This document provides an overview of phonetics and phonetic transcription. It discusses the main subfields of phonetics, including articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, and perceptual phonetics. It also outlines the articulatory apparatus and assumptions made in phonetic transcription. The document then describes the consonants and vowels of English, including their phonetic symbols and points of articulation. It introduces the concept of the sonority hierarchy and provides a phonetic chart showing English vowels based on formant frequencies.

1. John Goldsmith
Consonants and vowels

2. Kinds of phonetics
• Transcribing: descriptive phonetics?
transcriptional phonetics? No standard name.
• Articulatory phonetics
• Acoustic phonetics
• Perceptual phonetics (Psychology)
• Computational phonetics (CS)

3. Articulatory apparatus

5. Some (not so happy) assumptions
generally made to do transcriptions
• There is a (1-dimensional) sequence of units that
define or characterize the utterance – rather than 2
or more parallel streams. We think of the
articulators as being a single instrument rather
than as an orchestra.
• We can slice the utterances into pieces vertically,
in time, and ignore most differences in duration.
• Sounds follow one another, and that’s it: there is no
packing of them into groups.

6. Sounds of English
Consonants: first, the stops: When we need to emphasize
that we are using a phonetic
• b as in bat, sob, cubby transcription, we put square
brackets [b] around the symbols.
• d as in date, hid, ado
• g as in gas, lag, ragged
• p as in pet, tap, repeat
• t as in tap, pet, attack
• k as in king, pick, picking

7. More consonants: fricatives
• f as in fail, life
• v as in veil, live
• Ɵ as in thin, wrath
• ð as in this, bathe
• s as in soft, miss
• z as in zoo, as
• š (American) or ʃ (IPA) as in shame, mash
• ž (American) or ǯ (IPA)as in triage, garage, azure,
• h as in help, vehicular

8. affricates
• č (American) or tʃ (IPA) as in cheap, hatch
• ǰ (American) or ʤ (IPA) as in jump, hedge

9. nasal consonants
• m as in map, him
• n as in knot, tin (alveolar POA)
• ñ as in canyon
• ŋ as in sing, gingham, dinghy

10. Liquids
• l as in large, gull
• r as in red, jar

11. glides and semi-consonants
• y (American) or j (IPA) as in boy, yellow
• w as in wall, cow

12. Sub-Classification of Consonants
• 6 stops
• 2 affricates
• 9 fricatives
• 4 nasals
• 2 liquids
• 2 glides

13. Short vowels
Front: ǝ “schwa” as in about
I as in bit
Ɛ as in bet
æ as in bat
Back
as in put
ʌ as in putt
 as in bought
a or ɑ as in Mott, ma, spot

14. Long vowels
• iy or i as in beet
• ey or ej as in bait
• ay as in bite
• oy as in boy
• uw or u as in boot
• ow as in boat
• aw as how

15. Review where we’ve been
• We’ve listened to the sounds of “our” English,
and assigned a set of symbols to them.
• We abstracted away from pitch, loudness, and
duration.
• We hope to better understanding our
language’s sounds by analyzing them as being
composed of a sequence of identifiable
sounds, each of which occurs frequently in
words of the language.

16. • Frequently? If a sound occurs in just 2 or 3
words, we don’t take it seriously (glottal stop,
velar fricative)
• We do this against the background knowledge
that the inventory of sounds in English is not
necessary as human languages go: they are
what they are against a much wider backdrop
of possible linguistic sounds.

17. • We also attempt to physically characterize
these sounds: acoustically and articulatorily.
Consonants are easier to characterize
articulatorily, vowels acoustically.
• We are particularly interested in those ways
in which the English of Speaker 1 is different
from the English of Speaker 2: again, working
against the background knowledge of
variation.

18. • We also characterize differences of sounds
across sound contexts: we say, notice the
different sound that occurs in front of a
voiceless consonant in height.
• Looking ahead to phonology, we will attempt
to get a handle on variation in sounds in two
ways:
– Two sounds are similar if (roughly) we can
characterize one of them as a variant of the other
used in a particular context (“under the influence
of that context,” so to speak)
– Two sounds are distinct (hence, different) if two
distinct words differ only with regard to these
two sounds, in otherwise identical positions

19. • We try to characterize the inventory of
sounds in a language, knowing that that
language chose one set of sounds when a vast
range of other possibilities might have been
chosen.

20. Symbols
• We assign symbols to these sounds; in
addition, we want to characterize them as
best we can articulatorily and acoustically.
Sounds can be divided into two major
groups, consonants and vowels; or set
along a continuum known as the sonority
hierarchy:

21. Sonority hierarchy
• Vowels
• Glides
• Liquids
• Nasals
• Obstruents:
– Fricatives
– Affricates
– Stops

22. Consonants
• Consonants = obstruents + sonorants
– Obstruents: (oral) stops, affricates, and
fricatives
– Sonorants: nasals and liquids (l,r)

23. Consonants have a point of
articulation
The crucial points of articulation for English
consonants are:
• Labial
• Labio-dental
• Dental
• Alveolar: at the alveolar ridge, behind the teeth
• Post-alveolar/palato-alveolar/alveopalatal:
multiple names for the same thing
• Retroflex (r only)
• Palatal (y, ñ)
• Velar
• Laryngeal

24. Obstruents:
• 6 stops
• 9 fricatives
• 2 affricates
• Nasals (4)
• 2 other sonorants (what are they?)
• 2 glides

26. Vowels
• Vowels are harder to characterize
articulatorily, but we try!
• The fact that it’s harder is reflected in the
fact that there is more than one way in
which it’s done. IPA is one way; American
is another.

27. IPA

28. Two systems side by side

29. A phonetic chart based on the first
two formants

30. From: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/music/vocres.html

31. /i/ green
/ae/ hat
/u/ boot
graphics thanks to
Kevin Russell, Univ of Manitoba

32. “Hi” /haj/
we were away a year ago FORMANTS