HIGGINS
: Tired of listening to sounds ?
PICKERING
: Yes, It’s a fearful strain. I rather fancied myselft because I can pronounce
Twenty-four distinct
vowel sounds, but your hundred and thirty beat me. I
Can’t hear a bit of
difference between most of them.
HIGGINS
: Oh, that comes with practice. You hear no difference at first, but you keep
on
listening and presently
you find they’re all as different as A from B.
G.B Shaw
The
quality of vowels is determined by the particular configuration of the vocal
tract. Different parts of the tongue may be raised or lowered. The lips may be
spread or pursed. The passage through which the air travels, however, is never
so narrow as to obstruct the free flow of the airstream.
Vowel
sounds carry pitch and loudness; you can sing vowels. They may be long or
short. Vowels can ‘stand alone’ they can be produced with out any consonants
before or after them. You can say the vowels of beat [bit], bit [bɪt],
or boot [but], foe example, without some kind of vowel attached.
There have been many different schemes for describing
vowel sounds. They may be described by articulatory features, as in classifying
consonants. Many beginning students of phonetics find this method more
difficult to apply to vowel articulations than to consonant articulations. In
producing a [t], you can feel your tongue touch the alveolar ridge. When you
make a [p], you can feel your two lips come together, or you can watch the lips
move in a mirror. Because voewls are produced without any articulators touching
or even coming close together, it is often difficult to figure out just what is
happening. One of the authors of this book, at the beginning of her postgraduate
work, almost gave up the idea of becoming a linguist because she could not
understand what was meant by ‘front’, ‘back’, ‘high’, and ‘low’ vowels.
These terms do have meaning, through. If you watch an
X-ray movie of someone talking, you can see why vowels have ttraditionally been
classified according to three questions :
How high is the tongue ?
What part of the tongue is involved; that is, what
part is raised or lowered ?
How long or short is the vowel ?
There are other distinguishing features, such as lip
position and nasalisation, which we will discuss later.
