![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||
|
I'm confused by one of the examples... how exactly is 'w' a vowel acting as a consonant? Patrick Corcoran 16:12, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)
"Even though both the [w] and the [ʊ̯] are similar to the vowel [u], the transcription [waʊ̯] indicates that the initial segment is considered to be a consonant by the transcriber, while the final segment is considered to form a diphthong with the preceding vowel." -- Shouldn't there be a note of some sort about phonemic vs. phonetic considerations? Also, this sentence seems a little disingenuous, since there are other differences between [w] and [ʊ̯], besides one being considered a consonant by the transcriber and one not. The illustration would be clearer if we used the transcription [wau̯], since the relation between [w] and [u̯] is closer. (Or does no one actually ever pronounce [wau̯]?) 24.159.255.29 00:21, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Does anybody happen to know which vowels correspond to which semi-vowels? I know that /i/ corresponds to /j/, but I always thought that /w/ corresponded to /u/. This article seems to imply that it corresponds to /ʊ/. That doesn't sound right at all to me. /uɛl/ sounds much more like 'well' than /ʊɛl/ (/ʊ/ being the same vowel as the American pronunciation for 'book'). I think that /ɥ/ corresponds to /y/ but I'm not too sure. I'm completely lost with the rest of them. The vowels are the only part that I have trouble understanding when it comes to phonetics. The rest is completely straight-forward and easy to understand just by reading the description for articulation. The vowels, however, are irritatingly vague and seem to contradict each other in their description and sound samples.-- 67.177.36.200 02:11, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
Okay, after a while of personal Expirementation with the consonants and vowels (the few vowels I can actually pronounce) I've come up with this: /ɰ/ corresponds to /ɨ/ (Russian 'ы'), I think. /ʋ/ corresponds to /œ/ (I don't even know if I can pronounce this correctly, but I think it might be correct since it's the closest in it's proximity to /ʋ/ without sounding like a rounded 'i'). And after some consideration I'm definitely convinced that /w/ does correspond to /u/. I'm pretty sure that these expert linguists must have some damn good reasons to use 'ʊ' as part of the diphthong cluster in the English 'O', but my non-English-centered brain is telling me that they have some kind of intellectual disabilities. Somebody tell me why wrong, please! Until then, 'wow' is /wæu/ for me!
And another thing, in ever American dialect I've ever heard, the vowel in 'wow' and 'how' is exactly the same as 'at'. I don't think I've ever heard an American even pronounce the same /a/ that is used in Spanish, Russian, Italian, French, German, Greek, et cetera. This is why I used 'æ' in that example. Somebody please help me clear up these contradictions! By the way, I speak Russian and English, so I have an extra view to linguistics that many monolingual people might not have.-- 67.177.36.200 02:43, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
In this article it says "Using the transcription [aʊ̯] for the diphthong rather than [æu̯] as one might expect is a minor phonetic point. See diphthong for details.", but I can't find anything really explaining this in the diphthong article. Could someone write an explanation in that article. I would myself, but I don't actually know why diphthongs are transcribed that way. Thanks. -- Redtitan 01:57, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
I agree. I'm removing that remark from the article. FilipeS 20:10, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Should Non-syllabic vowel be merged into this article? They seem to be equivalent concepts. FilipeS 17:55, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
The introduction says '...also known as glides, though that term has fallen out of favor'. I'm too amateur to have a say on the matter, but I still do encounter 'glide' quite often (in recent literature). Though, my focus is on semitic languages.-- hɑkeem ¡ʇuɐɹ ɯǝǝʞɐɥ 07:18, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
Here are the assertions which I have not seen in the literature and, as far as I can see, are not supported by the sources (I can't access all the sources cited, so I could be wrong):
Cheers. Grover cleveland ( talk) 00:06, 7 August 2010 (UTC)
We still have the case that [j] is closer than [i̯], so they're not synonymous. The first is consonantal, the second vocalic. AFAIK, only the first would be an approximant, since they're consonants, whereas both might be called semivowels. — kwami ( talk) 02:20, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
If I said "approximants are a subclass of semivowels", I misspoke. I meant the opposite. Phonetically, we have segments which have more stricture than vowels, but not as much as fricatives. These are approximants. Ladefoged, at least, defines semivowels as approximants that correspond to vowels. He treats them separately from diphthongs, which he says are simply vowels with a moving target, but otherwise identical to other vowels. That is, [ai̯] (or perhaps [a͡i]) is a vowel, [aj] a VC sequence. Phonemic analysis is, of course, another matter, as L discusses. It's also problematic to distinguish them for many languages: articulation may be variable, and descriptions may be inadequate even if it isn't. I wouldn't expect basic sources to bother even if the distinction is justifiable for a particular language, but theoretically we do have a distinction. I'm not sure about your A-D, as you don't seem to be making the articulatory distinction that L does. What I see is this:
Now, (a) are semivowels, and (c) are vowels. The question is (b), which may not be distinguished from (a) or (c). I don't know of any term for (b). L is very brief. In SOWL under 'diphthongs' he says, "The kinds of vowels that occur as targets in diphthongs are no different from those that occur as single vowels [so] there is little extra to be said about diphthongs. No new features are needed." That section, the last in §9.2 Additional Vowel Features, is immediately followed by §9.3 Vowel-like consonants, where he says "there is a clear articulatory difference between vowels and semivowels [...] in that they [semivowels] are produced with narrower constrictions of the vocal tract."
As for the distinction between your (B) and (C) being only phonological, there is a measurable phonetic difference across diphthongs in many languages, where the peak of sonority occurs in a particular segment, such as the [a] in [ai̯], that would enable one to at least sometimes distinguish on- & off-glides, with stricture distinguishing these from semivowels in L's sense of the word. So at least theoretically I don't see a problem with three categories, even if there are practical problems or they may simply not be relevant to a particular language. — kwami ( talk) 02:04, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
Currently offglide redirects here. That doesn't seem right; consider e.g. the example (from Palatalization (phonetics)): "[I]n Russian, when /t/ undergoes palatalization, a palatalized sibilant offglide appears, as in тема [ˈtˢʲemə]", where it refers to [ˢ], which has nothing to do with semivowels, and which is of course not covered here. In which article are such offglides discussed? — Sebastian 08:35, 12 April 2015 (UTC)
The back unrounded vowels are, in order from most close to most open: [ɯ ɤ ʌ ɑ]. So if non-syllabic [ɯ̯] is equivalent to [ɰ] (a velar approximant), and non-syllabic ɑ̯ is equivalent to [ʕ̞] (a pharyngeal approximant), then are non-syllabic versions of either [ɤ̯] or [ʌ̯] equivalent to [ʁ̞] (a uvular approximant, where uvular is post-velar and pre-pharyngeal)? This is something I've wondered for a while. - Gilgamesh ( talk) 04:38, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
The article mentions that some disagree on whether a given approximant is a semivowel, and mentions several times Martínez Celdrán (2004) considering the labiodental approximant a semivowel (where other authors would disagree), yet Martínez Celdrán's article does not classify the labiodental approximant as a semivowel, but as a spirant approximant consonant, very clearly separating it from the 4 commonly agreed upon semivowels. I haven't been able to find any other author considering the labiodental approximant a semivowel to replace that source, either. Should the entire reference to the labiodental approximant as a semivowel removed? NguyenMDV ( talk) 01:45, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
As a resident in Romania, I dispute the assertion that î/â is the same as y in Polish, or that ă equates to ə. Rather, these vowels are the same as found in the Turkish ı and the Estonian õ. Reference to many YouTube lessons. I have also found a book that shows paletogramz for Romanian vowels. Take it from a polyglot, the values given here are simply wrong. Athanasius V ( talk) 13:35, 22 October 2021 (UTC)
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||
|
I'm confused by one of the examples... how exactly is 'w' a vowel acting as a consonant? Patrick Corcoran 16:12, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)
"Even though both the [w] and the [ʊ̯] are similar to the vowel [u], the transcription [waʊ̯] indicates that the initial segment is considered to be a consonant by the transcriber, while the final segment is considered to form a diphthong with the preceding vowel." -- Shouldn't there be a note of some sort about phonemic vs. phonetic considerations? Also, this sentence seems a little disingenuous, since there are other differences between [w] and [ʊ̯], besides one being considered a consonant by the transcriber and one not. The illustration would be clearer if we used the transcription [wau̯], since the relation between [w] and [u̯] is closer. (Or does no one actually ever pronounce [wau̯]?) 24.159.255.29 00:21, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Does anybody happen to know which vowels correspond to which semi-vowels? I know that /i/ corresponds to /j/, but I always thought that /w/ corresponded to /u/. This article seems to imply that it corresponds to /ʊ/. That doesn't sound right at all to me. /uɛl/ sounds much more like 'well' than /ʊɛl/ (/ʊ/ being the same vowel as the American pronunciation for 'book'). I think that /ɥ/ corresponds to /y/ but I'm not too sure. I'm completely lost with the rest of them. The vowels are the only part that I have trouble understanding when it comes to phonetics. The rest is completely straight-forward and easy to understand just by reading the description for articulation. The vowels, however, are irritatingly vague and seem to contradict each other in their description and sound samples.-- 67.177.36.200 02:11, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
Okay, after a while of personal Expirementation with the consonants and vowels (the few vowels I can actually pronounce) I've come up with this: /ɰ/ corresponds to /ɨ/ (Russian 'ы'), I think. /ʋ/ corresponds to /œ/ (I don't even know if I can pronounce this correctly, but I think it might be correct since it's the closest in it's proximity to /ʋ/ without sounding like a rounded 'i'). And after some consideration I'm definitely convinced that /w/ does correspond to /u/. I'm pretty sure that these expert linguists must have some damn good reasons to use 'ʊ' as part of the diphthong cluster in the English 'O', but my non-English-centered brain is telling me that they have some kind of intellectual disabilities. Somebody tell me why wrong, please! Until then, 'wow' is /wæu/ for me!
And another thing, in ever American dialect I've ever heard, the vowel in 'wow' and 'how' is exactly the same as 'at'. I don't think I've ever heard an American even pronounce the same /a/ that is used in Spanish, Russian, Italian, French, German, Greek, et cetera. This is why I used 'æ' in that example. Somebody please help me clear up these contradictions! By the way, I speak Russian and English, so I have an extra view to linguistics that many monolingual people might not have.-- 67.177.36.200 02:43, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
In this article it says "Using the transcription [aʊ̯] for the diphthong rather than [æu̯] as one might expect is a minor phonetic point. See diphthong for details.", but I can't find anything really explaining this in the diphthong article. Could someone write an explanation in that article. I would myself, but I don't actually know why diphthongs are transcribed that way. Thanks. -- Redtitan 01:57, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
I agree. I'm removing that remark from the article. FilipeS 20:10, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Should Non-syllabic vowel be merged into this article? They seem to be equivalent concepts. FilipeS 17:55, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
The introduction says '...also known as glides, though that term has fallen out of favor'. I'm too amateur to have a say on the matter, but I still do encounter 'glide' quite often (in recent literature). Though, my focus is on semitic languages.-- hɑkeem ¡ʇuɐɹ ɯǝǝʞɐɥ 07:18, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
Here are the assertions which I have not seen in the literature and, as far as I can see, are not supported by the sources (I can't access all the sources cited, so I could be wrong):
Cheers. Grover cleveland ( talk) 00:06, 7 August 2010 (UTC)
We still have the case that [j] is closer than [i̯], so they're not synonymous. The first is consonantal, the second vocalic. AFAIK, only the first would be an approximant, since they're consonants, whereas both might be called semivowels. — kwami ( talk) 02:20, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
If I said "approximants are a subclass of semivowels", I misspoke. I meant the opposite. Phonetically, we have segments which have more stricture than vowels, but not as much as fricatives. These are approximants. Ladefoged, at least, defines semivowels as approximants that correspond to vowels. He treats them separately from diphthongs, which he says are simply vowels with a moving target, but otherwise identical to other vowels. That is, [ai̯] (or perhaps [a͡i]) is a vowel, [aj] a VC sequence. Phonemic analysis is, of course, another matter, as L discusses. It's also problematic to distinguish them for many languages: articulation may be variable, and descriptions may be inadequate even if it isn't. I wouldn't expect basic sources to bother even if the distinction is justifiable for a particular language, but theoretically we do have a distinction. I'm not sure about your A-D, as you don't seem to be making the articulatory distinction that L does. What I see is this:
Now, (a) are semivowels, and (c) are vowels. The question is (b), which may not be distinguished from (a) or (c). I don't know of any term for (b). L is very brief. In SOWL under 'diphthongs' he says, "The kinds of vowels that occur as targets in diphthongs are no different from those that occur as single vowels [so] there is little extra to be said about diphthongs. No new features are needed." That section, the last in §9.2 Additional Vowel Features, is immediately followed by §9.3 Vowel-like consonants, where he says "there is a clear articulatory difference between vowels and semivowels [...] in that they [semivowels] are produced with narrower constrictions of the vocal tract."
As for the distinction between your (B) and (C) being only phonological, there is a measurable phonetic difference across diphthongs in many languages, where the peak of sonority occurs in a particular segment, such as the [a] in [ai̯], that would enable one to at least sometimes distinguish on- & off-glides, with stricture distinguishing these from semivowels in L's sense of the word. So at least theoretically I don't see a problem with three categories, even if there are practical problems or they may simply not be relevant to a particular language. — kwami ( talk) 02:04, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
Currently offglide redirects here. That doesn't seem right; consider e.g. the example (from Palatalization (phonetics)): "[I]n Russian, when /t/ undergoes palatalization, a palatalized sibilant offglide appears, as in тема [ˈtˢʲemə]", where it refers to [ˢ], which has nothing to do with semivowels, and which is of course not covered here. In which article are such offglides discussed? — Sebastian 08:35, 12 April 2015 (UTC)
The back unrounded vowels are, in order from most close to most open: [ɯ ɤ ʌ ɑ]. So if non-syllabic [ɯ̯] is equivalent to [ɰ] (a velar approximant), and non-syllabic ɑ̯ is equivalent to [ʕ̞] (a pharyngeal approximant), then are non-syllabic versions of either [ɤ̯] or [ʌ̯] equivalent to [ʁ̞] (a uvular approximant, where uvular is post-velar and pre-pharyngeal)? This is something I've wondered for a while. - Gilgamesh ( talk) 04:38, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
The article mentions that some disagree on whether a given approximant is a semivowel, and mentions several times Martínez Celdrán (2004) considering the labiodental approximant a semivowel (where other authors would disagree), yet Martínez Celdrán's article does not classify the labiodental approximant as a semivowel, but as a spirant approximant consonant, very clearly separating it from the 4 commonly agreed upon semivowels. I haven't been able to find any other author considering the labiodental approximant a semivowel to replace that source, either. Should the entire reference to the labiodental approximant as a semivowel removed? NguyenMDV ( talk) 01:45, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
As a resident in Romania, I dispute the assertion that î/â is the same as y in Polish, or that ă equates to ə. Rather, these vowels are the same as found in the Turkish ı and the Estonian õ. Reference to many YouTube lessons. I have also found a book that shows paletogramz for Romanian vowels. Take it from a polyglot, the values given here are simply wrong. Athanasius V ( talk) 13:35, 22 October 2021 (UTC)