Today, I’d like to talk about a sound that most English speakers don’t notice even though we use it every day: The Glottal Stop

The Glottal Stop is a unique consonant present in many languages around the world. It’s often represented as a lone ‘ (as in “Hawai’i”) or as a question mark (?), but its official IPA symbol looks like this:

glottalstop.gif

What do Mittens and Hawaii have in common?

Let’s look at the name of the state of Hawaii. The “proper” (native) pronunciation of the state’s name is “huh-WHY-ee”, rather than “huh-WHY” or “huh-WHYYY”.

Say the correct version slowly. The sort of “catch” in your throat between the “WHY” and the “ee” is our phonetic phriend, the glottal stop. In the IPA, Hawaii is written as (/həwaɪʔi:/), with the glottal stop showing up in all its glory.

Sometimes, you’ll see Hawaii written with an apostrophe in the place of the glottal stop (“Hawai’i”) to show that, but really, the glottal stop is unmarked 90% of the time in English.

Another place where the glottal stop makes an appearance in many dialects of English is in the words “mitten” or “button”. Say those words carefully, and you’ll notice that where we have a “tt”, there’s actually a glottal stop, not any sort of T sound. In the IPA, when I pronounce these words, they’re transcribed as /mɪʔn/ and /bʌʔn/ (with the n’s as their own syllables). Contrast this with “bitter” (which is actually an alveolar tap, not a t) or “mitts” (which has a true t), and you’ll see through the English writing system’s weave of deception.

You’ll also find this sound in expressions like “Uh-oh” and between many words (“new attack”). The glottal stop will also show up from time to time in English phrases replacing a t if you’re listening closely.

Whatcha gonna do with all those glottal stops, all those glottal stops inside your speech?

I’m mildly ashamed to use this as an example, but in the Black Eyed Peas song “My Humps”, the chorus is filled with glottal stops. I’ll transcribe (broadly) a bit of the chorus (from 00:13 in the above video on) below:

junk2.gif

Look at that transcription and try to note the different glottal stops in the singers speech. They’re going to make make make you surprised, make you surprised at how many glottal stops are in our everyday speech.

What’s our throat catching, anyways?

Take a look at this picture of the human vocal folds (courtesy of Wikipedia):
vocalfolds

Our glottis (the phonetic term for the vocal folds/vocal cords) is composed of two pieces of tissue that move together and apart during speech, and vibrate rapidly to create voicing. Those pieces of tissue can be moved a great deal, and even brought all the way together.

Hold your breath with your mouth and nose opened. You’ll feel a pressure build up below your throat, and you’ll probably be able to feel exactly where the air is stopped. That closure is the vocal folds, and what you’re doing now is holding a glottal stop. In order to make a glottal stop in speech, we just pull those two pieces of tissue all the way together until they make a seal, and then release it again. That’s it. No tongue, no voicing, no nasal worries. Just close the glottis. Easy, huh?

Glottal stops in other languages

Glottal stops are common in English, but they’re not really phonemic (meaning that they don’t generally contrast with other sounds). If I say “mitten” using a full on T, people will understand you, but just think you’re strange. They’re even more common in British English, and in some Cockney dialects, they’re really omnipresent (“then, la’er, my dau’er ‘it me”).

However, in other languages, they can carry a very distinct contrast. In Hawai’ian and Samoan, they’re phonemic, and can show up anywhere. /ʔika/ and /ika/ miɡht be entirely different words even though speakers of many languages can’t tell the difference. No matter how I’ve tried, I still can’t quite hear this difference. English speakers love our word-initial glottal stops (at the beginning of words), so I hear them most of the time, and have trouble starting a word without them.

Similarly, there are other languages where /kaʔ/ and /ka/ would be completely different. Once again, English speakers (and speakers of many other Indo-european languages) have lots of trouble with this contrast.

Reader, meet Glottal Stop

So, now that you know it’s out there, I suspect you’ll be hearing glottal stops in lots of places. Once you do, you and the glottal stop will certainly become phast phonetic phriends.

Tagged with Phonetic Phriends, Phonetics and Phonology | 11 Comments


A few weeks ago, in my gigantic post on the beauty of Phonetics, I mentioned a particular sound, called the Velar Nasal (ŋ). Well, I think the Velar Nasal is really cool, and I also want to show how much detail can go into the study of something as seemingly simple as a single sound. It’s fascinating to see how complicated something we take for granted can be. As such, I’m going to designate it as this post’s Phonetic Phriend.

A Phoundation in Phonetics

Every consonant sound we make can be described by describing the positions of the various parts of the mouth involved in speech production (“articulators”). There are five main articulatory parts that must be described for every sound:

  1. The front of the tongue – Where is it? Is it pressed against the upper part of the mouth? Where’s the closure? Is it completely closed?
  2. The back of the tongue – Just like the front, Is it pressed against the upper part of the mouth? Against the back of the throat? Where’s the closure? Is it completely closed?
  3. The lips – Are they open? Closed? Round?
  4. The velum – This is the movable bit that closes off your nose from your throat. If you look in a mirror and say “Aaaaa”, you’ll see a little dangling bit (your uvula) hanging from the roof of your mouth. The uvula is attached to the velum. When raised, the velum stops air from escaping out your nose, and when lowered, air can flow freely out your nose.
  5. The vocal folds (also known as the vocal cords) – In English, they’re either vibrating or not. In other languages, there are different ways of using them

If you know these five things about a sound, you can identify it, reproduce it (given practice), and determine the proper IPA symbol for it.

A Nasal by any other name

Let’s try making it for a second. Say “Ring”, and hold the final sound. Note that we don’t say rin-g, it’s just “ring”. There’s no real “g” to it. When you hold that sound, you’ll feel air going out your nose, just like when you hold an “N”, and you’ll feel your tongue pressed against the back of the roof of your mouth.

The name itself is descriptive: It’s called a “velar nasal”, which lets you know that the tongue is pressed against the velum, and that air is escaping out your nose, instead of through your mouth. Also called “Angma” or “Eng”, the Velar Nasal is fairly common in languages of the world. It’s the sound found in the English words “ring“, “sang“, “ankle” and “think”. The IPA symbol for the Velar Nasal is ŋ, or, in a more conventional IPA font:
angma

Here’s a cross-section of the head (“sagittal section”) of somebody making a velar nasal (created with this very cool sagittal section maker):
Sagittal section of a Velar Nasal

Using the 5-place method of describing sounds, we could describe the velar nasal as follows:

  1. The front of the tongue – Lowered, and not involved.
  2. The back of the tongue – Pressed up against the velum, forming a complete seal
  3. The lips – Not involved in the articulation, but likely open to begin the next sound.
  4. The velum – Lowered so that air can pass out from your nose
  5. The vocal folds – Vibrating

What’s so cool about the Velar Nasal?

You now know, in excruciating detail, how one goes about making one, but you might still be asking what makes them so cool?

First, many English speakers don’t even know that the sound is its own sound. Sure, they can tell the difference between “win” and “wing”, and they know it’s not quite right to pronounce the G and say “win-guh”, but for most English speakers, it never crosses our minds to think about it as its own sound, just as unique as a “K” or an “M”.

Second, in English, it’s a wonderful example of what Linguists call “Assimilation”. First, say “thin”. Stop at the “N” and pay attention to your tongue. It’s further forward in your mouth, almost behind your teeth. Now, say the phrase “I saw the thin kids” quickly. Now, do it again and stop right at the “n”. Notice that this time, your tongue is back in the mouth, and you’re making a velar nasal. Now, the N in thin is clearly a normal (“alveolar”) nasal when alone, but when it’s before a velar consonant, “K”, it becomes a velar nasal. This is because we’re generally quite lazy, and would rather make two sounds in the same part of the mouth than make two in two different places. This happens in lots of languages in lots of places, and especially with nasal sounds.

Finally, it’s interesting because of its distribution in English. We can make a “T” sound anywhere in a word. We can say “Tab”, “bat”, and “baton”. That’s not that case with the Velar Nasal. We can put it at the end of a word or phrase (“king”), or in the middle (“singing”), but try and say “ngo”. As a native English speaker, it’s easy to say “en-go”, but not “ŋo”. I’ve had to train myself to be able to make these at the start of words, because English never taught me how and they’re used at the start of words in lots of languages around the world. So, just because we can say something at the end of a word doesn’t mean we’re able to start a word with it.

So, reader, meet Velar Nasal. Velar Nasal, meet reader. Hopefully you’re now phast phonetic phriends, and will be on the lookout for them wherever they may lie. You might not thiŋk so, but they’re always haŋiŋ around, waitiŋ for a liŋɡuist to pick up on them. Fascinatiŋ, ŋo?

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Phonetic Phriends, Phonetics and Phonology | 4 Comments


I’m a big phan of phonetics (OK, I’ll stop now). Phonetics is the study of speech sounds, and how we make and hear them. One of the very first tasks when studying phonetics is to listen very closely to your native language, and start hearing the sounds that we ignore, can’t hear, or just never think twice about in our native language. This process can be really interesting, seeing the world of complexity in speech that we never quite notice in our everyday lives. To share a bit of this, I’m going to talk a little bit about two English distinctly different sounds that are usually considered to be one sound by Native Speakers: Theta and Eth

A Primer on Voicing

Before we discuss our new phriends, we have to talk a little about how we make some consonants. I’ve discussed the idea of “voicing” before, in my post “Unaspirated T’s from the mouths of Babes“, but I think it might be helpful to review the idea and rephrase a little bit. In the above post, I recommended that readers do the following quick experiment to get a sense of what voicing means. Give it a try again, if you’d like:

Put your fingers on your neck (guys, find your adam’s apple) and say “Ahhhhhhhh”. You’ll feel a vibration. That’s your vocal folds vibrating to give the A its sound. Now, keep your fingers there and say “Dadadadadadadada”. You’ll feel your tongue moving, but the vibration will be pretty constant. Now, try “Tatatatatatatata”. This time, the vibrations will feel like they’re going on an off, off during the T, on during the A. This is because, as I said above, T is a “Voiceless” sound, and D is “voiced”. (If you’re still interested, try the same with “Kakaka” and “Gagaga”, as well as “papapa” and “bababa”).

“Voicing” in phonetics, is just a fancy word for when the vocal folds (a more accurate term for the “vocal cords”) are brought close together, so that when air blows between them, they produce a vibration, and thus, a sound. It’s just like if you press your lips together and blow out your mouth, your lips vibrate (slowly), and produce an (altogether different) sound. For videos and pictures of this (which is taken by a camera inside somebody’s throat, so maybe not for the squeamish), check out this site.

Just like in the above experiment, whether or not the vocal folds are vibrating while your mouth and tongue make the required gestures can be the only difference between two consonant sounds (sounds created by obstructing the airway, unlike vowels). That’s the only difference between “Ta” and “Da”, between “Ka” and “Ga”, and between “Pa” and “Ba”. So, keep this contrast of “voiced” versus “voiceless” sounds in mind as you read on.

A tale of two TH’s

Say “This thistle” a few times. Now, pay very close attention to the TH sounds at the beginning of each word. Put your hand on your Adam’s Apple (or equivalent area on your neck) while you say them.
After a few tries, you’ll notice that, in the words of a friend of mine, the “TH” in “This” is “more buzzy”, or, put more scientifically, voiced. This sound, the TH in “This, That, The, There, Then, Those…”, is called an Eth (pronounced with a voiced, Eth sound). In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), it has this symbol:

eth.gif

The TH in “thistle”, or “theater, theory, think, thought, throw, through…” is called a Theta, and is Eth’s voiceless counterpart (Theta is to Eth as T is to D). Theta’s IPA symbol is, shockingly, a theta, as shown here:

theta.gif

Aside from voicing, there is no difference between them. The sounds are produced with the tongue in the same position, the tongue is doing the same thing for both, and all the other various phonetic phactors (I couldn’t resist) are the same. The only difference between the the Theta and the Eth is vocal fold vibration, but what a difference it makes.

Your writing system is lying to you

Now that you’re listening for it, there’s (eth) a big difference between the two sounds, but chances are, you never gave them a second thought (theta). Personally, I blame the English writing system. Writing systems complicate our lives when we’re learning phonetics, and in fact, the English writing system is the main reason that most English speakers don’t know that there’s a difference between Theta and Eth.

“This” and “Thistle” are spelled with the same TH, and there’s never a situation where the two sounds are used in identical contexts (When you see a TH in a word, it’s always clearly one or the other). In fact, say this made-up word, “thaxis”. I’ll bet you made a “theta”, if you’re a native English speaker. We never read unfamiliar TH words with Eth, and new words with Eth are few and far between.

So, in our everyday life, there’s not much need to know the difference between these sounds. Between our writing system and the system of English Phonology (where and when sounds are used), we’re seldom given a contrast between the two.

So, Theta, Eth, meet your new friend. You’ll never look at “TH” the same way again. You don’t have to thank me when you catch yourself sitting at the dinner table, endlessly repeating a word to figure out if it’s Eth or Theta. Phonetics addiction is Phun, isn’t it?

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Usage, Phonetic Phriends, Phonetics and Phonology | 4 Comments

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