[NOTE: I HAVE NOW EDITED THE WIKIPEDIA PAGES ON 'VOWEL LENGTH', 'ENGLISH PHONOLOGY' AND 'RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION' TO CORRECT THE VOWEL LENGTHENING/VOWEL SHORTENING PROBLEM DESCRIBED BELOW]

​I have noticed that an old fallacy survives in a couple of Wikipedia articles. In Vowel length and in English phonology you find the statement (made without any citation to support it) that English vowels are lengthened when followed by voiced (lenis) consonants or in an open syllable. The correct statement is that vowels are shortened when they are followed by a voiceless (fortis) consonant. You can see this in the descriptions in Cruttenden’s Gimson, section 8.4.1. The basic scientific work was published in 1970 by Matthew Chen in an interesting article entitled ‘Vowel length variation as a function of the consonant environment’ (Phonetica, 22, 129-59). I have written about this issue very briefly in ‘English Phonetics and Phonology’ (page 29 in the latest edition, in “problems and further reading”, 4.4.)  A simple “do-it-yourself” test is to measure your pronunciation of ‘ride’, ‘rye’ and ‘right’. The duration of the diphthong in ‘rye’, being in a zero-coda syllable, may be taken as the baseline duration. ‘Ride’ will show a very similar duration, but ‘right’ will have a markedly shorter duration. I will edit the two articles (and any others I find with the same error) and also remove the “generative rule” included in the Vowel length article (which is not only ad hoc and unnecessary, but also wrong).

Just a follow-up to my recent post about the unsatisfactory section headed "Prosody and intonation" in Wikipedia's article on Vowels. I've removed quite a lot of this section and rewritten the rest, but kept the title Prosody and intonation. I hope that has improved it a bit. At least it now has a couple of references.

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.

The Wikipedia coverage of vowels is on the whole pretty comprehensive. In the article on Vowels all the variables that characterize vowels are listed one by one, with the odd exception of vowel length or quantity. To find information on that topic, you have to look further down in the article, to a section entitled Prosody and intonation. Something that immediately looks dodgy about that section is that it carries no references to published material, something that in general Wikipedia does not approve of. A lot of the section is, as you might expect, about stress, tone and intonation, all of which are aspects of speech that I think of as syllable-related, not specifically vowel-related, and all of which are covered comprehensively in other WP articles. It seems to me that basic information on vowel length is relevant and should be retained, but the rest of the material should be removed. However, a sentence in the lead paragraph might perhaps mention that vowels are involved in prosodic variables. What’s left should be re-titled “Vowel quantity” and moved up to be appended to the list of vowel variables.
There is, in fact, a separate WP article on Vowel length, about which I will write some comments later. Meanwhile I will try to tidy up the Vowel article.

Wikipedia has a rather cursory treatment of the term Phoneme, and I noticed that there was almost no mention of the possibility of choosing alternative analyses of phonemic systems such as the English vowel system, in spite of the fact that there was a great debate during the early and middle 20th century (before Generative Phonology) around this topic. It was usually known as the “God’s Truth vs. hocus-pocus” debate. A key paper was Yuen Ren Chao’s catchily-titled ‘The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems’. When I first taught in the Linguistic Science Department at Reading University we used to get the first year Linguistics students to read the various papers on the subject in Martin Joos’s collection of papers Readings in Linguistics 1 (I never liked the sequel, Readings in Linguistics 2). To be honest, I don’t think the students really enjoyed reading them. Still, it seems odd that so many publications on the phonemes of English still seem stuck in the God’s Truth camp. It seems to be commonplace to state without reservation that English (well, RP) has twenty or more vowel phonemes. Sometimes writers note in passing that this is a bigger total of vowel phonemes than one finds in the world’s other languages. It is, indeed, massively bigger, considering that most other languages have only a handful. Yet it is perfectly possible (as I have pointed out before) to analyse the vowel phonemes of English in a different (perhaps hocus-pocus) way that reduces their number to seven or six, if one should wish to.
​
I have now added a section to the Phoneme article called “The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions”, and I am waiting to see if anyone objects to it. So far, it has just received one attack of vandalism!

A happy New Year to all.

[NOTE: I HAVE NOW ADDED NAMES OF SOME WOMEN WHO HAVE BEEN DESCRIBED AS RP SPEAKERS. NOT EVERYONE WILL AGREE WITH THE CHOICES, AND THE SOURCES ARE NOT IMPECCABLE]


I don't want to keep coming back to the Wikipedia article on Received Pronunciation, but it's one of WP's most controversial topics and it gets a lot of attention (some of it unwelcome). What I am complaining about at the moment is the section on "Notable RP speakers", which has been there for years. The problem with this section is that all the speakers listed are male, with the exception that the reference to The British Royal Family necessarily includes some royal female speakers.

I could easily come up with a list of female speakers that I would consider to be speakers of RP as defined in this article, but I'm not going to. For a start, I don't believe in RP any more than I believe in Father Christmas. If I did believe in it, I wouldn't include the Royal Family as RP speakers. Finally, it's not possible just to add new names to the list of notables, because only people who have been cited by name in a published source will be acceptable to Wikipedia (Dame Vera Lynn used to be on the list, but I removed her name because no reference was given). What all the listed speakers have in common is that they have been classed as RP speakers by John Wells in his blog, which is acceptable as a citation. Phoneticians other than John Wells are acceptable sources.

So here's the challenge: if you would like to see a proper representation of women speakers and you care about what WP says about RP, publish your list of female speakers somewhere other than WP (a blog will do), and the names can then be added to the present list. If you prefer, you could send me your list and I'll publish it here.

[I HAVE NOW EDITED THE PL ARTICLE TO INCLUDE SOME OF THE MISSING INFORMATION]

Reading the Wikipedia article on Peter Ladefoged, I notice that the role he played in the IPA doesn’t get proper recognition. The relevant bit says “Ladefoged was also a member of the International Phonetic Association for a long time, and was involved in maintaining its International Phonetic Alphabet. He was also editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association.”
 
I think the article ought to record how long PL was a member of the IPA – I imagine his membership must have been very long. I think the bit about his being "involved in maintaining its International Phonetic Alphabet" ought to make a mention of the importance of his contribution to the 1989 Kiel Conference - in fact, the Wikipedia article on the Kiel Conference itself makes no mention of him beyond listing various related publications of his. The article should also record that he was President of the IPA – I believe that was from 1986 to 1991. And I must say I have no recollection of him ever having been editor of JIPA.
 
I’d be glad if anyone could give me the relevant facts. I’ll be happy to make the necessary corrections.

I normally write here to criticize things that I find wrong with Wikipedia's coverage of phonetics and phoneticians, so it's a pleasure to make a note for once of a really good article that appeared recently. This is on Lilias Armstrong, a UCL phonetician of great accomplishment who is not now well known. I learned a lot from reading it (as I did from studying her Phonetics of French​).

​Vowels
 
I have recently had a rather bizarre email correspondence with someone about his theory of vowels and consonants, from which belief I have been unable to shake him. The theory is that “vowels start with a fully closed, blocked glottis with the vocal folds pressed together. Consonants start with a non-closed glottis”. This, according to my correspondent, is what distinguishes the two classes of speech sound.
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It is, of course, notoriously difficult to produce a watertight definition of vowel and consonant. If we leave aside the phonological definitions that have been advanced (that’s a different story), we are looking at the physical characteristics of the two sound classes. In Wikipedia’s article on Vowel, the lead paragraph gets off on the wrong foot: … a vowel is a sound pronounced with an open vocal tract, so that the tongue does not touch the lips, teeth, or roof of the mouth, such as the English "ah" /ɑː/ or "oh" /oʊ/.  Most phonetics textbooks mention the fact that the tongue makes contact with the upper molar teeth in non-open vowels. Additionally, palatography has shown that the tongue makes contact with the outer edges of the palate in the case of front close and front close-mid vowels. There are clear illustrations of this in Daniel Jones’ Outline of English Phonetics (see Fig 37, p. 65 for /i:/), and he also gives palatograms for “short I” and /e/. Interestingly, he says that his English /u:/ does not produce a palatogram – I think that’s true for me too, but my Cardinal  7 and 8 certainly do have tongue-palate contact at the back of the palate.

​Searching for other articles in Wikipedia that might discuss the definition of vowel, I looked at the vowel section of Articulatory Phonetics. The entire section reads as follows:
Vowels
·         Nasal vowel / Oral vowel
·         Previous Vowel / Later Vowel
·         Rounded vowel / Unrounded vowel
·         Open vowel / Close vowel
 
It seems a rather cut-price approach simply to list a few points with links to other articles. And goodness knows what the relevance of “Previous vowel/Later vowel” is. Some work is definitely needed here.

A proposal has been made by a Wikipedia editor to "deprecate" (i.e. stop using) the symbols /ᵻ, ᵿ/ in the transcription of English in Wikipedia. These are the special non-phonemic symbols invented by Clive Upton for the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation, to stand for "either /ɪ/ or /ə/" and "either /ʊ/ or /ə/" respectively. Wikipedia users are invited to vote on whether they want to keep or drop these symbols here. You can also see the reasons put forward for abandoning the symbols.

So far, nobody seems to want to keep them.