Re: OT: YAEPT: English low vowels (was briefly: Re: Y/N variants (< OT: English a...

On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 18:39:43 -0500, ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...> wrote:

>Paul Roser wrote:
>> >> >> ROGER MILLS wrote:
>>>I know. My phonetics course was a long time ago, in Summer of 1964,
>>>taught by (I'm sure) a disciple of Ladefoged, who was also in residence
>>>that summer. In addition to her text (Xeroxed, due to be published, but it
>>>never happened, as she died shortly thereafter), (snips)
>
>>>(These special symols had a heavy dot on on the end of the upper curve of
>>>[a] and reversed-c.)
>>
>>Those symbols sound like two of the additions included in Gordon Peterson &
>>June Shoup's proposed physiological- and auditory-based phonetics, published
>>in the 1966 Journal of Speech and Hearing. It's actually quite well thought
>>out, though some of their ideas have been superceded by recent phonetic
>>research (such as the work of Esling, Edmondson & Harris on states of the
>>glottis, voice quality & pharyngeal-laryngeal articulation). Peterson
>>& Shoup's phonetic chart incorporated vowels and consonants into one chart,
>>with pharyngeals and glottals below vowels.
>>
>Well well!! that would be exactly it, or certainly a version of it. I'm
>ashamed to say I was unaware it had been published, though I wonder if the
>journal article is a shortened version-- Ms. Shoup's text was a HUGE volume,
>which I still have packed away somewhere. (She was my teacher-- the TAs
>however were English-speaking UM grad students, and while they seemed
>proficient, it's possible some of the finer details didn't make it through
>their/our L1 filters :-) )
It was published as three articles totalling about 115 pp. There is the
general chart but not many examples to elucidate how some of the numerous
diacritics ought to be used, or examples to illustrate the assignments of
some of the vowels.

In the acoustic section they took the consonants and stops (in two separate
table) and paired them with the laryngeal states and then indicated their
acoustic qualities. Theone laryngeal state that always puzzled me was what
they called 'phonoaspirated' since it could occur with breathy voice (which
I initially took it to represent) but plain 'aspirated' could also co-occur
with breathy voice. That and a lack of lateral fricative symbols are the
only real issues I had with it, but if it was still in process, that might
have been fixed had they had more time.

If you ever dig it out the original text I'd be interested to hear more
about it. I came across the original article when I was an undergrad, if
memory serves, and I  looked it up again when it was referenced in the early
90s when the IPA was considering revising the alphabet (I was in favor of a
schema that would have combined aspects of Petersen & Shoup's work with J.
C. Catford's article on the articulatory possibility of man, feeling that a
phonetic alphabet should be able to account for any potential sound, not
just the ones that have lready been cataloged).

--Bfowol