anna-hope/phonemes

Jason Riggle's chart of phonological features in JSON format + extras

phonemes's Issues

/ə/ should be neither +tense nor -tense

Currently, /ə/ (mid central unrounded vowel) collides with /ɛ/ (low-mid front unrounded vowel). I think there's a couple of things going on here:

1. there should probably be an explicit front feature, so that the /ɛ/, /ɜ/, /ʌ/ trio would be +front, -back, -front, -back, -front, +back. But the file doesn't currently have /ɜ/ anyway, and this seems like a bigger change.

2. as I read Riggle's chart, /ɘ/, /ə/, and /ɜ/ are distinguished in that /ɘ/ is +tense, /ɜ/ is -tense, and
   /ə/ is neither:

   

   (The file doesn't currently have /ɘ/ either, but again, bigger change.)

I propose making setting /ə/ to "tense": 0, which will distinguish it from /ɛ/ and perhaps make it easier to add more vowels later.

/ə/ should be -round, -back

palatals, alveolopalatals, and palatalized alveolars

/ɕ/ and /ʃʲ/ are both given as “voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant” with the same features. From /ʃ/, it seems as though /ʃʲ/ should be “palatalized voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant”, although I admit I'm not sure how I'd hear (or produce) the difference. (/ʃ/ is also -strident — maybe /ʃʲ/ should be as well?)

It looks like you're modeling palatalization as +dorsal, +high, is that correct? This leads to a few pairs that can't be distinguished by features:

1. /dʲ/ (palatalised voiced alveolar stop) and /ɾʲ/ (palatalised alveolar flap)
   • /d/ and /ɾ/ differ only in that /d/ is +dorsal
2. /ç/ (voiceless palatal fricative) and /ɕ/ (voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant)
   • plus also /ʃʲ/, although as noted above I suspect it should be -strident
3. /ʝ/ (voiced palatal fricative) and /ʑ/ (voiced alveolo-palatal sibilant)
   • voiced counterparts of /ç/ and /ɕ/

For (1), I'm not finding a good canonical explanation in distinctive feature terms of /d/ vs /ɾ/. I found some lecture notes from Michigan State that give /ɾ/ as +cont, although I find that a little suspect. This undergraduate paper by Julianna Sarolta Pándi suggests it's a fool's errand and that none of the schemes the author's found are satisfactory, for various compelling reasons. (The +cont analysis, for instance, might make sense analying the tap vs. trill contrast in Spanish but isn't much use when looking at the flapping of alveolar stops in American English).

For (2) and (3), it doesn't seem like as hopeless a cause, but I'm still not able to come up with a canonical answer. The distinction between /ɕ/ and /ç/ isn't clear in Jason Riggle's chart -- neither in place (alveolo-palatal vs. palatal) or manner (sibilant vs. non-sibilant). Olga Arnaudova has palatals as -coronal, contra Riggle, and has palato-alveolars as +coronal, but doesn't address the coronality of alveolo-palatals. (She has palato-alveolars as +strident and alveolo-palatals as -strident). She also doesn't address siblance. Daniel Recasens cites Ladefoged to the effect that “segments … are expected to be either coronal or dorsal, and the corresponding places of articulation alveolar or postalveolar if the segment is coronal and palatal if the segment is dorsal”. This would also suggest /ç/ should be -coronal (cf. Arnaudova above). (Recasens, while arguing for IPA to incorporate a clear distinction between palatal and alveolopalatal, also says that /ɕ/ is “realized more often with a postalveolar articulation than with an alveolopalatal one.”) Maybe we should ask Riggle what he thinks.

So apart from the idea that /ʃʲ/ should be renamed and -strident, I don't have any concrete suggestions. (I can submit a pull request for that if you agree.) Am I right in thinking /dʲ/–/ɾʲ/, /ç/–/ɕ/ and /ʝ/–/ʑ/ are more a matter of taste/convenience, and just more or less intractable in terms of features?

/p b bʰ f v ɸ β/ shouldn’t be +coronal

Likewisely the previously (sic), from what I gather from the PDF, /p b bʰ f v ɸ β/ shouldn’t be coronal.

/z/ shouldn’t be +dorsal

From what I gather from the PDF, /z/ shouldn’t be dorsal, as /s/ also isn’t.

Thanks, btw :)

ARPABET Encoding

Awesome resource!

I think a useful annotation to add might be ARPABET encodings for each phoneme. I suspect a lot of people who are interested in a machine-readable format would also be using the CMU Dictionary and other ARPABET-encoded speech recognition software.

So

    "t": {
        "name": "voiceless alveolar stop",
        "arpabet": "T"
        "features": {...}
      }

Chart linkrot

The phonological chart is no longer at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5956329/Riggle/PhonChart_v1212.pdf ; neither is there https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5956329/Riggle/_Riggle_CV.pdf anymore either :/

/œ/ (low-mid front rounded vowel) should be +round