The real Professor(s) Higgins:
Section 1–a professor of Phonetics:
Henry Sweet, phonetician: The whole point of his “Current shorthand” is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except for the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, l, p and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms.
HIS TRUE OBJECTIVE WAS the provision of a full, accurate. Legible script for ur noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the Pytfall system. —> the triumph of Pitman was because of business organisation: cheap textbooks and exercise books were available in this and school where experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary sufficient. Sweet couldn’t organise his market in that fashion—> he was angry at Oxford for the failure of it to do justice to his eminence. Such people as phoneticians are among the most important people in England right now.
Pygmalion (1938-12) shows the figure of a Phoenician, a linguist who studies languages scientifically and whose existence is usually confined to the knowledge of very few people belonging to the field, emerged publicly for the first time.
Section 2.2– The Philological Society
Established in 1830 it is the oldest learned society in Great Britain devoted to the scholarly study of language and languages. It had a particular interest in historical comparative linguistics and maintains its traditional interest in the structure, development and varieties of Modern English.
The society experiences a period of heightened success in the 1860’s-70s with phoneticians suc as Alexander John Ellis and Henry Sweet — through the years it continued to attract known scholars like Bopp and Grimm.
The greatest achievement to date is what has since remained the foremost authoritative dictionary of the English language: Oxford English Dictionary, whose first official dictionary was Augustus Henry Murray.
Daniel Jones: played a key role in the development and Institutionalisation of the study of phonetic in England. In 1907 he secured a part-time lectureship in phonetics at University College in London —> his reputation soon expanded and in 1911 he was named Britain’s first Professor of Phonetics. He produced an extremely large number of publications and transcripts which offered meticulous descriptions of English phonetics ì, especially directed at second language learners, and explanations of other languages such as Cornish, Sindhi and Ga. Besides, he published analyses of French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Cantonese.
He identified and systemised the eight Cardinal vowels. He was also interested in the improvement of orthography. He was more concerned about practical matters, he developed a new concept of phoneme, considering phonemes as families of sounds, each appropriate to a specific phonetic context.
He also distinguished prosodic features from phonemes and coined the terms chroneme and toneme to denote differences in length and pitch. he invested time in scientific descriptions of his analyses by means of photos of his own lip movements, X-rays of his tongue positions, oscillograms. He recorded his voice, and in 1956 he recorded his pronunciation of the Cardinal Vowels on gramophone records (Thomas 2011). The next paragraphs will illustrate some of these descriptions concerning Cardinal Vowels in detail, and one of Daniel Jones's major works, the English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917), which both students and teachers, native and non-native speakers of English, still use nowadays (almost 100 years later!) as a major reference for the pronunciation of the English language.
One of the main aims characterizing his works was to provide the learner with a scientific study of the English speech sounds and their distribution in connected speech. It is, indeed, with this idea in mind that he identified and systematized the eight Cardinal Vowels as a technique for characterizing the vowel inventories of language (i.e. of all languages), and illustrated the speech sounds of English to give foreigners the scientific information needed in order to learn educated Southern English, in an appreciably lighter fashion ones 1922: Il. The general idea behind the concept of Cardinal Vowels is that they demarcate the articulatory vowel space that speakers have at their disposal; consequently, such vowels can be regarded as reference points for the phonetic description and transcription of any language. For this purpose, and with the firm conviction that these vowel sounds can only be learnt from a teacher who knows how to make them or from a gramophone record or tape record, Daniel Jones recorded his pronunciation of the Cardinal Vowels on gramophone records'". The following extract describes their use as presented by Daniels Jones himself in the booklet which accompanied his two-record set in 1956:
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Section 4–playing Mr. Higgins:
Praat (Dutch for talk) is a freeware program for the analysis and reconstruction of acoustic speech signals.
Student could use it for:
Recording themselves in order to compare their English to other’s
Explore varieties of English
Become more familiar with the language features studied theoretically during linguistic courses.
4.1.1–The Praat windows:
A variety of windows will open, it is better to explore the main windows before starting to use the actual Spectrogram.
Praat objects windows: is used to open, create and save files, as well as, to open the various editors and queries which will be needed to work with sound files.
Praat picture windows: used to create and display publication-quality images.
Praat editor windows: mostly used when examining a sound file, the spectrogram on the bottom, and selections and measurements can be taken by using the cursor.
Praat info windows: will pop up with the specific result when a query is made either in the editor window or the objects window.
TO KNOW:
Pitch: quality of a sound governed by the rate of vibrations producing it; the degree or highness or lowness of a tone.
The intensity of a sound wave: is measured in decibels and represents the power and loudness of the wave.
A dormant (called f1, f2, f3, f4 —> voice) is a concentration of acoustic energy around a particular frequency in the speech wave, it emphasises the harmonic, with higher amplitudes of a speech sound. —> f0 is the lowest frequency of a complex sound and is equal to the Pitch of one’s voice. F1 and F2 are important for vowels, while using dormant patterns, acoustic phonetics makes it possible to define specific vowels and differentiate them from one another. F1 describes the height of the tongue when the vowel is being produced, whereas f2 reflects the place of the tongue and the rounding of the lips —> will be further apart for front vowels and closer together for back vowels.
Pulses: are single vibrations or short bursts of sound which produce variations in air pressure —> occur in pulse-like manner, pushing the air out of the mouth or nose and displacing air with pulse. —> can be represented as a waveform.
4.1.2—Recording, opening, and saving sounds:
To record sounds using Praat, a microphone, sound card, or external ADC (Analog-Digital Conversion) box will have to be plugged in to a computer before starting Praat, and then:
Objects → New → Record Mono (at this stage the Sound recorder window will pop up, see Figure 32).
The Sound recorder window
Through the Sound recorder window it will be possible to choose the sampling frequency (the default, 44100 Hz, is fine for most purposes), the microphone or other sound source, and whether to record a mono or stereo sound. In order to record and then to stop the recording, Record and Stop will have to be pressed respectively, being careful that the sound level ar stays within the green range to avoid clipping"?. Once a recordinglas been made, it will have to be named and saved, It will then show up in the Praat objects window where it's ready for editing. Praat can only record one minute long chunks, to record longer sounds, the buffer size in Praat → Preferences → Sound Recording Preferences will have to be changed, otherwise another software program to record the session can be used and then the sounds can be imported into Praat for analysis and manipulation.
If there is no need to record a sound because one has already been recorded lin aif, wav or flac format®, there are two ways to open it in Praat: on Mac OS X, the supported files can be dragged onto the Praat icon in the dock, otherwise: Objects → Open → Read trom File... as it works for other operating systems. Once the files have been uploaded, they will appear in the Objects window for further use. To save a file, given that files are never saved by default by Praat, the file in the Objects window will have to be selected, then:
Objects → Save → Save as file.
4.1.3–Measuring waveforms and spectrograms:
Once a sound has been recorded and/or opened in Editor window via Objects → View & Edit, the Waveform of the sound will be represented as in Figure 25 above and, if the sound is sufficiently short, a broadband Spectrogram showing the spectral energy of the sound over time, will be displayed. In addition, a series of red dots (representing the Formants), blue lines (representing the speaker's Pitch), and a yellow line (representing the Intensity) might also be present. These can be enabled and disabled in the Editor → View → Show Analyses menu. The cursor will spawn two dotted lines by clicking within the Editor window.
A vertical bar will show the time within the sound where it has been clicked (labeled at the top in seconds) and, by clicking within the Spectrogram, a horizontal bar will show the frequency at the cursor (labeled on the left in red). If the Pitch or Intensity tracks are displayed where the cursor is placed, values at the time the cursor represent will be given on the left side of the editor window. In addition, portions of the sound can be selected by clicking and dragging them (or by using the Select menu). The time of the start and finish of the selection will be displayed in red, and the duration of the selection (in seconds) will be displayed in the top of the bar. The three gray bars at the bottom of the editor window can be used to play a sound in the editor window. The bottom-most bai (Total Duration) will play the entire sound. The middle bar (Visible Part) will play only the visible portion of the sound.
The different sections of the top bar (split by the cursor or selection), when clicked, will play the corresponding pieces of the visible portions of the sound file. Hitting < tab> also plays the visible portion of the file. To view some analyses and to get a closer look at the data, the five buttons in the bottom left corner of the window will have to be selected: all shows the entire file, in and out zoom in and out, sel zooms to make the current selection fill the window, and bak zooms back to the previous zoom level. When dealing with long sound files, in order to view analyses like the spectrogram and formants, zooming in will have to be selected to show only a pre-defined amount of time. The Group setting in the bottom right corner of the window will ensure that if two sounds are open in Editor windows at once, they will share the same zoom characteristics. This is best used to compare two versions of the same file, say, an original versus one with an acoustic modification made.
4.1.4– Viewing Pitch via a Narrowband Spectrogram:
The most reliable way of getting a sense of the Pitch through the course of the word in Praat is by examining a narrowband Spectrogram 2 with a reduced visible range 0 - 400 Hz for speech). This can be done by editing the Spectrogram settings as described here: To make changes to the spectrogram settings, Editor → Spectrum → Spectrogram Settings will have to be selected. This will pull up the Spectrogram settings window where there are two very important settings: the window length and view range.
Window length (given in seconds) controls how large of a chunk of the sound Praat will examine when trying to find the frequencies present at a given moment in the signal.
Looking at a larger window of the sound will give more accurate information about the frequencies present, but will also reduce the accuracy of the temporal information given. Varying the window length enables one to choose between Broadband and Narrowband spectrograms. View range controls how much of the spectrum is visible.
For speech, one is likely be interested in the range from 0 to 5000 or 6000 Hz, but if examining fricatives, it might be interesting to look as high as 15,000 Hz. For music, instead, one may focus on the area from 100 to 2000 Hz. If the sound files have a relatively small or large dynamic range (the difference in volume between the loudest and quietest parts), or if the spectrograms seems too light or too dark, the dynamic range setting can be adjusted here, but 50 dB is usually safe.
The contours of the harmonics will accurately represent the Pitch contours of the voice during the word, and doing this will offer a sense of the contour before using the Pich tracker for more precise measurement.
Praat also has the ability to provide a Pitch track in the Editor window: Editor → Pich
→ Show Pitch will select it in the Editor window. At this point, a blue line will be placed on top of the Spectrogram representing the Pitch (see Figure 33).
Once the Pitch track is placed, the cursor can be used to check the Pitch at any given point in the word by placing it and checking the middle blue number on the right side of the window. The cursor can also be placed at a given point in the file and Editor → Pitch → Get Pitch. Running Editor → Pitch → Get Pitch when a chunk of the sound is collected will return the average pitch during that selection
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