Non-pulmonic Sounds, Meaning-shattering Pitches, and my new Ability

Gussenhoven’s and Kenstowicz’s book both explore the foundations of phonetics but through different approaches. While Gussenhoven delves into the anatomical structures of organs of speech, Kenstowicz takes on more psychological of an approach in his analysis.

Gussenhoven lays the foundations for beginners as he specifically explains each organ from the larynx up to the vocal tract. I learned that English consists of exclusively pulmonic (from the lungs) egressive (through exhalation) sounds. He sparks an interest in me especially in the section wherein he discusses non-pulmonic sounds, which includes clicks, implosives, and ejectives. Even though I am Vietnamese, I have never paid special attention to how my language’s sounds differ from those of English. One example of implosives that I found was created with the special letter “đ,” which sounds similar to the letter “d.” The word is “đuôi” [ɗuəj] and it literally means “tail.” Another point that stood out for me was the idea of pitch. In Spanish, the pitch determines whether the sentence is declarative or interrogative. However, my language, the pitch does not determine that element. Vietnamese is a tonal language so the pitch instead determines what each word itself means. For instance, “mũ” and ”mụ” is written similarly. But the diacritics, which signal the difference in the changes of pitch, give them different meaning. The former means “hat” and the latter means “old woman.” The insights on pitch also gave more question: Since pitch can change meanings from a bigger scale (a sentence) to a smaller scale (a word), how small can the change from pitch result in other languages?

Kenstowicz, on the other, hand argues that there are implicit rules that govern how we pronounce words and their variations. “Tents” and “tends,” from the chapter, are pronounced in the same way. This suggests parts of the phenomena known as “collective phonetic illusions.” Other parts of the phenomena point to how we judge sounds to be identical when they are actually different allophones of the same phoneme. I also found these words that differ in a similar fashion as I browse the dictionary: “pool” [phul] and “spool [spul]. Although I have not been able to discern the difference when producing these sounds, I look forward to being able to do so in the next few classes.

I once read a research that discusses how one’s vocabulary dictates their ability to perceive and distinguish. While the research revolves around the ability to discern colors of an aboriginal tribe in Australia, I found this particularly relatable. Indeed, after reading their works, I would never listen to sounds the same again. They have not only enabled me the ability to discern an obstruent from a sonorant but also raised multiple questions concerning one’s acquisition of a language, specifically: how we bypass fundamental pronunciation rules of a language but still manage to apply those rules to when encountering new words.