In our phonological exercise on the 16th January, we we’re asked to find out whether glottal stops [ ʔ ] is a phoneme in Standard Arabic. We know that there is absence of the glottal stop phoneme [ ʔ ] in English, but it occurs in the speech of most speakers of English. In my observation, [ ʔ ] in English typically occurs when the phoneme [ t ] is in the phonetic structure of a word.
For example, [ bɒtəɭ ] will be uttered as [ bɒʔəɭ ].
According to my analysis, Arabic has a glottal stop phoneme and I did not notice the presence of it previously. The glottal stop in Arabic is the ‘Arabic letter’ called ‘Hamzah’ which is represented as ‘ء’. Phonological analysis really gets interesting! Studying phonological analysis and phonetics makes us have the ability to utter words or sounds in any language almost in the same manner as a native speaker, perhaps. But practice is needed of course.
However, when phonological analysis was about to get interesting, the last lecture on Features was very technical. Adrian (my lecturer) even compared the lecture of phonology to have a similar approach with a chemistry class on how an atom is made up of neutrons and protons. That lecture really took me back to my secondary school memory in chemistry class. I have a hard time understanding chemistry before and still having a hard time understanding it. I just hope that phonological analysis is nothing like chemistry! Otherwise, I can be in a lot of trouble for that particular course. What I hoping for now is to really understand it and try my best to make sense of ‘Features’ on phonological analysis.
However, when phonological analysis was about to get interesting, the last lecture on Features was very technical. Adrian (my lecturer) even compared the lecture of phonology to have a similar approach with a chemistry class on how an atom is made up of neutrons and protons. That lecture really took me back to my secondary school memory in chemistry class. I have a hard time understanding chemistry before and still having a hard time understanding it. I just hope that phonological analysis is nothing like chemistry! Otherwise, I can be in a lot of trouble for that particular course. What I hoping for now is to really understand it and try my best to make sense of ‘Features’ on phonological analysis.
Two comments. First, you are using the wrong symbol for [t]. The one you are using (with the elongated tail) represents a retroflex sound. English does not have a retroflex [t].
ReplyDeleteSecond, why not look at glottal stop in Malay? How about in the words 'saat' and 'mulai'? Is it phonemic or not?
I can answer that one. But not the Arabic one.
Thank you for pointing out my mistake. I have edited the post and made corrections to it.
ReplyDeleteFor Malay, I assume the language has a glottal stop phoneme, but it only occurs in between vowels, and I am guessing it only occurs in between the vowel a. Is that correct?
And I have a question sir, in my second year, when you taught us Introduction to Linguistics, you transcribed my name as /hʌkiːm/. Is the 'a' vowel in Malay uttered and as phoneme /ʌ/?