It's time to take another look at the issues raised by the coverage of Articulatory Settings and related matters in Wikipedia, which I first mentioned here. If you look at the very valuable comments that have been added by a number of contributors you can see that there's a lot to think about. The discussion started with the observation that WP had only a very short article on Basis of Articulation but nothing on Articulatory Settings. I added a bit of extra material to 'Basis of Articulation' and inserted a redirect so that anyone searching for 'Articulatory Setting' would be taken to 'Basis of Articulation'.
At present I feel there are some basic issues to consider, some of them suggested by email correspondence with Piers Messum and Jose Mompean. One is that it is by no means clear that a single article should cover both 'Basis of Articulation' and 'Articulatory Setting' - there is a good case to be made for treating them as separate subjects. Secondly, the subject of Articulatory Settings is by no means as neglected as I thought when I started looking at WP's coverage - a lot of very interesting research has been published in the last decade or so, and this needs to be reflected in the article. Thirdly, there is no WP article at all on the very important subject of Voice Quality despite the large body of work on the subject within phonetics, so another WP article is badly needed here. It's interesting that WP has separate articles on Phonation and Voicing which for many people are the same topic.
To make a proper job of improving this complex area is going to be beyond my powers, but I am willing to make a start. Anyone can edit WP, of course, so please don't hold back if you want to contribute material. But I am starting work on a basic and brief outline of Voice Quality to submit for the WP refereeing process. Once this is accepted and added to WP, anyone interested can edit more material in, or correct errors. I will have to leave it to others to discuss whether 'Basis of Articulation' and 'Articulatory Setting' should be split into two articles.
At present I feel there are some basic issues to consider, some of them suggested by email correspondence with Piers Messum and Jose Mompean. One is that it is by no means clear that a single article should cover both 'Basis of Articulation' and 'Articulatory Setting' - there is a good case to be made for treating them as separate subjects. Secondly, the subject of Articulatory Settings is by no means as neglected as I thought when I started looking at WP's coverage - a lot of very interesting research has been published in the last decade or so, and this needs to be reflected in the article. Thirdly, there is no WP article at all on the very important subject of Voice Quality despite the large body of work on the subject within phonetics, so another WP article is badly needed here. It's interesting that WP has separate articles on Phonation and Voicing which for many people are the same topic.
To make a proper job of improving this complex area is going to be beyond my powers, but I am willing to make a start. Anyone can edit WP, of course, so please don't hold back if you want to contribute material. But I am starting work on a basic and brief outline of Voice Quality to submit for the WP refereeing process. Once this is accepted and added to WP, anyone interested can edit more material in, or correct errors. I will have to leave it to others to discuss whether 'Basis of Articulation' and 'Articulatory Setting' should be split into two articles.
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