ANTH 493: Linguistic Anthropology

Dialect Survey  For your homework, listen to the attached sound file.  It is an .mp3.  You can probably right click on it and save it to your desktop for review.  We considered the following contrasts in the following sentence frames:

Open mid back rounded vowel vs. open back unrounded vowel.

I bought a body.

I caught a cot.

Near-close near-front unrounded vowel vs. open mid front unrounded vowel.

I made a bid on it.

I made my bed with it.

Same contrast in the context of a nasal consonant.

I have a pin on my coat.

I have a pen in my coat.

The IPA is a bit hard to read without some examples of the sounds that the symbols represent.  The UCLA Phonetics Lab website linked here has sound files for Ladefoged and Madidieson’s book The Sounds of the World’s Langauges.  In class, we enjoyed listening to Clicks in Nama and the greetings in Nama.

One of the best places to begin the study of phonetics on the web is the Wikipedia site for the International Phonetic Alphabet.

The Linguistics 001 Course Lecture 2 at the University of Pennsylvania has an informative discussion with pictures of the the articulators. The site also covers the sounds of English.

The UCLA Phonetics Lab presents some very interesting demos and illustrations.

Here is a link to a pdf for the American Dialect Society’s Words of the Year 2006. Here is a pdf link to the American Dialect Society’s Words of the Year 2005. The American Dialect Society keeps track of new words and then discusses the words at the annual meeting of the society.

Sy Montgomery provides a touching obituary for one of her heroes, Alex the Parrot. Montgomery’s report from Living on Earth (9/21/07) Alex (1976-2007) is her tribute to Alex the parrot, a student of English who “changed the way humans look at our place as a species in the great order of life.” Montgomery takes a petty swipe at linguists. After she presents Washoe the chimp, Koko the gorilla, and unnamed dolphins and sea lions as learners of human languages, she says, “but some linguist or other was always shooting them down.”