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

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.

[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.

[snip]
> For Christophe:
>
> Peter Ladefoged has a pretty nice website:
> http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/ladefoge/ . There are links to
> the UCLA Phonetics Archive which contains some basic information on
> acoustic phonetics. You should also look at
> http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lsp/Phonetics/Acoustics/formantvalues.html ;
> this describes how to extract formant values for vowels (and sonorants)
> for the speech analysis package Praat. This package is free; Google for
> it and take a look.
Thanks - it may be for Christophe, but I'll be taking a peek also   :)

Ray
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