I've had to read the material in the corresponding WP article on Vowel as I went along. Something that has puzzled me is the statement there, in the section "Front, raised and retracted", that The conception of the tongue moving in two directions, high–low and front–back, is not supported by articulatory evidence and does not clarify how articulation affects vowel quality. Vowels may instead be characterized by the three directions of movement of the tongue from its neutral position: front, raised, and retracted. There is a reference to a paper by John Esling at the end of this section, so I suppose this comes from him (I haven't been able to get hold of the article yet). I'm afraid I can't see why the traditional open/close and front/back dimensions are inapplicable, as long as one doesn't treat them as absolute determinants of vowel quality.
Some time ago I grumbled that the Wikipedia article on Articulatory Phonetics had plenty of information about consonants but only a couple of sketchy notes about vowels. I've made a start on improving the situation by editing in a summary of the main articulatory variables affecting vowels, but it's pretty sketchy, like its predecessor. I hope that at least the framework is more appropriate. I have made no attempt to provide a detailed treatment of each of the variables - they are already amply covered in the huge network of overlapping phonetics articles in WP.
I've had to read the material in the corresponding WP article on Vowel as I went along. Something that has puzzled me is the statement there, in the section "Front, raised and retracted", that The conception of the tongue moving in two directions, high–low and front–back, is not supported by articulatory evidence and does not clarify how articulation affects vowel quality. Vowels may instead be characterized by the three directions of movement of the tongue from its neutral position: front, raised, and retracted. There is a reference to a paper by John Esling at the end of this section, so I suppose this comes from him (I haven't been able to get hold of the article yet). I'm afraid I can't see why the traditional open/close and front/back dimensions are inapplicable, as long as one doesn't treat them as absolute determinants of vowel quality.
8 Comments
4/4/2018 06:11:05 pm
"The conception of the tongue moving in two directions, high–low and front–back, is not supported by articulatory evidence". We owe the notion of backness (a continuum of vowel constriction locations from front to back) to A. M. Bell (Visible Speech 1867:15-16), an inspired guess but no more, he had no way of knowing where the tongue was. And he was wrong. He tied it in with the single-resonance theory (already flawed by Helmholtz 1863 who reported two resonances for front vowels). Bell never mentioned it again and we owe its success to the efforts of Henry Sweet and the Neo-Grammarians and after that there were too many reputations and careers bound up in it. Bell's idea was flawed again in 1911 by Léonce Roudet (La classification des voyelles de M. Sweet; Revue de Phonétique 1:347-356) who pointed out that the vowel resonance depended on the volume of the front cavity, set both by backness and height (he was in fact arguing that height and backness would be mutually compensating and not the independent parameters Bell intended). The Bell model has never been confirmed by X-ray studies. Jones had made X-rayed profiles of his cardinal vowels in 1917 and immediately ran into trouble that took 15 years to work around. He finally withheld all the images except the four corner vowels. The full story is here: https://swphonetics.com/2018/03/04/150th-anniversary-of-the-bell-vowel-model-5/ and on other pages. Good luck.
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Peter
8/4/2018 06:29:06 pm
Thanks for the clarification and useful references. I appreciate that it would be impossible to demonstrate a clear relationship between tongue frontness/backness and perceived vowel quality or measured formant structure. But is it incorrect to state (as a matter of physiology, not of phonetics) that the tongue may be moved forward and backwards in the mouth in such a way that the highest point of the tongue may be observed to be nearer to the front or to the back of the oral cavity?
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16/4/2018 05:07:40 pm
I'd like to expand my first post, then take your comments.
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16/4/2018 05:17:10 pm
My post was too long and the end was excluded. Here it is:
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Peter
17/4/2018 10:01:20 am
It's really valuable to have all this explained so clearly. I wish I could think of a way of getting at least the general points into Wikipedia to correct the pervasive view of fonrt/back vowels.
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17/4/2018 02:50:47 pm
You're welcome. I've never contributed to Wikipedia because of their principle "Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles", together with anonymity. I don't want to spend a lot of time writing something and then have to defend it against anonymous comments or even see it edited.
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22/4/2018 12:24:44 pm
I realise that wasn't very helpful. A new article is probably the way to go rather than attempt to modify an existing article. I'll see what I can manage during the summer.
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A blog that discusses problems in Wikipedia's coverage of Phonetics
Emeritus Professor of Phonetics, uArchives
January 2021
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