Episode 6 sees Eric and Phil dissecting the final pair of stop/plosive sounds in English: /k/ and /ɡ/. As always, we work our way around the task of describing the sounds, their history, and usage in the course of about an hour and 10 minutes.

Show Notes:

Correction: Phil referred to "Findlay" as derived from Finn's Lea, but it turns out that it's from Gaelic, and that means Fionnlagh – "fair warrior." Bradley would have been a much better example: Brad=broad and Lea=meadow.

voiceless/voiced velar plosive: co-articulation, double action of closing the mouth with the back of the tongue at the soft palate, and closing off the nasal passage by lifting the soft palate at the velo-pharyngeal port.

Let’s take a tour of the anatomy. This will help us to deal with the idea that /t/ is apico alveolar but /k/ is dorsovelar

The Roof of the Mouth

Tectal: an adjective derived from the anatomical term "tectum," a roof-like structure.

Labia/labial: the lips; bilabial with both lips, labio-dental with lower lip and upper teeth, as in /f/ and /v/. (For people with an extreme overbite, one might make a dento-labial sound (upper lip and lower teeth.)

Dental: the teeth (as heard in the “th” sounds, /θ/ & /ð/ )

Alveolar ridge/alveolar: the gum ridge, behind the upper front teeth

Palate/palatal: the hard palate, rising up behind the alveolar ridge. Phil describes a small hole in his palate; Eric, in searching the net for information on this, could only find stuff about "Jacobsen's Organ" aka Vomeronasal organ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomeronasal_organ, an auxiliary olfactory sense organ; it's thoroughly debatable whether it exists in humans at all. Who knows what Phil has? (apparently, he hasn't had any of this since college days...)

Velum/velar: the soft palate, behind the hard palate

Uvula/uvular: the "small grape"-like structure that hangs down from the arch of the soft palate

Pharynx/pharyngeal: the column or space behind the tongue, the "chimney" that goes from the larynx up to the nose

Epiglottis/epiglottal: the flap-like value that protects the larynx during swallowing

Glottis/glottal: the vocal folds (technically the SPACE between the vocal folds, which disappears every time the vocal folds vibrate

Ari-Epiglottal/ False Vocal Folds: [there was some debate between Phil and Eric how Dudley Do-Right sounded, and whether it was ari-epiglottal tension or velar tension...

The Parts of the Tongue

Tip or Apex/apical: front edge of the tongue, the 'rim' of the tongue

Blade or Lamina/laminal: the front part of the tongue, the top surface

Back or Dorsum/dorsal: the back of the tongue, which is subdivided into:

    Front, Middle, Back, or, Front and Back —antero-dorsal or postero-dorsal

   

Root or Radix/radical: the root of the tongue

/k/ and /ɡ/ are different from other plosives because it is made on the back of the tongue, which works in a more gross manner

can be made further forward /ki/ or further back /kɑ/.

Challenge of learning /k/ and /ɡ/ for children because they are made further back in the mouth

The McGurk Effect

Experiment: Can you identify Phil's 3 sounds?

World Atlas of Language Structures: http://wals.info/

WALS shows 2,650 languages and notes 32 missing / ɡ /

Languages that are missing /ɡ/ but not /k/

From Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_plosive ] "Of the six plosives that would be expected from the most common pattern world-wide—that is, three places of articulation plus voicing ([p b, t d, k ɡ])—[p] and [ɡ] are the most frequently missing, being absent in about 10% of languages that otherwise have this pattern.[...] It seems that [ɡ] is somewhat more difficult to articulate than the other basic plosives.

"Ian Maddieson speculates that this may be due to a physical difficulty in voicing velars: Voicing requires that air flow into the mouth cavity, and the relatively small space allowed by the position of velar consonants means that it will fill up with air quickly, making voicing difficult to maintain in [ɡ] for as long as it is in [d] or [b]."

HISTORY OF THE LETTERS:

In Greek the symbol of the K (Kappa) turned the "right way" (the way it is in our writing), prior to this it was facing the other direction. Gamma was brought into Latin to represent the C. C had a line added to it to indicate the voiced version, G.

SPELLINGS:

k          “key, keep, koala, kangaroo”  “mask, make, pink, walk”

c          “cat, cost, cut” (contrast “cease, ace, ,macerate ”)  Hard/soft

cc         “accuse, stucco”                   

ck        “pick, stock”

ch        “charisma, Christ, choir, ache”

Shakespeare's "Petruchio" probably should be [pəʼtɹu.tʃo] not [pəʼtɹu.ki.oʊ]

g          “game, gate, bag, agony”  (contrast “gem, badge,magical ”)  Hard/soft

gg        “egg, dagger”

gh        “ghost, ghetto”          (contrast “night, ought”)

gu        “guide, guest, guerrilla”  foreign origin

ckg      blackguard

x          “examine, exhaust”

Note that "x" can be /ks/ or /gz/ depending on the word, e.g. /ks/ "excellent" , /gz/ "exist".

Soft G is the affricate /dʒ/, while Soft C is /s/.

PHONETIC NOTATION: represented by lower case k and ɡ

IPA symbol for /ɡ/ is the "single-story" version of the g lowercase with an open tail, rather than a looptail.

VARIATIONS:

Not a lot of variations:  mostly to do with voice onset time

Variation: final /k/ becoming fricative in Liverpool

week [wiç], like [laiç],  back [bax], dock [dɒχ]

John Maidment, commenting on JC Wells' blog post on "VOT is more":

"One might also like to add that VOT is sensitive to place of articulation. Other things being equal, the VOT of posterior articulations, velar and uvular, are considerably longer, at least for native English speakers, than articulations further forward in the vocal tract. A typical VOT for stressed syllable initial [k] in English is in the region of 120ms, while that for an equivalent [p]is only 60-70ms. I am pretty sure that this difference is an important secondary cue for the perception of place in voiceless plosives and one which, as far as I know, has not been properly investigated."

Non-English Stop plosives

Palatalized stops (often heard in Russian, [tʲ] [dʲ] vs. Palatal stop [c] or [ɟ]

Uvular stop, as in Arabic pronunciation of Qatar or Iraq [q].

Though it's unlikely that a character will do a sound substitution on stop-plosives, however, characters might speak foreign language work, or say words within the text, such as place names or character names.

Original Pronunciation: David Crystal is the leading proponent of this type of pronunciation, especially at the Globe Shakespeare Company in London. http://www.davidcrystal.com/DC_articles/Shakespeare11.pdf