Pronunciation of "cat"
Bob Cunningham
I've been trying to become more aware of where my tongue is for
certain vowel pronunciations, and my efforts may have been rewarded by
an interesting discovery: The phoneme /&/ that I've been using for the
"a" in "cat" doesn't appear to fit my pronunciation. When I say "cat"
my tongue looks to be much higher than when I say /kAt/. The
representation /k&t/ indicates that the "a" in "cat" is, in EK's
notation, low front, while /A/ is low back.
As I go through the sequence "cat", "ket", "kate", "kit", "keet",
my tongue does appear to get progressively higher, but I suspect that
the phonemes shown in Kirshenbaum's "fnt unr" column are spread out in
tongue height more than mine. Mine seem to be compressed into a range
that starts with a higher tongue position on the low end.
When I try to pronounce a vowel that I would call "low front", I
have difficulty doing so, but to the extent I succeed I get a vowel that
I don't have a name for.
I realize that the positions occupied by symbols in the vowel table
represent phonemes (at least, that's what it says in _The Linguistics
Encyclopedia_), so that a vowel could be slightly higher than /&/ and
still be in the same phoneme. However, the extent to which my tongue
appears higher when I say "cat" seems enough to crowd it into the next
phoneme position or higher.
This makes me question whether the "a" in my "cat" is really an
allophone of the same phoneme as the one that includes the allophone
used by a British RP speaker in pronouncing "cat". That RP speaker
might think I'm almost saying "kett" when I say "cat", and his "cat"
might sound to me similar to /kAt/ ("kaht"), but with the vowel farther
forward. (Come to think of it, "kaht" with the vowel pushed farther
forward and the tongue kept low does indeed describe the position of /&/
in the vowel table.)
Is this compression of the front vowels into a narrower range of
tongue positions something that is known to phoneticians as occurring in
some dialects?
(I should say that I realize the table from Kirshenbaum's Web page
is misleading in one respect: Rather than being a rectangle it should
be more nearly a triangle shape that's truncated at the bottom. That
is, while it is correct for the "bck" column to be vertical, the vowels
at the lefthand edge should move progressively somewhat farther back in
going from /i/ to /&/. This can be seen by comparing Kirshenbaum's
vowel table with the ones shown on page 159 on _The Cambridge
Encyclopedia of Language_ and in various other places. For example, the
truncated triangle shape is show in _Random House Webster's College
Dictionary_, _The Random House Dictionary of the English Language Second
Edition Unabridged_, and Kirsten Malmkjær's _The Linguistics
Encyclopedia_.)
For reference, following is Kirshenbaum's vowel table, followed by
a key to the tongue-position symbols, all cut and pasted from his 1993
file:
----- unr ----- unr ----- rnd -----
fnt cnt bck cnt fnt cnt bck
rzd
hgh i i" u- y u" u
smh I I. U
umd e @<umd> o- R<umd> Y o
mid @ R @.
lmd E V" V W O" O
low & a A &. a. A.
hgh high
smh semi-high
umd upper-mid
mid mid
lmd lower-mid
low low
Richard M. Alderson III
It occurs to me that I don't know what part of the US Bob Cunningham is from.
Based on his reported pronunciation of "cat", I would guess that he is from
north of the Mason-Dixon line, probably from the Midwest.
Let me refer readers of this thread back to John Lawler's description of the
chain shift taking place in the vowel system in parts of the US.
--
Rich Alderson You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
what not.
--J. R. R. Tolkien,
alde...@netcom.com _The Notion Club Papers_
Bill Fisher
In article <32047e96...@nntp.ix.netcom.com>, exw...@ix.netcom.com (Bob Cunningham) writes:
>
> I've been trying to become more aware of where my tongue is for
> certain vowel pronunciations, and my efforts may have been rewarded by
> an interesting discovery: The phoneme /&/ that I've been using for the
> "a" in "cat" doesn't appear to fit my pronunciation. When I say "cat"
> my tongue looks to be much higher than when I say /kAt/. The
> representation /k&t/ indicates that the "a" in "cat" is, in EK's
> notation, low front, while /A/ is low back.
>
in both cases. For [A], it's the relative height of the back of
the tongue that's important, and it's height relative to other back
vowels that's important for [A], not relative to all vowels.
> As I go through the sequence "cat", "ket", "kate", "kit", "keet",
> my tongue does appear to get progressively higher, but I suspect that
> the phonemes shown in Kirshenbaum's "fnt unr" column are spread out in
> tongue height more than mine. Mine seem to be compressed into a range
> that starts with a higher tongue position on the low end.
For phonemics, the absolute height doesn't make much difference; it's
only relative height that counts. For phonetics, most people who
study the nitty-gritty go to acoustic phonetics and talk of formant
locations, probably because they're much easier to measure.
>
> When I try to pronounce a vowel that I would call "low front", I
> have difficulty doing so, but to the extent I succeed I get a vowel that
> I don't have a name for.
Remember, it's only relative - a low front vowel only needs to be
decidedly lower than the front vowel on top of it. And vowels across
all languages tend to occupy "quantal" locations in vowel space rather
than be spread uniformly. Ken Stevens at MIT, I believe, should get the
credit for realizing (and computing) that for these popular quantal
locations, the amount of difference in sound you get per small movement
of the tongue is relatively small -- so they're sort of stable, compared
to other positions of the tongue where a small movement makes a big
difference. My guess is your *really* low front vowel is one of these
unpopular unstable positions that languages seem to dis-prefer.
>
> I realize that the positions occupied by symbols in the vowel table
> represent phonemes (at least, that's what it says in _The Linguistics
> Encyclopedia_), so that a vowel could be slightly higher than /&/ and
> still be in the same phoneme. However, the extent to which my tongue
> appears higher when I say "cat" seems enough to crowd it into the next
> phoneme position or higher.
>
Another thing -- it's really the sound that counts, not the tongue
position. If your "cattle" and "kettle" sound distinct -- that is,
if a listener could tell which one you intended --, then your
/&/ phoneme has not moved into the phonetic range of your /E/ phoneme.
> This makes me question whether the "a" in my "cat" is really an
> allophone of the same phoneme as the one that includes the allophone
> used by a British RP speaker in pronouncing "cat". That RP speaker
> might think I'm almost saying "kett" when I say "cat", and his "cat"
> might sound to me similar to /kAt/ ("kaht"), but with the vowel farther
> forward. (Come to think of it, "kaht" with the vowel pushed farther
> forward and the tongue kept low does indeed describe the position of /&/
> in the vowel table.)
You shouldn't talk about a single phoneme that has allophones in
two different dialects, like yours and British RP. A phoneme is
really only defined for an idiolect, and by a slight extension,
to a single dialect. There have been some attempts to define
pan-dialect phonemes, such as C.-J. Bailey's, but I think they're
not very successful or useful.
It would probably be alright if you talked of "phones" instead
of "allophones". "Phones" implies no particular phonemic analysis,
whereas "allophone" is a relative term, like "cousin" -- whenever
you say "allophone", there's always an implicit or explicit "... of
the phoneme X".
Niceties aside, I wouldn't be surprised if one of your phones that
is an allophone of phoneme A for you would sound to a Britisher like
an allophone of his phoneme B. I've had things like that happen
to me, just within dialects of American English. I heard someone
from a Northern city talk about a "benk" once, and wondered what the
Hell that was, until the light of context dawned and I realized he
was talking about a bank.
>
> Is this compression of the front vowels into a narrower range of
> tongue positions something that is known to phoneticians as occurring in
> some dialects?
>
I don't remember seeing anything like that in the literature, but
remember: you're assuming the other person's tongue position from a
tabular chart of phonemic (or gross phonetic) classificatory variables,
not phonetic millimeter measurements, so there may not in fact be
such a compression.
> (I should say that I realize the table from Kirshenbaum's Web page
> is misleading in one respect: Rather than being a rectangle it should
> be more nearly a triangle shape that's truncated at the bottom. That
> is, while it is correct for the "bck" column to be vertical, the vowels
> at the lefthand edge should move progressively somewhat farther back in
> going from /i/ to /&/. This can be seen by comparing Kirshenbaum's
> vowel table with the ones shown on page 159 on _The Cambridge
> Encyclopedia of Language_ and in various other places. For example, the
> truncated triangle shape is show in _Random House Webster's College
> Dictionary_, _The Random House Dictionary of the English Language Second
> Edition Unabridged_, and Kirsten Malmkjær's _The Linguistics
> Encyclopedia_.)
>
You may be giving too much weight to accurate phonetics. Charts
like Kirshenbaum's are meant to show gross categories of phones,
not fine phonetic detail.
> For reference, following is Kirshenbaum's vowel table, followed by
> a key to the tongue-position symbols, all cut and pasted from his 1993
> file:
>
> ----- unr ----- unr ----- rnd -----
> fnt cnt bck cnt fnt cnt bck
> rzd
> hgh i i" u- y u" u
> smh I I. U
> umd e @<umd> o- R<umd> Y o
> mid @ R @.
> lmd E V" V W O" O
> low & a A &. a. A.
>
> hgh high
> smh semi-high
> umd upper-mid
> mid mid
> lmd lower-mid
> low low
>
Yeah, I know it can be confusing.
- billf
Matthew Rabuzzi
Bob Cunningham <exw...@ix.netcom.com> writes:
: I've been trying to become more aware of where my tongue is for certain vowel
..................................................................
A camouflaged chameleon drinking chamomile tea among the camellias
Matthew Rabuzzi