Bad Taste Breakthrough! PLUS New Phoneme! (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Mark Mandel]

Sorry, I confused two renditions of the buzzer sound. /z/ is of course a
standard phoneme of English.

Eric, I would have a lot of trouble reproducing A 440, as would most people
who don't have perfect pitch. OTOH, a certain timbre, prolonged at B-flat
below middle C, is very well recognized now. I understand it has been banned
by several English soccer clubs... though I don't think they *can* ban vocal
imitations of the vuvuzela (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuvuzela)

m a m


On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 8:41 AM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:

> I wouldn't call this "eeeeeeeeeeee" or the buzzer noise *phonemes of
> English*, any more than the click of "tsk, tsk" is a phoneme. It's a
> non-phonemic speech sound used by itself, never as part of a word containing
> other phonemes -- except, maybe, as extensions of the same element, as in
> "BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT" for another version of the buzzer noise.
>
> Nor would I classify as a phoneme the unrounded lax back vowel (or possibly
> other articulations) sometimes transcribed as in:
>
> Q: How are you feeling today?
> A: Still pretty euuuuhhhhhhhh.
>
> Like the in-phrase use of "eeeeeeeee" that Jonathan reports, this is
> approaching word status syntactically, but phonologically I don't consider
> it part of English lexical phonology. So we have a grey area. So what else
> is new?
>
> m a m
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 8:13 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Eric, the buzzer comes close but it's still merely interjectional. CBS's
>> "eeeeeeeee" is actually used in a phrase.
>>
>> JL
>>
>>
> Eric Nielsen wrote:

> I would think the obnoxious buzzer sound used on game shows and the like to
> indicate a wrong answer may qualify as a morph/phoneme as well. It's often
> heard in conversation and on TV where a character will say something like:
> "
> "aaaaaa"  that's not the answer I want." or
> " "aaaaaa" you lose."
>
> Language in the future may include more and more electronic sounds based on
> pitch (as in A 440) and timbre. These sounds could be understood
> universally
> and transcend present language barriers.
>

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