Maybe You're Still Curious...
I've spent the better part of the day (and I'll be spending the better part of the weekend) working on my phonetics project.
And, it makes me want to share with all of you. I don't feel right actually using my data, but I do have some recordings of myself, so I'm going to show you that.
This is a spectrogram:
It is a spectrogram showing my production of the Welsh word diolch which you may remember from my little Cymraeg lessons means "Thank You".
the "d" sound is a voiced plosive or a "stop" consonant. It is made by creating a complete closure in the mouth. There are two things I'm going to point out about it. The release of the stop:
That is where I released the closure making the "d" sound. (This is an alveolar closure, for bonus points. Its made like you'd make the "d" sound in English.)
The other thing that you can see here is the "voicing bar". That is where I continued to voice even when there was no place for the air to go. This is lighter than what you can see later in the spectrogram, but you can see it anyway.
There are two vowels in "diolch". Vowels are distinguished by dark bands called formants. The first formant inversely correlates with "height" and the second formant correlates with "backness". Vowels are thought of "high" or "low", "front" or "back". This sort of, if you really think about it and make it work corresponds with what is going on in your mouth (how wide your jaw is, if there is lip rounding, whether your tongue is close to the roof of the mouth or near the bottom of the mouth.) Sort of.
So, that is the vowel. Lets look at the first part, "i". As I said, inversely correlates for height. The lower the first formant, the higher the vowel. The higher the second formant, the fronter the vowel:
So, its high because the first dark band is low and its front because the second dark band is high. The second vowel is what is normally transcribed as symbol called "open o". Now, whether or not I actually make that and not and "a" is anyone's guess as I don't tend to make "open o" when I'm speaking English. Its just not really in my dialect. (Although, in "a" the first two formants get really close and become hard to distinguish. So, if this isn't "open o" its just "o". But, that's a discussion for another day.)
so that's the "o" sound in diolch. Neat, right?
The last sound is the "ch" sound, which in the Southern Welsh dialect I was taught is a velar fricative. It is a sound made by bringing the back of your tongue close to the sound palate (but not so close that you'd make a complete closure.) You can see that dark gray band, it looks a little like white noise would look like. (I'm thinking that my recording isn't the best. I'm not sure that it should be gray all the way to the bottom.)
The last thing I want to show you is something known as a "velar pinch". Sounds that are made at the soft palate often make the second and third formants come together, as if they've been pinched. The "ch" sound is no exception.
Color me geeky, but I think that is so neat. We use our vocal cords and our mouths and teeth and tongue and cheeks and nose to make these sounds, that can be explained by physics and that create a signal that we can break down and interpret. How freaking awesome is that? I know, you're amazed, too.
