Talk:Allophone

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This is what you use to order natural healing ointment for home delivery (compare francophone. -- N. Utt

Does the deliverer travel the allopath? -phma

And do you sign the receipt with an allograph...? thefamouseccles

Contents 1 Allophony/Sandhi 2 Voiceless b 3 'Night Rate' vs. Nitrate 4 A good example for allophones is comparing English to French! 5 ˈnaɪˌtʃɹeɪtˀ 6 Allophones in Hawaiian 7 Why not cut to a short dictionary-like article 8 deleted paragraph 9 Examples of the different allophonic processes.

[edit] Allophony/Sandhi

What is the difference between allophony and sandhi rules? 89.243.249.181 (talk) 21:17, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

It's a good question, but since most phonology really can't account for most phonological variability--it certainly can't with just the concept of allophony--I doubt anyone will address this at the likes of a wiki article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.213.105.150 (talk) 07:15, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Voiceless b

It is not quite true that Pinyin b, d, g are pronounced like unaspirated p, t, k. In the southern dialects of German (spoken in Austria, Switzerland, Bavaria and the like), b/d/g have become voiceless -- but, except in eastern Austria (like Vienna), unaspirated p/t/k (called "hard consonants") and voiceless b/d/g (called "soft consonants") stay two different sets of phonemes! You can trust me on this. I'm a native speaker. :-) The difference is that b, d, g are shorter and less intense than p, t, k. Pinyin b, d, g sound exactly like I pronounce German b, d, g (I learn Chinese).

This kind of sound also seems to occur at the beginning of Korean words, and apparently in Mongolian and Navajo.

David Marjanović david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at 2005/8/6

My understanding of this is that actually the southern German dialects probably have /b/ as [p] and /p/ as [pp] i.e. they use a simple consonant for the soft voiceless unaspirated stops, and a geminate consonant for the hard voiclesess unaspirated stops. — Felix the Cassowary 05:03, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

That is not true. The most important difference is air pressure, intensity if you will. The easiest way to increase the air pressure of a stop is to prolong the hold, so the fortes are indeed normally longer than the lenes, but this also depends on other things like the surrounding sounds and the speed of speech. As an example, I hear the first word in this list of Lakhota audio samples as containing a long (IPA half-long?) voiceless [b]. It's not a [p].

Do you have Skype? :-)

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 23:30 CEST | 2006/4/8

Since [b] is the "Voiced bilabial plosive", I don't understand what "voiceless b" could possibly mean.—Nat Krause^(Talk!) 04:07, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

[b] is the voiced bilabial plosive, but /b/ has a range of phonetic difference as well as allophony. In French, it is an implosive [^mb] and in English it is somewhat devoiced (although not completely).

Much of this discussion is doomed to the same old problem--you are categorically confusing articulation/production with perception. A lot of the differences in initial consonants are really about voice onset timing. It isn't that an initial [p] of English 'pill' does not voice, it voices well later than the initial [b] of 'bill'. Some languages are characterized by voicing of so-called 'voiced' initial consonants before the consonant is articulated--this, for example, marks a Spanish or Italian accent in English. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.213.105.150 (talk) 07:10, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] 'Night Rate' vs. Nitrate

I removed the comment about English speakers being able to hear the difference between t and its allophone ght as it is patently absurd. An English speaker can hear the difference between 'night rate' and 'ni-trate' because they are pronounced differently.

Isn't that precisely what it said before you removed it?—Nat Krause^(Talk!) 04:04, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, that removal didn't make sense. But to avoid confusion we might put some IPA. Nitrate is [ˈnaɪˌtʃɹeɪtˀ] and night rate is [naɪtˀ.ɹeɪtˀ]. I think... Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 04:26, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Pharyngealisation? -Iopq 09:51, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Glottalization. <ˤ> denotes pharyngealization. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 17:10, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

It might be clearer for the example if we transcribe nitrate as [ˈnaɪˌtʰɹeɪtˀ], which is also a valid pronunciation, and perhaps more common in well-enunciated speech.—Nat Krause^(Talk!) 19:02, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, I would remove the aspiration marker and make the r voiceless like this: [ˈnaɪˌtɹ̥eɪtˀ]. It's just simple spreading of voicelessness. Maybe that would be confusing. Is there another good example set? Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 19:20, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

I think "nitrate" sounds totally wrong without either aspiration or a ʃ. Possibly both.—Nat Krause^(Talk!) 19:55, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

The voiceless r is due to the aspiration. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 22:18, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A good example for allophones is comparing English to French!

This article is still a bit of a stub ... Well, let's compare the words coffee (en) and café (fr). The French pronunciation sounds fairly like "guff-fay" because the c is NEVER aspirated in French. That's a 100% rule, and will distinguish a good foreign French speaker from a bad one. One less common language where you find this is Finnish: kaappi means cupboard, and the k is always very smooth in sound, because it's never aspirated either. Also listen how F1 pilots' names like Räikkönen are pronounced in Kimi's home country. The k never sounds hard. -andy 80.129.87.32 16:30, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

That's not allophony, that's phonetic realization. So English and French both have /k/ but in English it is [kʰ] (in that position) while in French it is [k].Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 21:17, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

The point about the free variation form of allophony is not just that sounds show variations, but that these variations bear a relationship to one another within the overriding homogeny of a language community. It is not helpful to use the same terminology across language boundaries. Of course you could say that that is arbitrary, since we do do it across dialect boundaries, and linguistics has never been able to define the difference between separate dialects and separate languages. But nevertheless, we don't do it. --Doric Loon 10:32, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Phonetic variation and allophony are clearly related. All those people trying to describe a phonology in terms of allophones simply give up due to the inadequacy of the tool and ignore far too much variation that might be explained better by a more comprehensive model of articulation and perception of language. Voice onset timing analysis might prove more illuminating in the case of initial [k] in French, English, etc. Why, for example, do English speakers hear a [g] when the foreign speaker of English might think they are making a [k]? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.213.105.150 (talk) 07:34, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm a native speaker of Midwestern American English who has been observing native French for 40 years, and I have never perceived the phonetic realization of French /k/ as [g], nor have I ever witnessed a situation in which another anglophone has. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.134.21.253 (talk) 14:24, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] ˈnaɪˌtʃɹeɪtˀ

Is that the correct pronunciation of nitrate? Is that ʃ supposed to be there? Jon Harald Søby 17:47, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Yeah. Many speakers affricate and retract /t/ before /r/. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 18:36, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

As in "train", "tree", and "try"? Any references on where these "many" speakers live? Or could we change the IPA to reflect some other dialect than a non-standard one (since /t/ -> /tʃ/ before /r/ is certainly not standard). Tesseran 22:59, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't have any references but my understanding is that it's largely idiolectal. That is, there isn't a region per se where people speak it. I'm not sure how un-standard it is since speakers generally can't even tell the difference even if you point it out to them (at least in my experience).

We could always say "for some speakers" to clarify the matter for people. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 01:53, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm more incredulous than anything else ... am I understanding the sounds involved correctly? Stepping away from IPA because maybe that's the problem, you're saying that for some people, the word "tree" begins with the first sound of the word "chair"? And that they're not aware of this? That just really surprises me. Can you pin down e.g. AmE vs. BrE vs. AusE?

In regard to the article, the problem (as I see it) is that the example of night rate vs. nitrate works better for speakers who don't have this /t/ -> /tʃ/ shift. For that reason, I think a transcription without would be better. (Also, any phenomenon that is idiolectal [idiolectical?] seems like a bad candidate for mention, no matter how widespread.) However, if I'm missing something, and this shift is necessary for nitrate to be an example, then I withdraw the suggestion. Tesseran 09:11, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

(By the way, what I find surprising is not that some speakers might affricate /t/ in this one context, which seems quite possible, but that it would be part of a larger shift. I'm partially surprised just that I've never heard of such a phenomenon.) Tesseran 09:21, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, you're understanding it correctly. I think I see your point and I can agree that it might be confusing to some people. I simply chose that pronunciation because it shows a third allophone of /t/ (at least for some speakers). But the point is sufficient without it.

You're saying that you're surprised that the affrication of /t/ before /r/ is part of a larger shift? A shift of what? Is it also surprising that it may be affricated in words like twin and dwarf? Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 17:46, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Allophones in Hawaiian

I heard that some phonemes in Hawaiian have highly unusual allophones. Maybe it would be worth mentioning (as well as examples from many other languages). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.151.83.161 (talk) 19:11, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Hawaiian phonology talks about the variations in the pronunciation of consonants, although most of the weird ones are sounds in free variation. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 19:26, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Why not cut to a short dictionary-like article

Allophony would appear to be an operative concept in phonetics--the variation of realized sounds, across speakers, dialects, languages, even just across instantiations. It is also a key concept in largely outmoded phonemic accounts of phonology. Much of the rest of this article could just be covered in phonetics and phonology then. Since so much of Wiki is shite, really, less is much much more. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.213.105.150 (talk) 07:13, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] deleted paragraph

I took out this paragraph as I feel it belongs in phoneme, and only confuses the issue here:

Speakers of a particular language perceive a phoneme as a distinctive sound in that language. This could support the theory that a language's phonology is comprised of an identifiable, stable set of phonemes. However, it might also indicate languages simply schematize and limit redundancy in how phonetics are used in a given spoken languages, thereby making spoken communication more informationally efficient. One theory is that phonemes are determinative of speech perception; however, that is not the only possible interpretation. Rather, phonemes may themselves be the result of successful speech perception (in other words, a phoneme can be identified because successful lexical recognition has already taken place). Usually, allophones falling under a specified phoneme are not considered distinctive, but rather a variant of that phoneme. In theory, changing the allophone won't change the meaning of a word, but the actual result may sound non-native, or be unintelligible to normal speech perception processes.

kwami (talk) 08:10, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Examples of the different allophonic processes.

I think some word examples of the different allophonic processes would greatly help readers to better understand what is happening in their vocal tract by practicing with actual words.

Ex: Lack of plosion – In English a plosive (p, t, k, b, d, g) has no plosion when it is followed by another plosive or an affricate inside words or across word boundary. example: ditch /dɪtʃ/; judge /dʒʌdʒ/

(It might also be helpful to indicate the lack of plosion as a quasi glottal stop, but without creating a separate syllable.)

Nasal plosion – In English a plosive (p, t, k, b, d, g) has nasal plosion when it’s followed by nasal, inside a word or across word boundary. example: big noise /bɪgⁿ nɔɪz/

etc... Finitoultero (talk) 04:10, 12 August 2008 (UTC)