"Authentic pronunciation" - but does she creak?

[Herb Stahlke]

Tom,

Creaky voice is one of several glottal states that languages can use.
In English we're accustomed to voiced and voiceless, but in Hindi and
many other Indian languages, as well as elsewhere, there are murmured
or breathy voiced sounds that contrast with voiced sounds.  In Hindi,
these are spelled with an <h> after a consonant, so in the name
Gandhi, the /dh/ is breathy voiced.  In Hausa and other languages
there are creaky vs. voiced vs. voiceless sounds.  All of these can be
involved in phonemic contrasts.  They are not suprasegmental in these
languages.  But they can be suprasegmental, as in the West Coast US
effect you mention.  Creaky voice and breathy voiced or murmured are
standard terms in phonetics.

Herb

On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 1:09 PM, Tom Zurinskas <truespel at hotmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Tom Zurinskas <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      "Authentic pronunciation" - but does she creak?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> An interesting fad apparently from Calif spreading around USA is the "creaky voice", especially for young females.  The name "creaky" is given to it in a paper in this Fall's ADS "American Speech" by Ikuko Patricia Yuaso.  I've noticed creakiness and wondered what the name for it was.  The Ikuko study is an interesting read.
>
> The paper said that in some languages creakiness can be "phonemic," such that a word that's creaked has a different meaning than the same word that's not creaked.  My problem here is terminology.  If the two words are said with no difference in phonemes (only a suprasegmental difference in creakiness) why should it be called "phonemically" difference?  The phonemes are the same.  Basically, it's a lexical difference, not a phonemic one, caused buy suprasegmentals like creakiness or tone, not by phonemes.  This is semantic twinge of mine.
>
> My take on the psychology of the creakiness is this.  It's all about being a rich kid in school that is above it all having a secure multimillion dollar future.  So a super-relaxed, non-uptight creaky voice is a power thing.
>
> I've no problem with creakiness as a new thing.  The author says, "Arguably, creaky voice can signify sexual desirablity of American women", citing another study.  So if she creaks, she's!!!????
>
> Regarding other phonetic fads, I heard my first double zinger phoneme swap (ones I don't like).  It was from a female newscaster who said the word "flaws" with an awe-drop and a "s" spelnounce.  She said ~flaas (~aa as in Saab and ~s as in "sad") instead of ~flauz (~au as in laud and ~z as in zoo).  And she didn't even creak it!
>
> Reflecting on the letter "s" spoken as ~z, it's done about 98% of the time in text if usual pronunciation of plurals is applied (ref truespel book 4, "the alphabet and sounds of USA English".  This study looks at pronunciation of words in text (considering word repetition).
>
>
>
> Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL7+
> see truespel.com phonetic spelling

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org