phonoloblog | all things phonology | camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog

This looks fun. No fair giving it away if you already know. Submit your transcriptions as comments (or, if you can’t stand phonetic transcription in html, submit your transcription as a PDF file to phonoloblog at gmail dot com and I’ll post it).

[Update: the answer.]

Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman discusses an article in the October 2004 issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America by Pierrehumbert, Bent, Munson, Bradlow and Bailey, entitled “The Influence of Sexual Orientation on Vowel Production”. It seems that if gmail doesn’t out you, your vowels might …

(Note: Hunting down the URLs for each of the authors definitely turned out to be worth it.)

Update: Bill Poser continues the discussion of “phonetic gaydar” on Language Log.

Henry Davis told me on Friday night about something very interesting. In Lillooet, there is a distinction between velars and uvulars. This distinction is very robust; Henry says it carries a “high functional load”. Speakers consequently reliably distinguish and identify them in speech.

When writing, on the other hand, Henry claims that some consistently get this robust distinction right, as I think we’d all expect: they use velar symbols for velars and uvular symbols for uvulars. But others tend to mix them up: uvular symbols are, unpredictably, sometimes used to represent velars and vice-versa. So Henry asks me: why should that be?

Honestly, I don’t know. But here is the guess I ventured.

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This might be a better example of that cart-before-the-horse analogy.

[Via LINGUIST List.]

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In a post on Language Log yesterday, Mark Liberman linked to this audio clip of John Kerry from the second presidential debate. Mark writes:

There’s [...] an extra schwa between [p] and [l] in paraplegic and quadraplegic, similar to the extra schwa in Bush’s much-discussed “nucular” pronunciation of nuclear.

When it comes to matters phonological, we here at phonoloblog take such claims like “phono-fact x is similar to phono-fact y” seriously. Perhaps too seriously. In any event, what you are about to read (should you choose to do so) is not at all serious in the all-important sense of “well researched”, but it is serious in the lesser sense of “I’m actually interested in this, but I hope someone who knows more about this than I do will pick it up and run with it.” We’ll see how things turn out.

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A few days ago, I briefly noted a handful of very useful online linguistic resources, and suggested that we should do more to advertise and comment on resources like these.

A reader writes to mention Introduction to Segmental Phonology, a very cool website “designed to help students of segmental phonology understand and identify phonological segments and their distinctive features.”

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A while ago, there were several posts on Language Log about the IPA being used in contexts other than linguistics (opera singing, music schools, ads in Germany and Japan, etc.). Here in Vancouver (where I’m spending my sabbatical), I found two more examples, both in Chinatown.

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Note to self, or others: we need a post or two about cool online linguistic resources like this.)