LINGUIST List 5.1413

Thu 08 Dec 1994

Qs: Indian corpora, Phonetics, Syllabus, Reader, Kinship terms

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1. Kripa Sundar, req: info on Indian corpora ...
2. Bruce Nevin, Qs: laryngeal phonetics
3. , syllabus for an undergraduate socio-linguistics course
4. "R.Hudson", sociolinguistics readers
5. Ted Harding, Re: Qs: Kinship terms

i would like to get in touch with people who are working on
corpora-related research for Indian languages.
i am specifically interested in helping to build a corpus a
corpus of thamizh (tamil) or malayALam (or other indian
languages), with the idea of building systems for automatic
recognition of written/spoken text, and to aid in machine
translation. thank you.

peace,
--kr.pA

Dear Colleagues:

I have a number of questions regarding laryngeal phonetics.

1. I understand that English voiced stops are phonetically voiceless
 unaspirated in initial position. (Data are cited in Kingston &
 Diehl 1994:432-434. [Kingston, John, and Randy L. Diehl, 1994,
 Phonetic knowledge, _Language_ 70:3.419-454.])

 What is the story about pretonic intervocalic allophones after
 unstressed, short vowels, e.g. fidelity, legality, mobility? To my
 ear they sound the same as in delegate, gallon, billion, but to my
 English-prejudiced ear they also sound voiced.

2. What is the story about laryngealization or creaky voice? I have seen
 this described as "a very slow vibration through only one end of the
 vocal cords" (Crystal, _Dictionary of Linguistics_ (? inexact
 citation)). What are the arytenoid cartilages doing at the posterior
 end of the vocal folds? How is it related to the closure for glottal
 stop and for glottalized consonants?

3. What is going on with the articulation of "stage whispered" speech?
 In whisper, the arytenoids are rotated so as to adduct the posterior
 ends of the vocal folds at their anterior ends, but the posterior ends
 of the arytenoids are not themselves adducted by the interarytenoid
 muscles, leaving a restricted, triangular opening at which
 sibilant-like turbulence is generated in place of voice.
 Introspecting, stage whisper seems to me to be like whisper only with
 some turbulence as air passes the closure of the main (anterior)
 portion of the vocal folds. There seems to be somewhat higher
 subglottal air pressure, like a "shouted" whisper, but it does not
 seem to be merely a question of forcing air past the closed vocal
 folds. There seem to be some additional differences of articulation
 to produce the turbulence over the vocal folds, as evidenced at least
 by increased tension in observable laryngeal and (to some extent)
 pharyngeal muscles. It also seems to me that some degree of
 pharyngealization is an incidental byproduct.

4. How is this related to pharyngeal spirants, as exemplified by Arabic?

5. Kingston and Diehl (1994:441) say that "in languages such as English"
 (meaning, I take it, languages without contrastive voiced aspirates)
 the phonological distinction [+/-voice] is signaled in part by
 aspiration initially, but not (if I read them right) intervocalically.
 More important, it is said, is the ratio of duration of consonants to
 duration of vowels, or perhaps the duration of V to VC syllable rimes
 (?). Can someone say more about this?

These questions bear on characteristics of a language I am working on.
In the near term for purposes of defining the issues and refining
research strategy, specific information will be more helpful to me than
pointers to the literature, because my access to research library
resources is not easy (actually, it's rather difficult), but I will need
the pointers too and must of course eventually follow them up.

All help will be greatly appreciated. Please respond to me and not to
the list. If there is interest I will post a summary.

 Bruce Nevin
 bnLightStream.com

I am putting together a syllabus for an undergraduate
socio-linguistics course. I would be grateful to see copies of any
syllabi people might be willing to share with me. Thank your very much.
Sincerely,

Seth A. Minkoff
MIT
sethmit.edu

Am I right in thinking that no collections of readings in sociolinguistics
have been published in the last 10 years?

Dick Hudson
Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics,
University College London,
Gower Street,
London WC1E 6BT
uclyrahucl.ac.uk

Sebastian Adorjan Dyhr's question prompts me to put the following
question to the list at large:

 Does there exist in any language a word which means purely
 "the other parent of one's child" in the strictly biological
 sense (i.e. no legal, social, etc overtones)? Formally,
 B is A's X if A and B are the two parents of a child. What is X?

(There is no lack for the parents' relation to the child: in English
even "sire" and "dam" are usable for humans - just!).

NB: Ad-hoc contrivances like "co-parent" earn no marks!

Ted. (Ted.Hardingnessie.mcc.ac.uk)