Re: Rhotics (was: Pharingials, /l/ vs. /r/ in Southeast Asia)

On Monday, February 9, 2004, at 11:26  PM, Ray Brown wrote:

> On Monday, February 9, 2004, at 06:00 PM, Dirk Elzinga wrote:
>
>> On Saturday, February 7, 2004, at 11:05  AM, Ray Brown wrote:
> [snip]
>
>>> I'm sure I'm not the only one on this list who is not au_fait with
>>> these
>>> terms 'lowered second formant' and 'lowered third format'. Could you
>>> please explain.
>>
>> Okay, I'll try. Any body of air (such as that enclosed by a bottle or
>> the mouth) will vibrate in a way which depends on its size and shape.
> [snip - I think I followed this]
>
>> called the first formant and the higher one is the second formant. For
>> English vowels, the first formant varies from about 250 Hz to 700 Hz;
>> the second formant can vary from about 2900 Hz to 2200 Hz. There are
>> formant bands above these two, but they become decreasingly important
>> to speech perception. Rhoticity is defined as a lowering of the
>> frequency of the third formant band.
>
> But this seems to be to do with _vowels_.  In this context I would
> assume
> the
> lowering of the frequency of the 3rd formant band is a mark of
> r-colored
> or rhotic
> vowels as in standard American and some southern British & some Scots
> dialects.
Yes, but consonants will affect adjacent vowels. In fact, the only
acoustic cues a listener gets for place of stop closure is the effects
of the onset and release on the adjacent vowels.

>
> [snip]
>>> protestations
>>> that it is not vague.  If it's not vague, then by definition it can
>>> be
>>> defined.
>>
>> As I understand it, rhoticity is marked only by a lowered third
>> formant.
>
> Right - but what I'm not clear about is whether this definition applies
> also to the
> various _consonants_ that for diachronic reasons have been grouped as
> 'rhotics'.
>
> I never had any problem with the vowels, tho maybe I wouldn't have
> defined
> them as
> neatly as 'lowered third formant'. It's the variety of different
> consonants produced
> variously with the front of the tongue or the uvular that I have the
> problem with seeing
> any connexion between them all other than, as I've said, their common
> diachronic origin.
Consonants will have an effect on adjacent vowels; if that effect is to
lower the third formant, then the consonant itself can be taken to be
rhotic as well (or to have rhotic properties; retroflex consonants also
lower the third formant of adjacent vowels). Also, spectrograms of
sonorants show clear formant bands, so you could look directly at them
to see if the third formant is low.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"I believe that phonology is superior to music. It is more variable and
its pecuniary possibilities are far greater." - Erik Satie