Talk:Relative articulation

Roundedness

Is there a way to signify "protruding" roundedness versus "compressed" roundedness? For the "compressed /w/", Im using [βˠ] as the close transcription. Is there a better way, so can keep the ‹w› letter for better visual recognition? Haldrik (talk) 07:05, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

AFAIK no, only a bunch of ad hoc remedies like yours. — kwami (talk) 08:09, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Eighth?

Should this sentence be in the article? "In General American English, the /t/ in the word eighth is farther front than normal, due to assimilation with the interdental consonant /θ/, and may be transcribed as [eɪt̟θ]." I ask because I'm a speaker of General American English, living in an urban area in the middle-Atlantic United States, and I've never noticed anyone having a /t/ in "eighth". I see that Merriam Webster provides pronunciations both with and without, but I'm looking for verification. I figure that if it was there in some people's speech, I might have noticed it at least since the time I noticed that some people do have a /ð/ in "clothes". —Largo Plazo (talk) 19:49, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Raising/lowering chart may be confusing and/or inaccurate

…As it seems to conflate phonological issues (the sonority scale) with phonetical ones (pure raising/lowering). (Not to mention that it is entirely unsourced.) Particularly suspect are the claims that semivowels [j] would be less constricted than high vowels like [i] (and not simply non-syllabic), and that flaps are less constricted than stops (and not simply shorter). --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 17:44, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Left and right tacks

The article does not mention that the combining left and right tacks (IPA numbers 417 and 418), that are now used for advanced and retracted tongue root, were/are also used as alternative variants for the plus and minus diacritics. This is even explicitly recommended in the IPA handbook (1999, p.183) in the place of plus and minus modifier letters. Unfortunately there are no modifier letters currently in Unicode for the left and right tacks (only mathematical tacks)--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 06:20, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

I'm sure the IPA Handbook, p. 183, is simply saying that one should use a diacritic in lieu of a modifier letter because ⟨˖, ˗⟩ are currently not officially recognized as part of the IPA and because the diacritics for advanced and retracted tongue root did not exist until 1989 so some might have used ⟨˖, ˗⟩ for ATR/RTR. It is clear from the previous page that it does not "recommend" that one use the tacks for horizontal relative articulation.

We could mention the horizontal tacks for relative articulation, sure, but JFYI the last time they were recommended in an official IPA publication was in 1908. (Incidentally, they were never recommended as diacritics so technically they do not overlap with the current diacritics for ATR/RTR.) The reason they fell into disuse is probably that the IPA chart was horizontally flipped since their introduction so it would have been confusing to use them (the 1921 book was already noting that some authors preferred ⟨˖, ˗⟩, which officially replaced the tacks by 1947). Have you ever found it confusing that ⟨˒⟩ stands for more rounded and ⟨˓⟩ for less rounded despite the fact that rounded vowels are usually shown to the right on a chart? This is also presumably because the chart was horizontally reversed. Nardog (talk) 17:34, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

I always understood ⊣ as "go to the left" and ⊢ "go to the right", that is some form of the arrows ↤ and ↦. Similarly, ˔ "go down" and ˕ "go up" like ↥ and ↧ (you may also think of Chinese 上 and 下). When the vowel chart was inverted, the tacks had the opposite meaning (that is, ⊣ backing and ⊢ fronting), I've checked that. For rounding: never met this much, but I understood it in a similar way: ˓ is like < (less) and ˒ like > (more). Note the former was and still used extensively in Romance studies for open vowels (particularly ę and ǫ, though you may say that the half-ring and ogonek are different diacritics, but they look practically the same).

As for ⊣ and ⊢, I've seen them particularly in A Reference Grammar of Russian by Alan Timberlake (2005), as well as in another Russian book on Russian phonetics from 1976 (Matusevich) (though the author employed a Cyrillic transcription). Plus one Russian book about general phonetics from 1979 (Lev Zinder), though the author referred to the transcription table from a 1937 book by Lev Shcherba. So you may say this is outdated, but it has occurred in some works as recent as 2005.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 10:03, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, 上/下 have served as a pretty good mnemonic to remember which direction each diacritic represented in my mind.

If the ATR/RTR diacritics are still used for relative articulation in recent literature, sure, that makes them a whole lot more worth mentioning. Nardog (talk) 23:32, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Eighth

Sol505000, it's interesting that, in responding to my added commentary on "eighth", you wrote "That's not the point", but you seemed to realize it was very much the point of my edit, as you replaced "eighth", with the complexities it presented that obscured its value as an example, with one tentative alternative before settling on another. However, if you'd like to restore the simplicity of a one-word example, in lieu of the one you arrived at that relies on the phenomenon crossing a word boundary, how about "width" or "breadth"? Largoplazo (talk) 15:00, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

But we don't want to deal with the /t/-less pronunciation of "eighth" in this article, just as we don't want to falsely claim that the phenomenon is (mainly/exclusively) an American one.

MW lists two pronunciations for each word, one with a voiced stop and one with a voiceless one. In addition, the /d/ in "breadth" can be elided just as the /t/ in "eighth". It's better to find a compound with /tθ/ or /dð/ at the morpheme boundary where there is no alternative pronunciation. Sol505000 (talk) 17:05, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

I knew you didn't want to deal with it, but it was unavoidable since the entire premise of the sentence, that there's a /t/ in "eighth", meant that every one of this article's readers for whom that's news would be inclined to consider that premise nonsense, and the example, therefore, meaningless, at least without the clue for those without a /t/ that a version with /t/ exists.

Interesting that MW shows both voiceless and voiced and omitted. It's my turn to have the consonant—as written—and to be surprised that pronunciations with the vowel omitted or unvoiced exist. So, yes, I see that "width" or "breadth" don't solve the problem after all. Largoplazo (talk) 17:30, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

glottal stop combining down tack below

if someone is looking for this grapheme, here it is: ʔ̞ . maybe someone should integrate this somewhere in this article. 2806:2F0:8040:F932:1C0B:7D47:2AFB:9BB9 (talk) 16:15, 15 June 2023 (UTC)