Re: Schwa and [V]: Learning the IPA

Taliesin wrote:
> * Mark J. Reed said on 2006-06-13 16:15:02 +0200
> /snip tale of discovery and woe/
> > Ultimately, what I'd like to do is learn the IPA sounds in a reliable
> > manner.  Listening to sound files just doesn't work for me; I want to
> > know how to produce them reliably.  Any tips?  Any chance of finding
> > someone who can do it and studying at their feet?
>
> If you have time for a class at university/college, look for
> "Introduction to phonetics"-classes or "Introduction to articulatory
> phonetics"-classes, or classes for speech therapists.
>
> Then be prepared to practice, a lot, preferrably somewhere noone else
> can hear you exercise muscles and floppy bits in your mouth and throat
> that you didn't know existed. Do check that you learn more than just
> "how to soundwrite English" though, and having a teacher that had a
> teacher that had a teacher that... had IIRC Daniel Jones as a teacher of
> the vowels. Any student of Peter Ladefoged will do :)
>
That's it exactly. No other way, sorry.
Dealing with spectrograms/formants etc. etc. is an art/science in itself.
Even if you contrast your own gram with a theoretically "correct" one, you
are still unlikely to know what to do to make yours look like the correct
one.
The advantage of a real live teacher is that he/she will likely be able to
say, "try thus-and-so to get your vowel to match the norm".
Or, just listen very carefully and repeat and repeat and repeat...
Actually it's quite fun.

Someday soon I really must take a break from accursed Gwr sound change
rules-- go out to my shed where a lot of books are still (after 15 years) in
boxes, and find the xeroxed text that we used in 1965. It has some good
charts, some however outdated. It was the work of June Shoup, a Ph.D out of
Ladefoged (who was also in residence at that particular Linguistic Summer
Institute at U.Mich). She was hoping to publish it after a few more
run-throughs, but unfortunately she died soon thereafter, and publication
never happened.

Ladefoged was held in awe even in those days-- he was one of the few people
willing to stick electrodes into the mouth or tongue to determine which
muscles were involved, etc. There was also an ancient movie with high-speed
(500 frames per min. or somesuch) pictures of the vocal cords in action--
done with an arrangement of little mirrors and powerful lights-- which, it
was said, could burn the vocal cords if one wasn't careful. And X-ray movies
of the tongue in action (coated with barium for visibility)-- a thoroughly
nasty procedure.

UM also boasted a very early speech synthesizer-- it was just a bit smaller
than today's Mini-Cooper :-))

How times have changed.