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  Peter Roach

Cardinal Vowels and Phonetic Training

20/2/2015

2 Comments

 
Carrying on from my previous posting about Wikipedia's treatment of Cardinal  Vowels (I'm never sure whether it's appropriate to use capital letters for these), I have submitted a short article about phonetic training. This hasn't been reviewed by WP editors yet, but the draft can (I think) be seen here. I'd be glad of suggestions for improvement - there is still time to make changes.

I have a number of concerns about the WP article on Cardinal Vowels, some of which I have already mentioned. 
1. I think it's essential to make it clear that the system works through training in its use, something which is not mentioned in the article.
2. Although the CV diagram in the Cardinal Vowels article looks to me like the real thing, the vowel diagrams on all the dependent articles on specific vowels reproduce the Wikipedia version which has a lot of extra vowels added. In what I will call the WP-CV diagram you get this (note that WP labels this "IPA vowel chart"):
 
Picture
So in addition to the traditional primary and secondary vowels, we have a row of five Mid vowels, two open central vowels and two near-close central vowels ɪ̈ and ʊ̈. I can't see why these are thought to be useful.
3. The distinction between Primary and Secondary Cardinal Vowels is a very old one. I have never read a proper justification for the use of this distinction. Why are Primary vowels primary? Is it (as I suspect) because they are thought to be easier to learn and produce by speakers of European languages, while Secondary vowels are the hard ones for us? I think that in the context of the languages of the world it is wrong to imply that in some way Primary vowels are "unmarked" and Secondary "marked".


The next step in sorting out WP's treatment of CV's is to consider the recorded examples. Leaving aside the controversial Mid and Central vowels for now, it sounds to me as if some of these recordings need to be improved. [ɛ] has a lot of noise in the recording. [a] is not fully front and [ɑ ] is not fully back. [ɔ] is too close. [œ] is a poor-quality recording. The [Œ] vowel, admittedly a rare and difficult beast, sounds nowhere near what I would expect - it is not rounded enough, open enough or front enough. [ʌ] is not back enough. Finally, [ɨ] sounds rounded to me.
2 Comments
Sidney Wood link
21/2/2015 06:40:37 am

Your 2. The Cardinal Vowel system of reference timbres was Daniel Jones' invention (although the expression cardinal vowel and the longitue/latitude metaphor go back to A M Bell, and perhaps beyond). This is history, and the DJ CVs will celebrate their centenary in a year or two. So DJ's original version is to be preferred to any anonymous modification appearing later.

Your 3. DJ certainly didn't justify the terms primary and secondary in the 3rd edn of the Outline (1932), the earliest I can check. I've always understood that the primary sequence was vowel timbres that would occur first in a language, and any secondary vowel would presuppose the existence of the corresponding primary vowel. So you would go to the primary sequence first when working on a language, and only go to the secondary sequence if it turned out to be necessary.

Recordings. Since this is history, DJ's original gramophone recording should be adequate. That was, after all, the standard for many years (like the metre in Paris). It should be possible to get a good professionally made recording from a disc that's still in good condition.

Reply
ثني ير link
29/8/2020 07:36:42 pm

ver y good is use ful for me

Reply



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    A blog that discusses problems in Wikipedia's coverage of Phonetics

    Peter Roach

    Emeritus Professor of Phonetics,
    ​University of Reading, UK

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