Applying Phonetics. Murray J. Munro

2.2 Speech Production Mechanisms

Airflow	Mechanism	Sound Type	Examples
Egressive	Pulmonic	Typical speech	All languages
Egressive	Glottalic	Ejective	Squamish (SW Canada)
Ingressive	Pulmonic	Ritual disguised speech	Swiss‐German fensterle and Hanunó'o courtship
Mixed	Glottalic/pulmonic	Implosive	Vietnamese
Ingressive	Velaric	Click	Sandawe (Tanzania)

Another production mechanism, called velaric , is used to generate CLICK sounds, which occur in the Khoisan languages and other languages of southern Africa. Clicks require ingressive airflow, achieved by “sucking” air into the oral cavity from outside. In more precise terms, the speaker reduces the air pressure in the vocal tract. Though clicks are not used linguistically in English, you already know how to produce a click at the lips with a kissing gesture that causes inward air movement. You may also be familiar with another click that is used non‐linguistically to urge a horse to move.

      One last unusual type of sound, called implosive, occurs in languages of Southeast Asia such as Vietnamese, as well as in parts of Africa and North America. Implosives entail a rapid lowering of the larynx, a gesture opposite to that used in ejectives. While this means that they have a glottalic INGRESSIVE component, there is a bit of a complication in that egressive air from the lungs is also involved. For this reason, they are considered to entail a “mixed” airstream.

      for further thought, analysis, and discussion

      1 Obtain an inexpensive dental mirror from a drugstore and explore the structures of your own oral cavity. View the alveolar ridge, hard and soft palate regions, and uvula by using it in conjunction with your bathroom mirror. If you are adventurous and don't have a strong gag reflex, you might also try using a long‐handled laryngeal mirror (available online) to view your vocal folds. Next, try using your phone to record videos of yourself producing a few words, phrases, and sentences. Watch the movements of your lips, tongue, and other articulators.

      2 Practice sketching the human vocal tract from memory, being sure to include the articulatory structures described in this chapter.

for further reading

      Though it was originally published over 50 years ago, Denes and Pinson's The Speech Chain continues to be one of the most popular and accessible descriptions of speech. It is available in hard copy and inexpensive electronic editions. See the List of Sources at the end of the book for publication details.

3 Sound, Spelling, and Phonetic Transcription

      As we observed in Chapter 1, not all languages have a written modality, but those that do use a host of different writing systems (ORTHOGRAPHY). These systems differ in what their symbols encode. English, along with many other languages of European origin, uses ALPHABETIC writing, in which letters roughly represent individual speech sounds. The word bat, for instance, is spelled with three letters, each standing for a different discrete sound. This is how our Roman alphabet works, as do the Greek, Cyrillic (for Russian and some other Slavic languages), and Hebrew systems. In another type of encoding, symbols stand for individual syllables, or for a combination of syllables and discrete sounds. Hangul (for Korean) and Devanagari (for Hindi) fit this category.

In contrast to systems that encode sound, Chinese writing, Japanese Kanji, and ancient Mayan script are examples of LOGOGRAPHIC systems, in which characters stand for entire words. Because a particular logograph has no fixed connection with sound, a single set of symbols can be used to write many different languages. However, readers of these languages have to learn the correct character for every word. Examples of different writing systems are given in Table 3.1.

3.1 why do speech specialists need a phonetic alphabet?

Phoneticians have long recognized the scientific necessity of distinguishing the sounds of words from their written representations. The acclaimed twentieth‐century phonetician Peter Ladefoged (2001) estimated that the world's languages have about 600 different CONSONANTS and 200 VOWELS. Each language draws a small subset from this larger pool. English, for instance, has roughly 35–38 PHONES in total, depending on dialect. That's not an especially large number; Ubykh, an extinct language of the Caucasus, had about twice as many (Colarusso, 2014). Nonetheless, the fact that our alphabet has only 26 letters means that it can't represent all the distinctions English speakers use. To maintain a clear difference between sound and spelling, speech research and technology rely extensively on systematic phonetic alphabets, the most famous of which is the INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET ( IPA ).

Table 3.1 Examples of Monkey in Different Writing Systems

Orthographic System	Language	Example Word (“Monkey”)	IPA
Roman	Spanish	mono	[ˈmono]
Cyrillic	Russian	обезьяна	[ɐbʲɪˈzʲjanə]
Hangul	Korean		[ˈwɘːnsʰuŋi]
Kanji	Japanese		[saɾɯ]

Figure 3.1 Examples of one‐to‐many (left) and many‐to‐one (right) spelling‐to‐sound correspondences

      Let's identify some of the reasons why phonetic alphabets are essential:

      1 They associate one unique symbol with each different sound used in spoken language.When analyzing pronunciation, one thing we certainly can't tolerate is ambiguity in the way we represent individual phones on the printed page or