The Sounds of the World's Languages


Book Description

This book describes all the known ways in which the sounds of the world's languages differ. Encapsulating the work of two leading figures in the field, it will be a standard work of reference for researchers in phonetics, linguistics and speech science for many years to come. The scope of the book is truly global, with data drawn from nearly 400 languages, many of them investigated at first hand by the authors.




Vowels and Consonants


Book Description

This popular and accessible introduction to phonetics has been fully updated for its third edition, and now includes an accompanying website with sound files, and expanded coverage of topics such as speech technology. Describes how languages use a variety of different sounds, many of them quite unlike any that occur in well-known languages Written by the late Peter Ladefoged, one of the world's leading phoneticians, with updates by renowned forensic linguist, Sandra Ferrari Disner Includes numerous revisions to the discussion of speech technology and additional updates throughout the book Explores the acoustic, articulatory, and perceptual components of speech, demonstrates speech synthesis, and explains how speech recognition systems work Supported by an accompanying website at www.vowelsandconsonants3e.com featuring additional data and recordings of the sounds of a wide variety of languages, to reinforce learning and bring the descriptions to life




The Sounds of Language


Book Description

Phonetics is the scientific study of sounds used in language- how the sounds are produced, how they are transferred from the speaker to the hearer and how they are heard and perceived. The Sounds of Language provides an accessible, general introduction to phonetics with a special emphasis on English. Focusing on the phonetics of English, the first section allows students to get an overall view of the subject. Two standard accents of English are presented- RP (Received Pronunciation), the standard accent of England, and GA (General American), the standard accent throughout much of North America. The discussion is arranged so that students can read only the RP or GA portions, if desired. Sixteen additional accents of English spoken around the world are also covered to provide students with wider international coverage. The author then moves on to introduce acoustics phonetics in an accessible manner for those without a science background. The last section of the book provides a detailed discussion of all aspects of speech with extensive examples from languages around the world. Containing student-friendly features such as extensive exercises for practising the sounds covered in each chapter; a glossary of technical terms; instructions on how to write phonetic symbols; the latest International Phonetic Alphabet chart and a detailed list of English consonantal variants, The Sounds of Language provides an excellent introduction to phonetics to students of linguistics and speech pathology and students of English as a second language.




The Sounds of Language


Book Description

The Sounds of Language is an introductory guide to the linguistic study of speech sounds, which provides uniquely balanced coverage of both phonology and phonetics. Features exercises and problem sets, as well as supporting online resources at www.wiley.com/go/zsiga, including additional discussion questions and exercises, as well as links to further resources such as sound files, video files, and useful websites Creates opportunities for students to practice data analysis and hypothesis testing Integrates data on sociolinguistic variation, first language acquisition, and second language learning Explores diverse topics ranging from the practical, such as how to make good digital recordings, make a palatogram, solve a phoneme/allophone problem, or read a spectrogram; to the theoretical, including the role of markedness in linguistic theory, the necessity of abstraction, features and formal notation, issues in speech perception as distinct from hearing, and modelling sociolinguistic and other variations Organized specifically to fit the needs of undergraduate students of phonetics and phonology, and is structured in a way which enables instructors to use the text both for a single semester phonetics and phonology course or for a two-course sequence




Language Conflict and Language Rights


Book Description

As the colonial hegemony of empire fades around the world, the role of language in ethnic conflict has become increasingly topical, as have issues concerning the right of speakers to choose and use their preferred language(s). Such rights are often asserted and defended in response to their being violated. The importance of understanding these events and issues, and their relationship to individual, ethnic, and national identity, is central to research and debate in a range of fields outside of, as well as within, linguistics. This book provides a clearly written introduction for linguists and non-specialists alike, presenting basic facts about the role of language in the formation of identity and the preservation of culture. It articulates and explores categories of conflict and language rights abuses through detailed presentation of illustrative case studies, and distills from these key cross-linguistic and cross-cultural generalizations.




Exploring Linguistic Science


Book Description

Introduces students to the scientific study of language, using the basic principles of complexity theory.




The Phonology of Italian


Book Description

This book provides an overview of the phonology of Italian. It covers the different levels of analysis from individual sounds up to the phrasal level. It focuses on the most widely dispersed features of the language reflecting its significant regional and social variation and its most prominent regionally restricted patterns.Martin Krämer provides a critical survey of the generative literature on Italian phonology. He reports on current debates in the field, considers their particular and general theoretical interest, and provides both syntheses and original analyses. His accounts of the main aspects and characteristics of Italian phonology are couched in the framework of Optimality Theory, but he keeps formal aspects and theory-internal matters to a minimum and separate from the presentation and descriptionof the data. His exposition is thus fully accessible to students and researchers who are not familiar with or do not subscribe to the tenets of the theory. Individual chapters may thus serve as starting points for in-depth investigations into particular aspects of Italian phonology in whatever frameworkthe reader chooses to employ.The Phonology of Italian is the first fully comprehensive account of its subject for many years. It will interest scholars and advanced students of Italian, Romance phonology, and phonology as a system.




Comprehensive Articulatory Phonetics


Book Description

Comprehensive Articulatory Phonetics teaches how to recognize, record, and reproduce the sounds of any language.Phonetics is the study of sounds. Specifically, it is the study of human speech sounds. A person who only speaks one language may not realize that there are hundreds of different consonants and vowels spoken by humans in different parts of the world. This book will introduce the reader to almost every sound spoken by man.Since the English alphabet is inadequate to represent every speech sound known to man, the reader will be taught the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This is a special alphabet containing numerous symbols that represent sounds for all languages. Charts are included in the back of this book that list many of the symbols used in the IPA. Some IPA symbols will look quite familiar, but others are from foreign languages or were invented specially for the IPA. Learning these symbols and their corresponding sounds is the foundation to accurately learning the sound system of a language.The reader should also be aware of the fact that not all linguists follow the IPA conventions. Though this book generally follows the standard IPA, alternative symbols and notations will be explained throughout the text.This book is intended for speakers of American English because many of the sounds are compared to the English language. Speakers of other dialects or languages may need to adjust their pronunciation accordingly.Table of Contents:Lesson 1: Introduction to SoundsLesson 2: Fricatives and VoicingLesson 3: Pitch VariationsLesson 4: Stops and Voice Onset TimeLesson 5: Facial DiagramsLesson 6: Progressive Pitch ControlLesson 7: Aspiration and Glottal StopsLesson 8: Advanced IntonationLesson 9: AffricatesLesson 10: Introduction to VowelsLesson 11: Characteristics of SyllablesLesson 12: Vowel GlidesLesson 13: Fronting, Retroflexion, and SibilantsLesson 14: Back VowelsLesson 15: NasalsLesson 16: Front VowelsLesson 17: LateralsLesson 18: Open Vowels and LengthLesson 19: Flaps and TrillsLesson 20: Central Vowels and ApproximantsLesson 21: Alveopalatal StopsLesson 22: Vowel and Glide ClustersLesson 23: Palatal and Uvular ConsonantsLesson 24: Nasalized VowelsLesson 25: Double Articulations and PrenasalizationLesson 26: Front Rounded and Back Unrounded VowelsLesson 27: Transition and ReleaseLesson 28: States of the GlottisLesson 29: ImplosivesLesson 30: Breathy Consonants and Consonant ClustersLesson 31: EjectivesLesson 32: Tongue Root PlacementLesson 33: Secondary ArticulationsLesson 34: Fortis and Lenis ArticulationLesson 35: ClicksLesson 36: Speech StylesAppendix




Patterns of Sounds


Book Description

Patterns of Sounds describes the frequency and distributional patterns of the phonemic sounds in a large and representative sample of the world's languages. The results are based on UPSID (the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database), a computer file containing the phonemes of 317 languages selected on the basis of genetic diversity. The book contains nine chapters analysing the UPSID data, as well as fully labelled phoneme charts for each language and a comprehensive segment index. Questions of the frequency and co-occurrence of the particular segment types are discussed in detail and possible explanations for the patterns observed are evaluated. The book is thus both a report on the research into phoneme inventory structure that has been done using UPSID and a resource that provides the reader with the tools to extend that research.




The Phonology of Norwegian


Book Description

A the end of the fourteenth century, Norway, having previously been an independent kingdom, became by conquest a province of Denmark and remained so for three centuries. In1814, as part of the fall-out from the Napoleonic wars, the country became a largely independent nation within the monarchy of Sweden. By this time, however, Danish had become the language of government, commerce, and education, as well as of the middle and upper classes. Nationalistic Norwegians sought to reestablish native identity by creating and promulgating a new language based partly on rural dialects and partly on Old Norse. The upper and middle classes sought to retain a form of Norwegian close to Danish that would be intelligible to themselves and to their neighbours in Sweden and Denmark. The controversy has gone on ever since. One result is that the standard dictionaries of Norwegian ignore pronunciation, for no version can be counted as 'received'. Another is that there has been considerable variety and change in Norwe