Talk:Tenseness/Archive 1

message: Tenseness unfortunately does not have a consensus definition among linguists. I gathered some material from newsgroups and websites. Even Peter Ladefoged, in his A Course in Linguistics Third Edition, said once regarding tense and lax vowels:
   These terms are really just labels that are used to 
   designate two groups of vowels that behave 
   differently in English words.  There are phonetic 
   differences between the two groups, but they are not 
   simply a matter of tension...
   In each of these pairs, the lax vowel is shorter, 
   lower, and slightly more centralized than the 
   corresponding tense vowel.
This type of fuzzy definition is not up to today's linguistics standards. Mario Pei equally had a vague definition for lax vowels:
   1. A vowel sound pronounced with lesser muscular 
   tension in the speech organs ([I], [E], vs. [i], [e]). 
   Opposite TENSE. 
   2. A Sound produced with weaker breath pressure, less 
   vigorous action of the lips or tongue (i.e., less 
   muscular strain and deformity of the vocal tract), and 
   correspondingly lesser concentration of energy in the 
   spectrum and in time. 
In Pullum and Ladusaw's Phonetic Symbol Guide: 
   Tense.  A problematic term phonetically, it is claimed by some 
   that there is an identifiable class of tense speech sounds 
   characterized by an articulation involving relatively more 
   forceful and extreme motions of the articulators, but there is 
   considerable controversy in the experimental literature about 
   such phonetic correlates. 
   As for "Lax": "The opposite of tense". 
This confusing situation has improved recently. For instance, Melissa A. Epstein, following Ladefoged 1971 and Gobl 1997, put forth the following definitions:
   Lax voice: Associated with loosely adducting arytenoid cartilages,
   loosely adducting vocal folds, and less tension in the vocal folds 
   themselves.
   Tense voice: Associated with tightly adducting artenoid cartilages
   and vocal folds, and greater tension in the vocal folds themselves.
Ladefoged, P. 1971, Preliminaries to Linguistic Phonetics, University of Chicago Press; Chicago.
Ni Chasaide, A. and C. Gobl. 1997. Voice Source Variation. In W. J. Hardcastle and J. Laver, eds., The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences. Blackwell: Oxford, 427-461.
An analogy with party balloon may help to clarify the difference between tense and lax vowels. An inflated balloon is like a human lung holding some air pressure. If one holds the balloon's neck fairly tightly and only let open a minuscule gap, the air comes out slowly and can make some whistling sound. This kind of controlled release of the air pressure is analogous to the production of a tense vowel. On the other hand, if one fully releases the balloon's neck at once, one gets some puffing sound instead. That is analogous to the production of a lax vowel. In order to prevent the total loss of the lung's air pressure, human lax vowels must be followed immediately by some form of partial or full constriction. That is why lax vowels tend to occur only at checked syllables. Notice one crucial difference between tense vowels and lax vowels: tense vowels are sustainable, lax vowels are not. ~~~~ 07:28, 8 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Then GA English has no lax vowels, except maybe reduced schwa, for all others are sustainable. kwami 08:26, 8 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Not necessarily. English is a tenseness-assisted language, not a tenseness-strict language like Vietnamese. In colloquial speech, the English short vowels often start with lax phonation. But when lengthened, they are continued with tense phonation. The vowel qualities of these two ways of phonation are aurally different, but are allophonic to a native speaker. ~~~~ 17:10, 8 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Definition of Tenseness

message: Because lax vowels are impossible to sustain and are short in duration by their very nature, it often becomes inconvenient to discern their vowel quality aurally and compare them with other vowels, short of using advanced electronic instruments. Speakers whose native language does not have lax vowels often have difficulty learning their proper pronunciation for a language that has them.
Fortunately, there is a vocal technique that can help to make lax vowels "longer" by repetition:  the glottal trill technique.
Imagine taking a cold water shower in a freezing winter day. After it, you may say: "Brrr, it's COOOOOOLD!" with a trembling creaky voice. That trembling is the glottal trill. During glottal trill the glottis opens and closes intermittently.
Using the glottal trill technique, one can discern various vowel-quality differences. For instance, the vowel quality of a short  vowel in American English (as in bit) can vary from lax production to tense production. In normal speech, the word bit is often produced with lax phonation and has a short duration. However, when emphasizing, the same word can be followed with tense phonation, with a further retracted tongue root and centraling. Usage of the glottal trill can help to the recognition of these differences and also to the familiarizing of the proper production of the lax-vowel version. Similarly, there is a difference between the American English's  and the standard High German's short  as in the word bitte. The American version is RTR (retracted tongue root) whereas the German version is ATR (advanced tongue root). The usage of glottal trill can help to their comparison more easily. Glotal trill can also be used to elucidate the sound qualities of English's semivowels and vowel glides (in diphthongs). E.g., to help distinguishing  (as the semivowel in year) from  and  (as the vowel in ear.) (~~~~ 17:10, 8 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Lax Vowel Training and Glottal Trill Technique

message: The Akan vowels in figure 9.17 also differ in the height of the tongue in the front part of the oral cavity. This leads us to consider whether the differences between [+ATR] and [-ATR] vowels are the same as the differences between so-called Tense and Lax vowels, which may also differ in both the height of the tonge and the position of the root of the tongue. There are differences of this kind in Germanic languages, as exemplified by pairs of English words such as heed-hid and bait-bet. Following Jones (1956) and a long British tradition, we regard the members of these pairs of vowels as being distinguished by variations of the major vowel qualities, Height and Backness (and perhaps Rounding). We note, of course, that the differences may involve diphthongization implemented through variation in Height and the members of each pair also differ in length. But we do not find it necessary to consider any additional parameters such as tenseness. 
We recognize, however, that there is also a long tradition in which these vowels are considered as being distinguished by the feature Tense (e.g. by Bloch and Trager 1942, and by Chomsky and Halle 1968). This leads us to consider two related questions that might be asked at this point. Firstly, are we correct in our phonetic characterization of these vowels as differing only in the regular vowls dimensions of Height and Backness (and Rounding), plus Length? Secondly, are ATR variations the same as Tense/Lax variations? We can get a partial answer to these questions by comparing the vocal tract shapes shown for th Igbo vowels in figure 9.16 and the Akan vowels in figure 9.17, with the pairs of English vowels shown in figure 9.19 or the pairs of German vowels in figure 9.20. In Igbo and Akan the tongue height is not correlated with the tongue root position. In English the position of the tongue root is correlated with the tongue geight (more so for the back vowels than for the front). In German the same is true of the back vowels, but in the front vowels what difference there is in root position would favor the so-called lax vowel having a more advanced tongue root. There is no common setting of the tongue root for the so-called lax vowels that distinguishes them from the so-called tense vowels. This conclusion is supported by statistical analyses of tongue shapes, in which it has been shown that the sagittal position of the tongue in sets of Englsih vowels containing the Tense/Lax pairs can be specified very completely by reference to only two variables (Harshman, Ladefoged and Goldstein 1977, Ladefoged and Harshman 1979). Using similar techniques, Jackson (1988) has also substantiated the finding that in English there does not appear to be a separate control of the root of the tongue; but he did find that there were three independent parameters of tongue shape in Akan. [That is, English only has Height and Backness, while Akan has Height, Backness, and ATR. –kwami] Tiede's (1993) three-dimensional study of pharynx volume using MRI shows further differences between Akan and English. In the pharyngeal region below the epiglottis, Akan shows a positive correlation between the transverse width of the space and the tongue root advancement, whereas in English transverse width is negatively correlated with advancement. Accordingly it seems that the situation in English (and other Germanic languages) is not the same as that in West African languages. Although there may be some increase in the height of the tongue accompanying the advancement of the tongue root in Akan, the changes in tongue height are small in comparison with the expansion that occurs in the pharyngeal region. Furthermore, on some occasions there may be virtually no increase in tongue height for [+ATR] vowels, as is shown in the case of the Igbo vowels in figure 9.16. We conclude that the advancement of the tongue root is a separable tongue gesture in languages such as Igbo and Akan. In Germanic languages, however, it is simply one of the concomitants of vowel Height. 
If the advancement of the tongue root is an independent gesture that can be learned as part of the sound pattern of a language, then it must have observable acoustic consequences that distinguish it from all other possible ways of achieving similar acoustic effects. 
Lindau (1979) has also pointed out that there are differences between ATR and Tense/Lax characterizations of vowels in the acoustic domain. Figure 9.21 shows the acoustic characteristics of ATR differences in a number of languages. The Akan data is from Lindaw (1979), the DhoLuo from Jacobson (1978), and the remaining languages are from our own files. It may be seen that in virtually all the cases the [+ATR] vowel appears to be raised and advanced in the acoustic space. The only exception is the Ebira lower mid back vowel which is raised, but only very slightly advanced. Among front vowels, paris of vowels differing in ATR have formant frequency characteristics that are reminiscent of so-called tense-lax pairs of vowels in Germanic languages, such as Englsih bead-bid; bade-bed; both retracted tongue root vowels and the lax vowels are lowered and more central in the acoustic space. Among front vowels there is this parallel between [+ATR] and [-ATR] tongue root vowels on the one hand, and Tense and Lax vowels on the other, but among back vowel pairs there is no such parallel. The high back retracted tongue root vowel is always further fack than its counterpart, rather than further forward, as is the case for the traditional lax back vowels. Lax vowels of all kinds are normally taken to be more centralized. Retracted tongue root vowels do not always have this characteristic. 
[end section] kwami 09:05, 8 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for posting that.  I'm still not very sure what's going on, though.  Part of the problem is that my GOAT and GOOSE vowels feel central, not back (except the allophones before /l/), so I'm not sure about how the last paragraph applies.  But there's no way of telling what's really going on without acoustic analysis, which I don't have the equipment for, so let's leave it here.--JHJ 21:49, 8 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Tense/Lax and ATR (quoted from Ladefoged SOWL 1996)

message: This section needs re-work in light of the new definition.
"In general, tense vowels are more close (and correspondingly have lower first formants) than their lax counterparts. Tense vowels are sometimes claimed to be articulated with a more advanced tongue root than lax vowels, but this varies, and in some languages it is the lax vowels that are more advanced, or a single language may be inconsistent between front and back or high and mid vowels (Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996, 302–4). The traditional definition, that tense vowels are produced with more "muscular tension" than lax vowels, has not been confirmed by phonetic experiments. Another hypothesis is that lax vowels are more centralized than tense vowels. There are also linguists who believe that there is no phonetic correlation to the tense-lax opposition.
In many Germanic languages, such as RP English, standard German, and Dutch, tense vowels are longer in duration than lax vowels; but in other languages, such as Scots, Scottish English, and Icelandic, there is no such correlation.
Since in Germanic languages, lax vowels generally only occur in closed syllables, they are also called checked vowels, whereas the tense vowels are called free vowels as they can occur at the end of a syllable."
4tildes 05:56, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: And why have you decided on a single definition as the truth, when there is no such agreement in the literature? I didn't revert it immediately to give you a chance to respond, but I think you should justify your edit. kwami 06:15, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: All Wikipedia items involve some judgement call on which definition to choose, otherwise each item would have an endless list of definitions. I chose the one that I personally considered to be the most precise. It certainly is fair to include alternative points of views. Two would be OK, three is already a bit too much. If you can find an alternative definition of tenseness that allows you to explain it with several supporting topics (like in my case, I have included balloon analogy, glottal trill, semivowels, tenseness assisted, etc. etc.), we can figure out a way to better organize the article, like moving my part into a separate subsection. If this still does not work, it is OK to move my part entirely to a totally different article, too. The whole point is, it is very disappointing to see people not understanding tenseness and making statements like Spanish vowels cannot be meaningfully described as tense or lax and take it as true. I have seen all too many people (including linguists with academic positions) being confused about tenseness, which really is not that complex if you focus on the glottis area. It is just sad. Wikipedia is not my life. I will be gone soon enough. You guys that stay are the ones that need to look into yourselves and ask: have I really understood tenseness? 4tildes 15:55, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

text: I agree with kwami. Your edit does not cite its sources (whose definitions are these? whose is the party balloon analogy?), and it's unencyclopedic to claim one definition of a term to be used here when there is no consensus among experts. You added the Ní Chasaide and Gobl reference but you didn't cite them anywhere in your edit, so it's impossible to know what exactly they argue for. --User:Angr/talk 07:09, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  I agree with Angr agreeing with kwami. The recent additions also have an obvious contradiction (or poor explanation), that being that if lax vowels and semivowels are unsustainable, then the glottal trill technique should be impossible (because how you repeat the loss of all the air from your lungs if you have no more air in your lungs?), or how could you produce a vowel to follow the semivowel? (Even if the latter is possible, I think that this physical arrangement would result in semivowels being very marked as onsets—yet that's their preferred placement!) This could just be the result of a poor explanation or understanding, though; kwami and Angr's points are more than enough to disapprove of the additions. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 08:51, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, there are at least four vocal techniques with various degrees of faithfulness to real lax vowels. (a) Tense phonation, like the long-duration it in Michael Jackson's song Beat It. (b) Vibrato phonation, used by opera singers, where the tension of the vocal cords changes intermittently, but not enough to fully close the glottis, (c) Glottal trill, where glottis closes intermittently, (d) real lax phonation, which is impossible to sustain. The degree of faithfulness increases from (a) to (d). My point is, glottal trill is only a technique to produce a sequence of vowel-like sounds close enough to the actual lax vowels produced in colloquial speech. It's an approximation, not the real thing. If you want the real lax vowels of colloquial speech, then use actual colloquial speech, and live with the difficulties of not being able to compare them easily to other vowels or explain them easily to another person. As for your question how it is possible not to lose all the air pressure or how it is possible to follow up with another vowel, remember the balloon analogy. If you let open the neck completely, at some point you will lose all the pressure. But if you constrict the neck (tensify your vocal cords) soon enough before all that pressure is gone, you surely can (a) repeat the same process again to achieve glottal trill, (b) follow up with a tense vowel. Tense vowels themselves are a form of partial constriction. It is OK to consider English's semivowels as on-sets and glides as off-sets. But in a language like Vietnamese, they do recycle the lax vowel â for diphthongs, notationally. And phonetically, many of the phonetic lax vowels in Vietnamese can appear (a) in monophthongs, (b) as on-glides (equivalent to English's semivowel) in diphthongs/triphthongs, (c) as off-glides in diphthongs/triphthongs. There is no reason to consider them as separate entities, just because they are monophthongic, on-glides or off-glides. 4tildes 15:55, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Comparison between tense and lax vowels