Acoustic Phonetics Puns

Hi guys,

I've not read any physics for a few years since I left high school plus my high school education wasn't in English so I got a bit lost when reading some stuff about acoustic analysis in phonetics (like slow resonance frequency, rapid resonance frequency, and other things about (sound) waves). I want to re-educate myself on physics to better understand acoustic phonetics.

Do you know any resources on physics which target adults to self-taught? I mostly interested in what related to phonetics but also want to pick up other basic knowledge (feeling ashamed as an ex-natural-science student).

https://preview.redd.it/ngzvnc6q10331.png?width=550&format=png&auto=webp&s=c3433e80bb7590c367d4b13add2540f60c8c413d

Hey all -- my name is Mai and I'm a doctoral student that does research on all sorts of things related to voice and vocal tract movements. That includes speech production, non-speech vocalizations like "uh"s and "um"s, coughing, laughing, and finally, Tourette's vocal tics! Do people want to know more about this?

I could go on and on, but to summarize, it's not very well understood how we control the movements of our larynx (the structure holding the vocal folds) during goal-directed vocal behaviors, like speech, or urge-based behaviors, like vocal tics.

If anyone wants to know more, hit me up! I'm trying to record as many people as possible in the next few months. Even if you aren't interested in participating, I'd love to hear your questions, comments, suggestions--whatever.

Happy to be on here and looking forward to exchanging ideas with y'all!

Hi everybody.

I've been studying linguistics for four years. I'm interested in corpus linguistics and phonetics. I've been thinking about starting to learn more about acoustic phonetics but since my university doesn't provide any acoustic phonetic course I'm kind of confused because all the stuff I've seen on the Internet seems extremely difficult to grasp. My questions are:

• Do you know any book(s) that you would recommend for a beginner. I'm talking about a book that explain everything from scratch i.e. the formants, vowel analysis etc.
• The same question but about the program Praat. I've used it several times but it's quite complex. Are there any manuals for a johnny-come-lately like me in this field?
• How much time do you think it takes to really understand it, at least the basis, and to be able to analyze something on my own?
• If there's someone who's been working on acoustic phonetics: is it worth of trying? I know that kind of question is never an easy one to answer but how does your acoustic phonetic knowledge change your view on linguistics in general?

Thank you in advance for each reply :)

I was viewing some vowel definitions and was very surprised to find out they could be easily applied to consonants or were simply incorrect. Some examples:

Consonant related

1. Sounds produced with the vibration of the vocal folds and modified by the different types of stricture in the mouth cavity. 2. Sounds produced with narrowing of the vocal tract without friction of the air.

Incorrect when referring to every vowel

3. Sounds in wich the airstream passes unimpeded through the nasal and oral cavities.

Phonology gives us an answer but only for the languages that have vowel forming a syllable's nucleus, wich isn't always the case.

To me it seems that the only good for all characteristic of vowels lies in acoustic phonetics: we can increase vowels in pitch and it's waveform is periodic, consonants can't have their pitch altered and it's waveform is non-periodic. Though I put that into question too considering how I lack knowledge in this branch of phonetical studies.

Hey everyone, as an university student who is interested in phonetics, I've decided that I want to write my Bachelor's thesis about a phonetics related topic. However, my school's library lacks literature which would help me with my research for the thesis. Since I'm planning to do most of my research through Praat, I feel like I'm lacking a lot of knowledge related to acoustic/experimental phonetics. That's why I'd like to ask you, do you know of any good books that could help me get into this linguistic branch? Ideally it would be a book that would introduce me to the basics, as well as point me to some more in depth problems which this branch is concerned with. Thank you :)

I'm analyzing a speech corpus that has a distinction between geminated and nongeminated consonants and wanted to know what was the perceptibility threshold in relation to duration of speech signal. In other words, how much should a consonant sound last for it to be humanly perceptible? Am I right in thinking that, if X milliseconds is the absolute perceptibility threshold for a given consonant sound, then its geminated version should last at least 2X milliseconds for it to be correctly perceived as geminated?

Is there an absolute, non-language-relative answer to this question?

Hi- sorry if this should be posted somewhere else, but I think posting this in this subreddit has the highest chance of getting the attention of someone who can help.

I'm taking a class on Phonetic Analysis and there's some acoustic phonetics material that I'm having trouble wrapping my head around- spectra.

So I understand that the x-axis is frequency/pitch and the y-axis is sound pressure/amplitude/loudness/whatever, but I'm having trouble really understanding and reading them. What exactly is it showing? And what exactly does a period relate to? I understand what I see when I look at a waveform, partly because there's time? So I can see it as something happening over the span of time. But with spectra there's no time shown really, so I guess that makes it harder for me to visualize/understand it.

If a period is like 12 ms or something, how does that compare to 50 ms or what? And for harmonics, whats the point of them? What do they show? Whats the point of finding them out? To find the fundamental frequency? I really just am totally confused, I don't care if this makes me look dumb. I had tutorial work and I did the work, but it took a couple of hours of staring at things and rereading notes and stuff. How do you tell the pitch from a spectra?

Sorry if this is nonsensical. :O

http://67.225.133.110/~gbpprorg/mil/mindcontrol

http://www.amazonwebworld.com/NSA.htm

From: (Redacted) Newsgroups: alt.mindcontrol

Could Subjected : The NSA and Mind Control

Date: 20 Aug 1999 08:50:21 GMT

NSA mind control and psyops

The following was sent to me by Will Filer (edit email address redacted) on July 27, 1999. It offers a new explanation for government mind control. Will has stated to me that he is a former consultant to the U.S. National Security Agency and asked me to post this information immediately. He also believes he is in immediate danger because of this information.

If you have comments on this document, feel free to post them to the MINDCONTROL-L list.

Wes Thomas, moderator, MINDCONTROL-L list

http://whale.to/b/nsa4.html

Near is /nɪɹ/ and so on. Shouldn't it be /niɹ/ instead?

*Beer not Bear lol

Toki pona has a fairly small phonemic inventory, so it should be possible to create a whistled mode that doesn't actually produce any ambiguity. Doing so while minimizing violence to the natural consonant formants and still maximizing distinguishability is a little bit tricky, though. A natural whistle language derived from toki pona would probably end up collapsing several of the already-short list of words into homophones, but by picking a larger-than-strictly-necessary consonant space with mappings based on Silbo Gomero, and shifting just one consonant (specifically, w) out of its most natural place, we end up with a system that can encode toki pona with perfect fidelity at the lexical level. And since synthesizing whistles basically just requires basic FM sine-wave synthesis (unlike all the complicatedness of a normal human voice synthesizer), I went ahead and knocked out a whistled-speech audio synthesizer for toki pona: toki-suli. (The name is a reference to the fact that natural whistle languages develop to support communication over Big distances--e.g., between mountain peaks or across a savanna.)

(Apologies for not writing all of this in toki pona, but, uh... my toki pona is weak anyway, and I haven't the slightest clue how to approach technical details of acoustic phonetics in it!)

The vowel inventory is a little inconvenient, but it turns out there are no minimal pairs between i/e and o/u in the Classic Word List, so we can get a whistled-Turkish-esque three vowel system by collapsing those pairs and then mapping the vowels as follows:

i: high
a: mid
o: low

The already-small consonant inventory could be further reduced with carefully-chosen and not particularly naturalistic mergers, but that turns out not to be necessary, and the resulting whistled phonology is more interesting for keeping all 9 consonants.

In order to map all of toki pona's consonants into the whistling modality, we'll set up 4 consonant loci, using a hybrid between Silbo Gomero and Whistled Turkish phonology:

1. Grave - formant motion downward
2. Mid - no formant motion, just amplitude modulation
3. Acute - formant motion upwards, not necessarily leaving the vowel space if starting from <a> or <o>
4. Sharp - formant motion upwards to a target well above the vowel space

And there are 3 manners of articulation:

1. Interrupted - sound cuts off and restarts abruptly, with a silent period.
2. Continuous - amplitu

Well, my whistling conlang now has a name: Tjugem, which is the transcription of a simple whistle sequence that covers the entire frequency range from highest to lowest with each class of consonant (interrupted, continuous, delayed; and acute, mid, grave) represented once, and in order.

Those consonant categories form a nice square grid of 9 total consonants:

There is a phonetic motivation for the transcription, and it is intended to be pronounceable "normally" if one so desires, but keep in mind that neither the English nor the IPA values for these characters indicate the actual official pronunciation, which is defined in terms of whistles.

There are also 7 vowels based on tone contours:

H: i
HM: ja
HL: ju
L: u
LM: wa
LH: wi
Schwa: e

I made us of my generic whistle synthesizer library to put together an acoustic model for the language and published it on GitHub here: https://github.com/gliese1337/Tjugem
There is also a sample .wav file there with a pronunciation of the name 'Tjugem'. I say "a" pronunciation rather than "the" pronunciation because, while it is technically accurate, the precise phonetic details may end up getting tweaked. Right now, for example, there is no assimilation of precise consonant and vowel targets to the surrounding environment, and I'm not entirely sure of the precise timings used for different segments and sub-segments. (Also, of course, the whole thing can be transposed to different frequency ranges and speech rates.)

The phonology per se is not super interesting, as most of my phonologically-relevant effort is going towards phonetic details. There are, however, a few potentially-interesting details:

Phonemically, syllable structure is strictly CV, except that all words must also end with an extra consonant (which at the moment is a physical articulatory constraint, given how consonants have been defined--although that *might* change...) If there is no phonemic word-final consonant, an epenthetic /k/ is inserted.

The schwa vowel has effectively no realization of its own; it exists entirely as a zero-length mobile frequency target whose value is determined by the surrounding consonants (specifying exactly how that works is the single largest section of the acoustic model for feeding into the synthesizer). Theoretically, certain pairs of consonants could be directly in hiatus

I'm reading Hyman and Plank's (2018) Phonological Typology, and I found some passage:

> phonology is no longer the unified subfield that it once was

>it is becoming harder for phonologists to talk to each other, for who can be a computer scientist, phonetician, neurolinguist and expert in adjacent fields such as morphology and syntax at the same time as having a command of the extensive literature on phonology-internal argumentation and phonological typology?

And my teacher also said that it is not really any "camps" in phonology like what is in syntax, because the field is too fragmented, with no central framework(s). And I may be wrong but it seems like in Syntax not very much people are expected to be well-verse in more than one Syntax theory, but many Phonology curriculum expect the student coming out knowing at least Rule-based phonology, OT, and Autosegmental phonology (and may be also Feature Geometry and Metrical phonology).

What do you think? Is phonology any more fragmented than other linguistic discipline like syntax, morphology, etc.? Is there any attempt to unify the field again (perhaps like when Newmeyer tried to bridge between formalist and functionalist)?

I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.

Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.

Taking a stab here because there is no Praat subreddit. Btw, why not? And the acoustics subreddit does not seem to deal with this type of acoustics. I am also going to crosspost in r/phonetics.

I wrote a script that worked beautifully on all of my test files (yay!). When I went to run it on all 240 real files, it kicked up this error on file 6. I am measuring VOT by having two point tiers - one marking the burst and one marking the onset of voicing. The script is just doing simple subtraction. I thought, maybe this is a negative VOT and Praat doesn't like that for some reason, but I checked and that is not the case. When I Google the error, I just get a script written by Paul Boersma that has this line in it, but I am not sure what it is doing there (https://github.com/praat/praat/blob/master/fon/praat_TextGrid_init.cpp).

The script is also doing a ton of other stuff on multiple other interval tiers. For example, it measures formants, duration, and F0. However, since the error specifically mentions point, and the VOT is the only measurement making use of the point tier, I think that must be the issue.

Anyway, anybody know what this error is or why I might be getting it? I would appreciate any help at all.

Do your worst!

I'm surprised it hasn't decade.

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

It really does, I swear!

Since we intend to start posting more about linguistics, it's a good idea to provide a post explaining some linguistic concepts that not everyone might be familiar with and listing abbreviations used. This post will be gradually edited when needed, i.e. every time a new concept is mentioned or a new abbreviation is used.

CONCEPTS

• Lexicon - the complete set of meaningful units in a language (= words)
• Linguistic genetic relationship - the relationship between languages that are members of the same language family, a group of languages that share common origins. Example: English and Dutch are related because they are part of the Germanic language family.
• Sound changes - changes in the pronunciation of a language over time. All languages are always changing, there is no such thing as a 'static' language. How fast and how much a language changes is not defined by regular standards, therefore not all languages change at the same speed, and a language does not change uniformly across time: many changes may happen during a given period, while in a different period lasting the same amount of years there may be fewer changes.
• Proto-Language - the once-spoken ancestral language from which a number of languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. This linguistic evolution includes (but is not limited to) sound changes; languages also evolve their morphology, syntax, lexicon, and other linguistic aspects. A proto-language is usually unattested and reconstructed, but in some cases it is an attested language. Reconstructed terms are preceded by an asterisk. Examples: Proto-Indo-European is the unattested and reconstructed ancestor of Indo-European languages; Latin is the attested ancestor of Romance languages; Proto-Indo-European *méh₂tēr "mother" is preceded by an asterisk because it is reconstructed; Latin mater is not preceded by an asterisk because it is attested.
• Reflexes - A reflex is an attested word from which a root in the proto-language is reconstructed (or generally any attested linguistic element inherited from the language it descends from). Example: English water is the reflex of Old English wæter, in turn the reflex of reconstructed Proto-West Germanic *watar.
• Cognates - two or more words that have a common etymological origin (= descend from the same root). Example: English mother is cognate with Italian madre, both ultimately going back to Proto-Indo-European *

They’re on standbi

Pilot on me!!

Nothing, he was gladiator.

Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.

This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.

If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.

Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.

When I got home, they were still there.

What did 0 say to 8 ?

" Nice Belt "

So What did 3 say to 8 ?

" Hey, you two stop making out "

I won't be doing that today!

[Removed]

This morning, my 4 year old daughter.

Daughter: I'm hungry

Me: nerves building, smile widening

Me: Hi hungry, I'm dad.

She had no idea what was going on but I finally did it.

Thank you all for listening.

You take away their little brooms

There hasn't been a post all year!

It was about a weak back.