The Daniel Jones Cardinal Vowel system, defined as it is by clear-cut and rigid rules, is part of the stock-in-trade of all IPA phoneticians. I wish to suggest that the present format of the system contains a contradiction so basic that any attempt to make use of it as a descriptive technique, in all but a very restricted number of cases, would be completely impossible. This contradiction, moreover, is so obvious that the fact that no phonetician has called attention to it until now is hard to explain, and the equally certain fact that descriptive phoneticians (including the present writer) regularly teach the use of the technique to students, and apply it themselves, is even more so.

1. What follows is a sketch of the phonology of the English spoken in Emper, Co. Westmeath. Emper is a pocket of fertile country partly enclosed in a loop of the River Inny and situate some eleven or twelve miles to the north-west of Mullingar. The population, fluctuating about two hundred souls, is composed mostly of farmers and farm labourers. They are engaged in mixed farming, that is tillage, stock-raising, and dairying; and are a settled community in that the farms in most cases have been occupied by the same families for generations. It is difficult to say at what date exactly the people of Emper ceased to speak Irish and became English speakers. The evidence is scanty and entirely oral, yet sufficient to warrant the conclusion that at some time after the middle of the eighteenth century, and certainly before 1800, Emper had become English speaking. The findings and conclusions below are based on my own (dialect) pronunciation and my memory of auditory observation of the speech of the older stratum of the inhabitants, and especially of those born before 1900. This is my vernacular speech and I have never lost touch with it.

This study comes in two parts; first, we consider a range of potential intonation contrasts in isolated utterances, and in part 2, we analyse the intonation used in connected text. The study is based on data and observations collected by Miller in Northern Nigeria and by informants in Cardiff, and further research conducted by Tench, during a visit to Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Northern Nigeria, where both printed and recorded materials were made available at the Kashim Ibrahim Library.

Christoph Friedrich Hellwag was probably the first scholar who tried to show the auditory relationships and the relative distances of the vowels (Hellwag [1791] 1991). He described the vowels in a space in which the vowels formed a triangle (He didn't actually use the word ‘triangle,’ but spoke instead about a ‘scale,’ ‘ladder,’ ‘stairs,’ or ‘symmetric scheme’ (Monin 1991: 22)). The cardinal vowel system, created by Daniel Jones, has been a valuable frame work for vowel quality description, but it is partly articulatory, partly auditory.

One of the challenges of current research into speech communication is that of effectively using the power of the digital computer to both organize data and to extract relevant relationships by computational methods. Whilst considerable progress has been made in the analysis and synthesis of the acoustics of speech and in understanding the perceptual mechanisms at work in human perception of speech, there has been a paucity of relations between such knowledge and the description of speech by the traditional discipline of phonetics. One significant factor in this situation is the lack of an effective way for the speech scientist to code the descriptions of the phonetician in a way that preserves the richness of description and accuracy of judgement attained by a highly trained ear and expressed in specialized phonetic scripts. It is the intent of this paper to propose a tool that could provide improved communication between the two disciplines.

This paper reports the results of an experiment on the effects of six speaking styles on some of the acoustic properties of speech. The experiment was part of an exploration of within-speaker variation in connection with automatic speaker verification (ASV), pursuing the hypothesis that the elicitation of style variation in the training phase of an ASV system (‘structured training’) would enhance the performance of the system. Swedish-speaking subjects produced a digit sequence at varying speaking rates and loudness levels, and also with simulated denasality (pinched nose) and under cognitive stress. Duration of vowels and consonants, and formant frequencies of vowels, were measured. A number of consistent patterns of variation emerged for duration and vowel quality and are reported here. The discussion explores the relation between the patterns observed and the success, or in the case of speech under stress the failure, of structured training in reducing the error rates in ASV.

The following transcriptions were made from tape recordings of the speech of two natives of Greater Boston, reading ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ followed by a sentence composed to illustrate the distinctive New England distribution of low vowels. In each transcription, [aː] varies from cardinal to []; [ɑ] is about cardinal; [ɒː] varies from cardinal to ; the [o] in ‘o#x0259;, oɹ] ranges from to . Whereas [ɒː] and [oə] are kept quite distinct, as are [aː] and [ɑ], [ɑ] and [ɒː] are close together, overlap, and are not kept rigorously separate, [a] in [aɩ, aɷ] = [] or ; the first speaker uses a more advanced and the second speaker a more retracted variety. Diphthongization of [eɩ], [oɷ] is only slight, and the first element of [oɷ] is near cardinal and well-rounded. [œ] is a lightly-rounded , about like French [ə].

In ‘Linking /r/ in the General British Pronunciation of English’ by J. Windsor Lewis (JIPA 5.1) the author expressed his view that ‘linking’ and ‘intrusive’ r can be regarded as one and the same thing, that both are regular practice in current usage, and that therefore foreigners ought to be taught to use both ‘irrespective of traditional orthography’. My purpose is to show that he does not make a convincing case with the evidence he puts forward.

Umbuygamu is a Pama-Nyungan language of the east coast of Cape York Peninsula, in the northeast of Australia. Genetically, the language belongs to the Lamalamic subgroup (Laycock 1969, Rigsby 1997) of Paman languages, themselves a subgroup of Pama-Nyungan (as proposed by Hale 1964, 1966; see also Bowern & Atkinson 2012). Umbuygamu is the language of three clans at the southern end of Princess Charlotte Bay, about halfway up the east coast of Cape York Peninsula. Their estates are centred on a lagoon called Emanha (or Dinner Hole in English); they extend inland into the upper Running Creek system, and include the Cliff Islands group along the coast; see Rigsby 1992 for more details, and Verstraete & Rigsby (2015: 2) for a map of the region and its languages. Neighbouring languages are the Middle Paman language Umpithamu, along the coast to the north (see, for instance, Verstraete 2010, 2012) and two Lamalamic languages, Rimanggudinhma to the southwest (located inland; Godman 1993, Sommer 1999b), and Lamalama to the southeast (along the coast; Sommer 1999a).

Goemai is an Afroasiatic (Chadic, West Chadic A, Angas-Goemai group) language spoken in Central Nigeria. The name Goemai [ɡmi] is used by the speakers themselves to refer to both their language and their ethnic group. To outsiders, they are better known under the name Ankwe – a name that is also commonly found in the older linguistic, anthropological and historical literature. The Goemai live as farmers, fishermen and hunters in villages throughout the lowland savannah region south of the Jos Plateau and north of the Benue River, an area that is known geographically as the Great Muri Plains. The economy is based on agriculture (yam, millet, guineacorn, groundnut, beniseed) and is supplemented with fishing and hunting. Politically, the area belongs to Plateau State, and more specifically to the Local Government Areas Shendam and Qua’an Pan. Smaller Goemai-speaking communities are found in surrounding Local Government Areas as well as in Jos, the capital of Plateau State.

Emphasis (contrastive pharyngealization of coronals) in Arabic spreads from an emphatic consonant to neighboring segments. Previous research suggests that in addition to changing spectral characteristics of adjacent segments, emphasis might affect voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops because emphatic stops in Arabic dialects have considerably shorter VOT than their plain cognates. No study investigated whether emphatic co-articulation could shorten VOT in plain stops produced in emphatic environment. The present study investigates changes in VOT in syllable-initial /t/ using production data from sixteen speakers of Qatari Arabic, who read non-word syllables with initial plain and emphatic stops /t/ and /ṭ/ adjacent to another plain or emphatic consonant. The results show that emphasis spread is a gradient process that affects only spectral characteristics of segments, causing changes in vowel formants and spectral centre of gravity of stops. Long-lag VOT in plain /t/, however, was not shortened in emphatic syllables. The findings suggest that shorter VOT in voiceless emphatic stops in Qatari Arabic is not a mechanical aftermath of pharyngealization but, rather, a phonological requirement to maintain contrast between long-lag and short-lag VOT in plain and emphatic stops.

Ende (ISO639-3 code: kit) is a Pahoturi River language spoken by at least 600 (Eberhard, Simons & Fennig 2019) and as many as 1000 (Dareda 2016) people in Western Province, Papua New Guinea, primarily in the villages of Limol, Malam, and Kinkin, as shown in Figure 1. The Pahoturi River family, which also includes the Agob, Em, Idi, Kawam, and Taeme language varieties, has not yet been demonstrated to be related to any other language family and is thus classified as Papuan due to its geographical location. As with many languages in the region, the name of the language, Ende /ende/ [ʔende], is the Ende word meaning ‘what’.

Language documentation faces a persistent and pervasive problem: How much material is enough to represent a language fully? How much text would we need to sample the full phoneme inventory of a language? In the phonetic/phonemic domain, what proportion of the phoneme inventory can we expect to sample in a text of a given length? Answering these questions in a quantifiable way is tricky, but asking them is necessary. The cumulative collection of Illustrative Texts published in the Illustration series in this journal over more than four decades (mostly renditions of the ‘North Wind and the Sun’) gives us an ideal dataset for pursuing these questions. Here we investigate a tractable subset of the above questions, namely: What proportion of a language’s phoneme inventory do these texts enable us to recover, in the minimal sense of having at least one allophone of each phoneme? We find that, even with this low bar, only three languages (Modern Greek, Shipibo and the Treger dialect of Breton) attest all phonemes in these texts. Unsurprisingly, these languages sit at the low end of phoneme inventory sizes (respectively 23, 24 and 36 phonemes). We then estimate the rate at which phonemes are sampled in the Illustrative Texts and extrapolate to see how much text it might take to display a language’s full inventory. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for linguistics in its quest to represent the world’s phonetic diversity, and for JIPA in its design requirements for Illustrations and in particular whether supplementary panphonic texts should be included.

Madurese (bhâsa Madhurâ) is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken primarily on the island of Madura and a number of regions in East Java, Indonesia. Its further subgrouping has remained a matter of some dispute. Early work placed Madurese in a Malayo-Javanic subgroup containing Javanese, Sundanese, and Malay (Dyen 1963). Glottolog and Ethnologue use the more recent ‘Malayo-Sumbawan’ classification (Adelaar 2005a), which puts Malayic, Chamic, and the Balinese-Sasak-Sumbawa group into one branch with Madurese and Sundanese in two other branches, to the exclusion of Javanese. Robert Blust, rejecting the Malayo-Sumbawan hypothesis, tentatively places Madurese in a Malayo-Chamic subgroup (Blust 2009), but also suggests (Blust 2010) that, as Madurese is lexically similar to Malay but phonologically and morphologically quite different, it may once have subgrouped with Javanese and later underwent heavy relexicalization due to language contact (see also discussion in Kluge 2017: 3).

Cicipu ([tʃìtʃípù], ISO 639–3 code awc) is spoken by approximately 20,000 people in northwest Nigeria, with the main language area straddling the boundary between Kebbi and Niger states. The language belongs to the Kambari subgroup (not Kamuku as stated by Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2013) of Kainji (Benue-Congo), although it is heavily influenced by the lingua franca Hausa, in which almost all speakers are fluent. There are several identifiable dialects, with native speakers of Cicipu generally listing seven. Of these, Tirisino is the most prestigious and least endangered dialect, and this is the one presented here. Tikumbasi is the most divergent of the dialects, with the /o/ vowel in the other dialects consistently corresponding to /e/ in Tikumbasi (for example /póːpò/ ‘hello’ ~ /péːpè/, /tʃìkóːtò/ ‘drum’ ~ /tʃìkʷéːtè/). The distinction between /o/ and /ɔ/ has been lost in Tikumbasi.

Articulatory studies have revealed cross-linguistic variation in the realization of cross-word nasal+stop sequences. Whereas languages such as Italian and Spanish show largely categorical regressive place assimilation (Kochetov & Colantoni 2011, Celata et al. 2013), English and German alveolar nasals are often characterized by gradient assimilation, modulated by the degree of overlap with the following gesture (Barry 1991, Ellis & Hardcastle 2002, Jaeger & Hoole 2011). The lack of comparable instrumental studies for French may be due to the common assumption that the language lacks nasal place assimilation in general. We investigate here the production of French /n/+/k ɡ/ sequences via electropalatography. Four female speakers of European and Quebecois French wearing custom 62-electrode acrylic palates read the sentences C'est une bonne casquette ‘That's a good cap’ and C'est une bonne galette ‘That's a good tart/cookie’ alongside comparable control sentences involving /n/+/t d/ sequences. For each sequence, assimilation type was determined both qualitatively via visual inspection of the linguopalatal profiles and quantitatively using two contact indices. None of the /n/-tokens exhibited either categorical assimilation (i.e. [ŋk]) or lack of assimilation (i.e. [n(ə)k]). Rather, an intermediate pattern was attested with the nasal involving overlapped coronal and velar gestures ([nn͡ŋ]) and continuous retraction of the constriction. The degree of overlap varied among speakers, extending up to half of the nasal interval. Overall, these French patterns are strikingly different from the categorical processes reported for other Romance languages, yet similar to the gradient assimilation attested in Germanic languages. We conclude by discussing possible sources of these differences.

The aim of this essay is to argue that English intonation has broadly two functions. On the one hand it picks out a particular item or items in every sentence in order to give it or them semantic prominence; on the other hand, the pitch CONTOUR of an utterance also contributes to meaning and this contribution may itself be divided into two types: firstly, the height of pitch and the degree of its variation in a given utterance reflect speakers' ‘involvement’ or ‘interest’, and, secondly, the direction of the pitch contour towards or away from a neutral low pitch indicates the degree of ‘completeness’ or ‘incompleteness’ of an utterance in a discourse. I shall argue that the division of intonation into these two main subparts, an ‘accent’ function corresponding to what Halliday calls ‘tonicity’ and an ‘attitude’ function corresponding to Halliday's ‘tone’, is valid since it correlates with the division of meaning analysis into semantics and pragmatics.

The process of assigning computer codes to phonetic symbols began when the 1989 Kiel Convention of the International Phonetic Association was called to revise the Association's alphabet. The Workgroup on Computer Coding formed at that time had the task of determining how to represent the IPA alphabet numerically, and of developing a set of numbers referring to IPA symbols unambiguously. This involved assembling phoneticians who work with computer representations of phonetic symbols, and communicating with specialists in computer coding to gauge the fit between the phonetician's perspective on symbol usage and the non-phonetician's understanding of how to identify and use phonetic symbols. Prior to Kiel, a collection of practical approaches to coded representations was outlined in JIPA (Esling 1988), which dealt mainly with keyboard assignments of characters.

The question of whether intonation contours directly signal meaning is an old one. We revisit this question using vocatives in Colombian Spanish (Bogotá). We recorded speakers' productions in three pragmatic conditions – greeting, confirmation-seeking, and reprimand – and compared proper names (vocatives) to situation-specific one-word utterances, such as ¡Hola! ‘Hello’ (non-vocatives). Intonational analyses showed no direct one-to-one correspondence between the pragmatic conditions and intonation contours: (a) for vocatives, e.g. a rising–falling contour occurred in both greetings and reprimands; and (b) for non-vocatives, e.g. a step-down contour (a.k.a. calling contour) occurred in both greeting and confirmation-seeking conditions. Looking beyond intonation to consider other phonetic variables – spectral tilt, duration, alignment of tonal targets, f0-range, f0-slope – the results showed that the intonation contours that occurred in more than one pragmatic condition differed in phonetic realisation, e.g. rising–falling vocatives showed differences in f0-range of the rise and spectral tilt. However, the corresponding non-vocatives did not show the same differences. Furthermore, vocatives in greeting contexts were realised differently from non-vocatives in greeting contexts. In sum, the pragmatic condition affects the prosodic realisation of (non-)vocatives, but the relationship is complex. The results are discussed in the light of prosodic constructions, leading to the conclusion that the prosodic realisation of vocatives and non-vocatives in Bogotá Colombian Spanish cannot be easily modelled by prosodic constructions.