Talk:Grave and acute

Incomplete article

An article devoted to graves and acutes should have, as a minimum, a visible representation of both, no? AngryBear (talk) 22:49, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

We have a Table of gestures and passive articulators and resulting places of articulation. Does that help? — Sebastian 07:03, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

What's the point?

I don't have the one source that this article cites, so please excuse me for poking in the dark here. From the article, I don't see any motivation for grouping sounds in this particular way; this seems very arbitrary. The differences between the manners of articulation have a far greater influence on their distribution of sound energy than the differences of places this definition is solely based on. E.g. the "graves" [f] and [p] clearly have higher pitched sound distributions than "acutes" such as [n] or [ɹ]. But even when one stays within one manner, it doesn't seem to hold water. I hear higher frequencies in [f] than in [θ]. I wonder if the creator, user:Tibetologist or the major contributor, User:Benwing can maybe clarify what this concept is good for? — Sebastian 07:03, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

The grave/acute distinction is rather old, and I think it would be fair to say that it plays no part in modern phonetics (though it may still be relevant to other disciplines). It dates from relatively early in the days of acoustic phonetics, when some phonologists believed that one could categorize all speech sounds by means of a finite set of acoustically-defined distinctive features. These were supposed to correspond to auditory impressions of sounds. The pioneering publication for this was Jakobson, Fant and Halle (1951) Preliminaries to Speech Analysis (MIT). It is unfortunate that the WP article doesn’t refer to that. In fact it doesn’t quote from any publication, but merely gives a reference to a much later one. The feature(s) grave/acute were defined primarily in acoustic terms (with some reference to auditory qualities), but were given a secondary description (or gloss) in terms of their articulation. Features like grave/acute could be used to divide speech sounds into broad classes.

In the 1951 book, the articulatory information included an account of pharynx width as a possible discriminating factor, acute consonants being articulated (in Czech) with a wider pharynx, according to X-ray studies done in the 1920’s. I don’t think this criterion is taken seriously nowadays.

For most phoneticians, the JF&H features had been superseded by 1968 by the articulatory features set out in Chomsky and Halle’s Sound Pattern of English and by competing articulatory features devised by Ladefoged in such publications as Preliminaries to Linguistic Phonetics (1971).

While I can’t agree with the specific arguments you make, I do agree with you that the grave/acute distinction is not much use in phonetic classification. RoachPeter (talk) 16:47, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

Also, as the article notes, there are sometimes historical sound changes that specifically apply to one or the other sets of sounds. I think Chinese is an example. Benwing (talk) 01:33, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Thank you both for your replies. Peter: Sorry that I overlooked your comprehensive reply at first. That's a great addition to the article! I think I will copy the gist of it to the article, because it is essential for understanding its point. I'd be curious to hear why you disagree with my specifics, as my linguistic knowledge is self taught and likely to contain some misunderstandings. Benwing: I did see that general remark in the article, but without any example, and with the first example I could think of, [θ]/[f], already being countered by Russian, I didn't give it much credence. — Sebastian 13:21, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

Can we make this page Grave and acute (Phonology)? [grave]/[acute]is relevant to phonology. So I'm wondering if it doesn't make more sense to change the category in parentheses to phonlogy instead. Perhaps this uber category is not changable? Thoughts? My reasoning is that [grave]/[acute] is a way to understand why labials and velars group together in contrast to alveolars and palatals. The observation is really about consonants whose articulations break up the resonating tube vs those that don't. It's a meaningful constrast for explaining patterns in a number of African languages among others. For example, see Hyman (1973) and relevant for Sherbro, a Sierra Leonean language I'm studying. If the Hyman reference isn't there, I'll add it. Ccorcoran7 (talk) 04:38, 28 April 2022 (UTC)