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How can you tell from the formants (or whatever) of a vowel if it's rounded? — Felix the Cassowary ɑe hɪː jɐ 10:24, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
I'd really like to see a source on this endolabial vs. exolabial rounding. 72.130.89.63 ( talk) 04:12, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
I second the request on the source for the endolabial vs. exolabial with reguard to front and back rounded vowels. Kunoodle ( talk) 05:20, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
WellsTribute ( talk) 10:57, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
This article has a number of embarrassing confusions in it:-
a. Is it about rounding in vowels, or rounding in consonants, or both? It announces vowels as its topic in the first line, but refers piecemeal to consonants. Since the Wikipedia article on Consonants deals with consonantal rounding, and says that this present article deals with rounding of vowels, consonantal rounding should be dropped here.
b. Is compression a type of rounding or not? The first sentence under "Types of rounding" says that it is, but the remark about Iroquoian labials only makes sense if it is not. The claim that compression is not a type of rounding is specifically made in the Wikipedia article on Vowels. It is not substantiated, however. It appears to rest on two papers by Mona Lindau from 1975 and 1978 (mentioned in Trask's Dictionary). Since it hasn't reached the mainstream in the intervening 30 years, it shouldn't be given airspace.
c. 'Protruded/non-protruded' is not the only dimension along which vowel-rounding can vary. Rounding can also be:
- 'less/greater' (the corners of the mouth can be drawn together to a lesser or greater degree);
- 'less open/more open' (the aperture can be narrower or wider).
(See O'Connor, "Phonetics", p. 37, and Laver, "Principles of Phonetics", p. 278.) See 'less/greater' dimension is covered in the article, but not the 'less open/more open' dimension.
d. The distinction between protruded and non-protruded vowels has a smaller place in the literature than the distinction between 'less open' and 'more open' vowels, and a smaller place anyway than this article suggests. It gets, for example, no mention at all in the following standard reference works:
- Catford's 'Practical Introduction'
- Clark, Yallop & Fletcher's 'Outline of Phonology'
- Crystal's 'Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonology'
- Crystal's 'Cambridge Encyclopedia'
- Ladefoged's 'Course in Phonetics'
- O'Connor's 'Phonetics'
- Pike's 'Phonetics'
and only a brief mention in:
- Catford's 'Fundamental Problems'
- Ladefoged's & Maddieson's 'Sounds of the World's Languages'
- Laver's 'Principles of Phonetics'
e. 'Endolabial/exolabial' are the wrong terms: they are not synonyms for 'protruded/non-protruded', and are not used as synonyms in any of the works listed above. They actually mean 'using the inside/outside of the lip', with no implication as to whether the lip is rounded or not. This is specifically stated by Catford ('Fundamentals', p. 146), and clear from Trask. (The Note to the current article makes it look as though Trask claims they're synonyms for 'protruded/non-protruded', but he doesn't.) Catford's use of 'exolabio-exolabial' (not simply 'exolabial') is surely a pedantic joke - he has in an earlier chapter set up 'exolabio-exolabial', 'endolabio-exolabial', 'exolabio-endolabial' and 'endolabio-endolabial' as possible descriptors of lip-action, whether rounded or unrounded.
f. 'Vertically compressed' is an unhappy term - does it mean that pressure is applied from the sides, or from top and bottom? Trask uses 'horizontal compression' for non-protruded vowels; Catford ('Fundamentals') uses 'compressed vertically' for non-protruded vowels; and Lad&Mad use 'vertical compression' for protruded vowels. Laver, fortunately, is clear: non-protruded vowels have not only horizontal compression (in that the corners of the mouth are drawn in, creating rounding), but also vertical compression (in that the flesh displaced upwards and downwards by drawing in the corners is pressed back towards the teeth). Protruded vowels have horizontal compression (mouth-corners drawn in) but no vertical compression.
g. 'Endolabial/exolabial' have their meanings reversed in some (but not all!) Wikipedia articles, and on the bottom photograph in this article (both lower photographs show protruded lips, and are therefore 'endolabial' in this terminology.) The terms were also reversed on earlier photographs attached to this article, are currently reversed in Wiktionary, and reversed in many citations from Wikipedia on other web-sites, as shown by Google. The present article should include a note acknowledging this.
h. The claim that back rounded vowels are usually protruded and front rounded vowels non-protruded is not well-founded, despite appearing frequently in Wikipedia's articles on vowels. Catford states it briefly in 'Fundamental Problems', but produces no data; Clark, Yallop & Fletcher quote Catford, and again produce no data. None of the other standard works noted above mentions it - and if it were true, then it would surely feature in Ladefoged & Maddieson.
i. The claim that protrusion vs. non-protrusion can be phonemic is overstated. The Swedish case is far from certain - the two vowels in question also vary in length, position and off-glide. (See the discussion in Ladefoged & Maddieson; and note that Engstrand doesn't support the claim in his IPA Handbook article.) And the claim about Dutch is simply false. The IPA Journal has published analyses of six varieties of Dutch recently (1983(13/2), 1998(28), 1999(29), 2005(35/2), 2006(36/1), 2007(37/2)), as well as Gussenhoven's Handbook account, and none of them mentions such a distinction. Perhaps the contributor who entered this was confused by a reference to an endolabial (but not rounded) Dutch consonant in JIPA 1982(12/1). Given that the phonemic case is so weak, the unspecific nature of the term 'rounded' and the lack of an IPA diacritic are trivial.
j. A couple of minor points: (i) Note 4 says, "The convention is to use the asterisk," but this is not an IPA convention, and if (as stated) it's not done in the literature then it isn't a convention anyway. (ii) The opening of the second para. under 'Types of rounding' repeats material in the first para.
What I propose is this:
- remove references to consonants
- remove suggestions that compression (non-protrusion) is not a type of rounding
- add an account of narrower and wider apertures
- shorten the discussion on protruded vs. non-protruded
- replace 'endolabial' with 'protruded', and 'exolabial' with 'non-protruded'
- drop 'compressed'
- remove or soften the claim that back rounded vowels are protruded and front rounded vowels non-protruded
- remove or soften the claim of phonemic status for protruded/non-protruded
- clean up the account of what Trask says, and remove the 'endo/exo' reference to Catford
- add an acknowledgement of past errors
- add photographs (if I get permission) of narrow/wide aperture and protruded/non-protruded lip-positions
If there are no well-founded objections to the considerations I've put forward here, I'll start on the revisions in a week or so.
Sorry this is so long. WellsTribute ( talk) 00:21, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
It also looks as though endo- and exo- are reversed in the photo, given our current definitions. kwami ( talk) 01:47, 14 July 2009 (UTC)
1. The change (on 16th July) from "compressed vowels are rare" to "compressed vowels where protruded would be expected are rare" misrepresents the literature. The rarity of attested compressed vowels makes the protruded/compressed distinction unimportant, and that information ought not to be suppressed. I've reverted the edit.
2. Endo/exolabial are not the words used in the literature for this phenomenon, and Wikipedia's job is to mediate between between the layman and the academic accounts. I propose to change them to "protruded/compressed" pretty soon.
WellsTribute ( talk) 23:55, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for making the change, Kwami. WellsTribute ( talk) 17:29, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
kwami asked me for my help about identifying the three vowels in the picture. From the top, they look like [i, ʉ, y] respectively. The latter could be [ʏ]], but I'm not too sure about that.
Peter Isotalo 12:40, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
The article only lists Vietnamese as a language for which roundedness is a distinguishing characteristic for back vowels. But isn't it one for English? 24.136.232.57 ( talk) 04:51, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
I've been speaking English my whole life, and I don't think I've ever used vowel rounding in it. I can't really figure out the descriptions though. If some dialects use vowel rounding, then either it's an important split or its loss is an important merger. 96.231.17.131 ( talk) 16:11, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
Whenever I encounter an article referencing pronunciation on Wikipedia I end up on an endlessly recursive quest trying to understand the arcane explanations and descriptions, that are always defined in terms I do not understand which in turn are explained in the same obscure fashion. No-where, it seems, on the whole of Wikipedia is an accessible explanation of the basic principles and framework for understanding linguistics, phonetics and pronunciation that does not assume prior familiarity with the intimate details of the subject.
I don't struggle as much to understand articles on such abstractions as relativity, mathematics, art, music or even theology. It seems there are those who use language and those who study it, and the former must be kept from understanding why and how they say what they say so that the latter can study them.
In this article I need to understand labialisation, front vowels, back vowels and how to determine the height of a vowel just to understand the first introductory paragraph. And this is one of the less opaque articles on phonetics.
Quite simply, in my view linguistic articles on Wikipedia are consistently the most poorly explained; they are written as if for a phonetic textbook, not an encyclopaedia.
PLEASE! Can someone who does understand all this gibberish (and to me it is gibberish until I can find explanations that use plain English rather than being self-referential) tackle this and other pages with a linguistic bent and ensure that each one defines its core material in a way that doesn't need further research to understand it. 23:35, 30 December 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Stub Mandrel ( talk • contribs)
I've always been perplexed at how English front vowels, at least when enunciated, are produced with noticeably different shapes of the lips compared to, say, [ɑ] or [ə], yet most texts only make distinction between rounded and unrounded. Sure enough, Cruttenden (2014:15) defines "spread" lip position as the lips being "held sufficiently far apart for no friction to be heard, yet remaining fairly close together and energetically spread ... taken up for vowels like that in see when energetically enunciated", and refers to the lips being "held in a relaxed position with a lowering of the lower jaw ... taken up for the vowel of sat" as "neutral". I think this should be incorporated into the article, but I don't know if I'm well enough equipped to do so myself right now and need more research. Nardog ( talk) 14:52, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
Apparently unrounded vowels can also be divided into two groups (spread and neutral) much like rounded ones, according to the IPA Handbook. So there are four classifications for the lip position of a vowel in total. Maybe this article should be moved to Lip position or something. Nardog ( talk) 03:36, 1 August 2017 (UTC)