 'O' and 'R'. Vowels are particularly important for learners of foreign languages as well because they're often the hardest part of a foreign accent to get right and much more likely than consonants to give you away as a non-native speaker. We can identify various kinds of vowels such as monopthongs, single vowels such as in bed or diphthongs, two vowels in the same syllable such as mine where the sound starts off as 'R' and changes to 'E' mine. We've also got long and short vowels which in some languages like Finnish change the meaning of the word. For example 'Tuli' means 'fire' and 'Tuli' means 'wind'. Interestingly some languages also have double consonants or 'demonet' consonants which affect the meaning like the minimal per 'palla', 'shuffle' and 'palla' 'ball' in Italian. Anyway back to vowels as well as oral vowels we've also got nasal vowels which occur in many languages including Bengali and French with words like more and 'va'. We classify vowels based on the position of our tongue when we make the sound. By that I mean is it further towards the front or the back of the mouth and according to that classification we can identify front, back and central vowels. Also is the tongue high up or low down so we've got high low and mid vowels. We also bear in mind whether our lips are rounded or not. One vowel which is easy to describe is 'ar'. In the unlikely event that you're able to get a doctor's appointment about your sore throat, cynical English person speaking here they might tell you to make the sound in order to see the back of your foot clearly. 'ar' is a low back unrounded vowel in which your mouth is open, your tongue is pulled down low and towards the back of your mouth. Have a go. At the opposite end of the skill we have 'e' which has a high front unrounded vowel. When you pronounce it you can almost feel the front of your tongue touching the roof of your mouth just behind your front teeth. If you remember the alveolar ridge from earlier on. Interestingly in some languages proper names with high front vowels often suggest something small or cute. If you search online for something like names for small pets you'll likely find suggestions such as pixie, cookie and toffee. Some linguists have even researched the notion that many girls names in English have high front vowels such as Ellie, Emily or Lizzie. By comparison of course with traditional boys names such as Mark, Sam or John with lower back vowels clearly intended to convey an air of gravitas. Interestingly the most common vowel in British English which also occurs widely in French, Germanic languages and some of Tunisian languages is a mid-central vowel known as schwa which sounds a bit like 'a'. It's the ultimate shapeshift taking the form of a variety of letters in unstressed syllables ranging from 'e' in problem to 'a' in banana and 'o-u-g-h' of all things in thorough. Another very interesting aspect of phonology is tone. We're very outtune a voice in different sentence types without really thinking too much about it such as whether we're stating a fact or asking a question but speakers of certain languages vary their tone within individual words as well. Tonal languages are found in parts of Africa and East Asia and each syllable of a word has a particular tone and changing the tones can change the meaning of the word creating menol pairs. For example in chi and a kan language in Ghana if you say papa with a low followed by high tone it means father while papa with two high tones means good papa papa. Chi has only three tones high mid and low but others have many more such as Vietnamese with six. We've also got pitch accent languages such as Swedish where typically only one syllable is distinctive and the other syllables are neutral. Unlike in tonal languages where all the syllables have some kind of tonal values a specific tone and overall in pitch accent languages there's much less contrast with tonal languages and if a learner for example were to get the pitch wrong it wouldn't affect the meaning of the word. No discussion of phonology would be complete without mentioning whistling languages which I believe I promised you in the trailer to this series. According to UNESCO which has designated two whistling languages as intangible cultural heritage this phenomenon is found in more than 80 cultures around the world from the Canary Islands to Brazil. Whistling languages have arisen particularly in mountainous or densely wooded locations where there was a need to communicate in a way that would carry over a greater distance than an ordinary voice and in fact they carry about ten times further. A number of vowel and consonant phonemes can be conveyed by different tongue movements and changes of pitch and frequency by the whistlers who are essentially whistling the words of their everyday language. Whistling is of interest to linguists for many reasons not least because it may shed light on how spoken human language first evolved in terms of our developing and ability to control our vocal tract for communicative purposes. Anyway that just about wraps up today's quick introduction to phonology and I hope you've enjoyed it. When I was planning to write a book on linguistics for young people which I think I mentioned in the introduction to this series the first chapter that I wrote which was going to be the sample chapter sent to a publisher was about phonology and someone said to me at the time oh do you really think it's a good idea to start with that I mean isn't it a bit dry and a bit difficult to understand won't it put readers off? It seems to be a commonly held belief that sound systems are inherently dull I don't know why I personally find them very interesting so maybe I've taken a huge gamble here by having episode two of my podcast about phonology but the purpose of my podcast is to inform people about linguistics and I think not discussing sounds is a bit like teaching someone to learn to drive and saying to them oh just ignore those pedals down there we won't worry about those they're just boring and they'll put you off. I also don't think there's any concept in linguistics which is too difficult to understand providing it's explained effectively and I hope I've explained everything here effectively enough for you today. Anyway we'll revisit many of these concepts in future installments and in the meantime have you ever heard a word so long that you thought it must be a whole sentence well in some languages it is and more to Indonesian Hawaiian and baby talk all have in common and where to design a dog's coming to all this and where to design a dog's coming all this and more will be revealed in the next episode in which we'll look at word creation in an introduction to morphology. See you there!