- The author, at the time of the writing of this article (1963), was a senior research scientist at the IBM San Jose Communication Sciences Laboratory, with the acoustic phonetics responsibility for the composition, development, and evaluation of instrumental synthetic speech. Relatedly, he was visiting professor of phonetics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is presently professor of anthropology and pediatrics and director of the Language and Linguistics Research Laboratory, of the Mailman Center for Child Development and the University of Miami generally.
- And of homonyms (for accurate distinction, see below).
- ['hamənim], contrived from ['hamənum]+ ['fonim].
- And of homonymic sets (e.g., hour ‘sixty minutes’, hour ‘period’, hour ‘moment’,…).
- It must be understood that any statements about “same pronunciation,” “sounding alike,” or words to that effect, must necessarily implicate dialect harmony, and more specifically than that, what is true for a particular idiolect is not ipso facto true beyond the particular speaker or in any sense generally, even though most pronunciation and semantic features may be generalized for speech communities, as will be discussed further below.
- Any less definitive restriction than this introduces a partial two-way ambiguity of term and concept homophone and homonym, as similarly for homonym and homograph.
- See n. 6.
- It might profitably be remembered that a catalyst causes action without itself being affected or entering into the action, just as a phoneme generates and elicits phones, each of which is an allophone of the referent phoneme but none of which is that phoneme in any sense.
- A concatenation is a series of interrelated elements or units, not a successivity of tangential segments or sectors. A “chain of phonemes” is amore valid analogy than a “string of phonemes,” provided the interlinked nature of chains is appreciated.
- Roman Jakobson, C. Gunnar M. Fant, and Morris Halle, Preliminaries to Speech Analysis, Technical Report No. 13, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Acoustics Laboratory (Cambridge, Mass., 1952).
- Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York, 1933), p. 145 and elsewhere.
- Ibid., p. 502.
- E. Colin Cherry, Morris Halle, and Roman Jakobson, “Toward the Logical Description of Languages in their Phonemic Aspect,” Language, XXIX (1953), 34.
- The interest of these widely-publishing scientists has been expressly in electromechanical schematic synthesis—the production of caricatured speechlike analogs from controlled parameters corresponding to the minimal acoustic components (such as primary spectral regions of energy concentration and principal regions of random energy-distribution and their interrelated transport) necessary for communicating intelligible message—a problem quite apart from high-quality speech reproduction.
- It is irrelevant here whether the idiolect of the speaker “contains” the central retroflex vowel 3 or not—[auə] would illustrate the phenomenon equally well. Nor has the presence or absence of the glottal stop any pertinent significance… nor the particular indication of the diphthong “terminals.” In discourse, [ar] is common for our in General American; therefore, our/hour does not have universal homophony. A letter in my files from an eleven-year-old reads: “… In your letter you mentioned are balmy weather. I am sorry to report, but are so-called balmy weather turned to rain….” And I have many documented instances of the pronunciation [ar] for our.
- Such deliberate circumlocutions as uttered signal are enforced in order to avoid the explicit incompleteness of such terms as articulated or phonated, since the latter refers explicitly to those more often than not physically ambiguous intergradations of voiced-sound continua, which constitute only a portion of the entire speech-sound output, and since the former is all too generally restricted to that complex of exclusively supraglottal vocal-tract gestures. Speech utterance comprises phonation, glottal and other source-generating articulation, supraglottal resonance-modification articulation, inherent articulation-related silences, expressly “voiceless” phenomena, and any other speech-sound generation and amplification components, none of which should be interpreted as independent aspects or unambiguous elements or the like. Whisper, at a single stroke, dissolves the dichotomy voiced/voiceless (but not the anciently expert fortis/lenis opposition!).
- While the particular example offered here may seem unnecessarily contrived, it is typical and representative, and as in all such instances, ambiguity would be dissolved in the larger contextual frame-of-reference of topic-under-consideration.
- E.g., H. M. Truby, Acoustico-Cineradiographic Analysis Considerations (Acta Radiologisa, Supplementum 182), (Stockholm; 1959); Correlation of Cineradiographic and Visual-Acoustic Analyses of Speech, 17-min., X-ray and sound film (Stockholm; 1958).
- F. A. and E. L. Gibbs, Atlas of Electroencephalography (prior to 1947; current printing: Cambridge, Mass., 1950 and 1952), vols. 1 and 2.
- ['aelig;lehomz], contrived from allo-+hom- (+-s).
- Yuen Ren Chao, “Translation Without Machine”, paper delivered at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, Cambridge, Mass., August 29, 1962.
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