Recent laryngoscopic observations suggest that renewed discussion of pharyngeal articulations is warranted. The discussion involves issues of place of articulation — the nature of the category “epiglottal” — and of manner of articulation — whether pharyngeal manners of articulation go beyond approximant and fricative to include trill and stop. In essence, the question is still the old one of how those sounds which are labelled auditorily as “pharyngeal” are produced. The observations reported here suggest that “epiglottal” articulations can be treated as a category of pharyngeal manners of articulation; and that manners of pharyngeal articulation are more closely parallel to uvular manners of articulation than previously assumed. The nature of pharyngeal approximants and pharyngeal fricatives is reexamined, evidence of trilling accompanying friction is presented, and the nature of the pharyngeal (epiglottal) stop is described. It is suggested that all four of these categories share a common place of articulation, and that they can best be described as differing in manner of articulation. The motivation for elaborating the phonetic detail of these distinctions is to facilitate a more precise description of phonemes that have been identified as pharyngeal in the languages of the world, and to provide a clearer explanation of phonetic and phonological processes that may be related to pharyngeal articulations.

A hundred years from now a large number of presently spoken languages will no longer be viable means of communication, and the distinctive sounds that they contain will have disappeared. Of the nearly seven thousand languages in the world listed by Grimes (1992), about ten per cent are spoken by around a thousand people or less. As the speakers of these languages grow old, and their children go to schools in which the main languages of the country predominate, phoneticians will no longer have access to the wide variety of sounds currently in use. Toda, a language spoken by about a thousand speakers in the Nilgiri Hills of Southern India, has some unusual sounds that will probably not exist in our great grandchildren's times. Among them are the six trills which this paper will describe. Tongue tip trills occur in about one third of the world's languages (Maddieson 1984). None of the languages in Maddieson's sample has two contrasting apical trills without secondary articulations, although they have been reported in Malayalam (Ladefoged 1971). To the best of our knowledge only Toda has three contrasting trills; and almost certainly no other language has surface contrasts between palatalized and non-palatalized versions of three lingual trills. Toda is a rich source for trill-seeking phoneticians.

The perception of speaker sex depends on the listener's integration of a complex range of factors. These may relate, for example, to the style of delivery, the use of particular language, pronunciation (Trudgill, 1983; Smith, 1979), the use of particular intonation patterns (McConnell-Ginet, 1983) and the perceived pitch of the speaker (Aronovitch, 1976, Elyan, 1978; Lass et al., 1976). Some acoustic-phonetic investigations have explored through instrumental analysis how speaker sex differences are perceived. These have shown that acoustic phonetic differences exist between the read speech of men and women speakers. It has been demonstrated that fundamental frequency differences exist between men and women, with men having on average, lower fundamental frequencies (Aronovitch, 1976; Coleman, 1973a). This can be explained in part by their larger larynges. However it is also acknowledged that it is not a low overall average fundamental frequency alone that contributes to the perception of an adult male voice. Some evidence shows for example that use of a wider pitch range will contribute to the perception of femininity, even where the overall pitch is low (Terrango, 1966). In addition women have been found to have on average higher formant frequencies (Coleman, 1976; Henton, 1986; Peterson & Barney, 1952; Childers & Wu, 1991; Wu & Childers, 1991) as a result of the smaller vocal tract. Women have different glottal source characteristics (Karlsson, 1989) which are reflected in the filter characteristics of the speech signal (Klatt & Klatt, 1990). There is also some evidence to suggest that other speaker sex differences exist in the temporal domain. Byrd (1992) found differences between men and women speakers in speaking rate in read speech in American English in the TIMIT database. Byrd states that under the recording conditions used for the TIMIT database, women spoke appreciably more slowly than the men and that men tended to reduce vowels to schwa ([ə]) more often than the women. Byrd also found that female speakers in the TIMIT database released stops in sentence-final position more frequently and produced more glottal stops than male speakers. All these findings were statistically significant.

Barry (1995a) presents data from Standard German which, among other things, illustrates the two different schwa vowels found in that variety. Barry's acoustic analysis demonstrates that orthographic final ‘-e’ has a regularly closer central vowel than orthographic final ‘-er’, and that the latter normally has no closing r-consonant. Barry, however, did not present data to examine which variety of schwa was found before orthographic ‘-r-’ when the ‘r’ is pronounced (e.g. when an inflectional affix is added to a final ‘-er’ form, as in ‘besser – bessere’).

This paper aims at describing the click accompaniments of |Gui, a little known Central Khoisan language, and presenting some new findings which may contribute to general phonetics as well as Khoisan linguistics. The phonetic features described here are based upon linguistic field research by the author into the |Gui language in the Xade area, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana, from August to December in 1992, from August to October in 1993 and from August to December in 1994.

Labiodental flaps exist in several African languages, and were first described by Doke (1931) in a study of Shona. Westermann and Ward (1933: 76) quote data from Tucker, who notes labiodental flaps in Kreish, a Central Sudanic language of the Sara-Bongo-Baguirmi group. In the same group of languages, Thomas (1981: 262) claims to find them in Bongo-Gberi and in Binga-Kara. Thomas defines these sounds as “vibrantes labiodentales” (see also Caprile 1981: 238). Hoffman (1963) and Ladefoged (1964) both identify these sounds in Margi. Cloarec-Heiss (1981: 225) reports such sounds in Banda, but describes them as “labiodentales lâches”, transcribed [ǔ]. Maddieson (1984) quotes two sounds of this type in the UPSID data base, one in Margi and the other in Gbeya.

Taba (also known as ‘East Makian’ or ‘Makian Dalam’) is an Austronesian language spoken in northern Maluku province, Indonesia. It is spoken on Makian, Moti and Kayoa islands and also in a few villages on other nearby islands. The speech recorded here is from the village of Ngofakiaha on Makian island. Slight dialectal variations are to be found in most villages where the language is spoken.

As an extensive study of Hebrew and Arabic has revealed that [ʕ] is an approximant in ordinary speech, and as we have no reason to believe that [ʕ] is different in other languages, we should consider [ʕ] to represent not a fricative but a voiced pharyngeal approximant.