PHONETICS MANUAL.indd - HumBox

separately in 4.11. Meanwhile, though the following uvulars and pharyngeals
don’t occur in English or any of the European languages you are studying, you
may like to note them for interest’s sake (and remember that they are important
in the languages in which they do occur).
In some languages (Arabic for example), stops occur which are produced by closing
the back of the tongue against the uvula. The effect is that of a retracted, rather
hollow-sounding [k] or [g]: the IPA uses the symbol [q] for the voiceless uvular stop
— as does the ordinary Western alphabet when Arabic names are written in it: the Al
Qaida network, for instance. [G] is the symbol for the corresponding voiced uvular
stop.
It is also possible to pull back the root of the tongue so as to create a constriction
between it and the rear wall of the pharynx, giving rise to the pharyngeal fricatives
which are a feature of Arabic and Hebrew (midway between [x] and [h]). These can
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be voiceless [h] (“crossed h”) or voiced [] (“reversed glottal stop”). It’s not possible for
most people to to retract the tongue root far enough to close the pharynx completely,
so pharyngeal stops don’t occur.
Exercises
63. You are now in a position to enter on the IPA chart all the stops and fricatives
that have been presented, so do so — together with the names of the ten points
of articulation and the two manners. You might as well include the “exotic”
uvulars and pharyngeals, making 11 stops and 15 fricatives altogether.
64. Glottal stops are a conspicuous (and often frowned-on) feature of some nonstandard
varieties of English, in words like daughter or butter — or glottal itself.
Say how they would be used, and in which accents.
65. You may have noticed in the above text the two spellings uvula and uvular. This
isn’t a misprint, and they are not interchangeable: work out when each should be
used.
Consonants
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