6. Reviewing Chapter 7: Place and Manner of Articulation

 
     Again, the first place to go to review the material in chapter 7 of Ladefoged, Place and Manner of Articulation, is Ladefoged's own site:

http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/course/chapter7/chapter7.html

     Go through the various sound files here for the more unusual sounds, such as bilabial fricatives (Ewe), retroflexes (Malayalam, Polish), uvular stops (the upside-down 'y' is a palatal /l/), uvular fricatives (French), voiceless and voiced lateral fricatives, and velar laterals [L] (Zulu). Finally, you can hear, as with the previous chapter, sound files of the performance exercises.

      Here's a page by Professor Jennifer Smith of the University of North Carolina with examples of sounds covered in chapter 7 (most are from the Ladefoged site):

http://www.unc.edu/~jlsmith/ling120/lgsounds.html

     Lately, various Arabic words and names have been in the news. The 'q' used in English transliterations of Arabic is a voiceless uvular stop, just as you would expect, based on the IPA symbol. So now you know how to correctly pronounce burqa (the head-to-toe garment worn by Muslim women in Afghanistan; 'r' is trilled in Arabic) and al Qaeda ('the base').

     Here from the University of Victoria in Canada is a site with impressive videos and sound files of a pharyngeal stop, a voiceless pharyngeal trill, and a voiced pharyngeal trill. (There are lots of other interesting pages at this site to try out while you're at it!)

http://web.uvic.ca/ling/research/phonetics/jipa26.htm

   If you have time (don't do this right now if you're feeling information overload; you can come back to it later), there's a detailed PowerPoint presentation on lots of the sounds we're working on in this chapter. It includes several sound files from Arabic and other Semitic languages of the more unusual (from an English or Chinese speaker's point of view) sounds we've looked at:

http://ling.ucsd.edu/~rose/Semitic%20Languages/Phonetics.ppt

     For further examples of exotic sounds like the voiceless and voiced pharyngeal fricatives of Arabic, you can go to IPA Help. (Click here if you'd like to download it now.)

     A fun way to listen to real-life samples of just about any language imaginable is Internet radio. The BBC, for example, has a Pashto (one of the major languages of Afghanistan, closely related to Persian or Farsi) language service. And former phonetics student Sunny Che found the following site, My Language Exchange.com, which facilitates language exchanges over the Internet. This is potentially a good way to get firsthand information about a language you're interested in, fast:

http://www.mylanguageexchange.com



Next: Having trouble producing an alveolar trill? Go on to Trills again – and /r/

on to next page        back        index I       index II        home