SpecGram—The Never-Ending Story of Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know

Reflections on the Dooms/Punod Manuscript—Faoi Smacht

The Boy Who Stuttered Wolf—A Linguistic Tale of Caution Among the Tʷɪči—Claude Searsplainpockets & Helga von Helganschtein y Searsplainpockets

The Never-Ending Story of Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know
(because they aren’t actually true)

gathered at great personal risk of
psycholinguistic harm from actual student papers
by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira

This 16th collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them.

Articulatory labels and descriptions

[æ] is a monothong.
[æ] is a voiced front sornanant, low.
In [æ], the vibration of the audible friction is lax.
[ɒ] occurs at the lower part of the mouth.
In [ɒ] the airflow comes out like a plosive.
[ɒ] is a voiced bilabial auxillary.
[ɔː] is a voiced, back, elongated vowel.
[ɔː] is a voiced palato sonorant.
[ɔː]: the teeth come together, the tongue is in front.
[ɔɪ] is a long neutral unrounded vowel dipthong.
For [eɪ] the body of the diphthong is raised.
In [eɪ] the tongue has to be refracted to produce e after ɪ. The trajectory moves into vocoid space.
In the production of [eɪ] the tongue is not rounded.
With [eɪ] air escapes through the gap made smoothly.
[j] is a voiced palato-approximant.
[j] is a palatized nasal.
[l]: the air is allowed to pass through by the side of the lips.
[l] is a voiced velar affricate.
In [w], the body of the tongue meets the palette.
[w] is a [-palato] because the soft palate is not raised.
For [w], the back of the tongue is raised and is voiced.
For [r], the tongue tip bends downwards and the blade of the tongue touches the soft palate.
In [r], tongue hurls against the hard palete, without causing any audible friction to be heard.
[f] is a voiceless biolabial fricative. The airstream goes out smoothly with audible friction.
[ʃ] is a plato-aveolar.
[ʃ] is an alveolar-paloto.
[ʃ] is a plateo-alveolar. If the airflow involves friction it is not smooth except for cavity friction.
[s] is voiceless and [z] is voiced. They are minimal pairs.
In [k] the black of the tongue is curled back.
[p] is a voiceless bilateral stop.
In bilabial sounds such as [m] and other labiadental sounds [θ] the back of the tongue forms a complete closure with the soft palate.
In [+ nasals] sounds the soft palette is raised. The velum is raised so that no air escapes the nasal cavity.
The sound [+labial +nasal] involves the lips and the nasal. The symbol is [m̃].
There is tapping in [b] and [m], which are bilabial plosives.
[t] is [+stop] and [+coronary]. The tip of the tongue comes into control with the alveolar ridge.

More to come...

	Reflections on the Dooms/Punod Manuscript—Faoi Smacht
	The Boy Who Stuttered Wolf—A Linguistic Tale of Caution Among the Tʷɪči—Claude Searsplainpockets & Helga von Helganschtein y Searsplainpockets
	SpecGram Vol CLXI, No 4 Contents