Polish

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Fricatives

Polish is interesting for exhibiting a rather different range of sibilant fricatives than is found in English or German. It also shows that it is not always easy to decide on the best description of sounds. In particular, two of the three place of articulation categories illustrated below share the post-alveolar place of articulation, but differ substantially in the shape of the tongue.


Notes on the 3 places of articulation - from left to right in the table with the sounds below

1. Alveolar (dental?)

This category is referred to as alveolar in Ladefoged (2005), but as dental in Ladefoged & Maddieson (2008) (and is transcribed accordingly). Ladefoged & Maddieson (2008) base their interpretation on a radiographic study indicating that these sounds are articulated further forward than English [s].

2. Flat postalveolar

This category is often referred to as retroflex, but both Ladefoged (2005) and Ladefoged & Maddieson (2008) indicate that this term in misleading. Polish clearly does not have the kind of retroflexion found in many Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages. For these (and other) languages, Ladefoged & Maddieson (2008) find it useful to distinguish between two kinds of retroflexion:

  1. apico-postalveolar (“light” retroflexion; indicated with a subscript dot diacritic which is not part of the standard IPA inventory)
  2. subapico (or sublaminal) palatal (“strong” retroflexion)

Polish differs from these since it is postaveolar, but laminal. This raises the question of how it is distinguished from e.g English [ʃ], which can also be described as laminal postalveolar. The important difference seems to be that the tongue is flat in Polish, rather than being domed towards the palate as in [ʃ]. The retraction of the tongue away from the teeth, and the presence of lip-rounding, both help to strengthen low-frequency emphasis in the signal.

For this sound Ladefoged (2005) uses the retroflex symbol. Ladefoged & Maddieson (2008) use the alveolar symbol with the non-standard subscript dot (e.g [s̩]), while explicitly labelling it flat postalveolar (in the table below we have used the standard retroflex symbol).

3. Palatalized postalveolar (alveolo-palatal)

The second postalveolar category is given the traditional label alveolopalatal in Ladefoged (2005).

This sound (and label) has attracted a lot of debate in the IPA. (A similar sound may occur in the fricative portion of some pronunciations of the affricate in English words like ‘tune’.) The label is not a very happy one, especially now that the palato-alveolar label used in older version of the IPA chart is referred to as postalveolar. (Catford argues that the ‘o’-prefixes should be reserved for articulatory organ (as in “apicopostalveolar” above) rather than for modifying place of articulation.) The sound now has an awkward existence outside the main IPA table in the rag-bag section headed “Other Symbols”.

Seen in this light, the designation used in Ladefoged & Maddieson (2008) makes a lot of sense: palatalized postalveolar. This makes clear that the salient feature of the articulation is a basically postalveolar place of articulation, but with strong raising of the tongue dorsum towards the hard palate.


Examples from SoWL


s a l i
("room", gen.)
emu WebApp
ʂ a l i
("scale", gen.)
emu WebApp
ɕ a l i
("sown", gen.)
emu WebApp
z a l ɛ f
("bay")
emu WebApp
ʐ a l i
("complains")
emu WebApp
ʑ a l i
("grasped")
emu WebApp
k a s a
("case")
emu WebApp
k a ʂ a
("groats")
emu WebApp
k a ɕ a ʂ
("burglar")
emu WebApp
s k a z a
("flaw")
emu WebApp
g a ʐ a
("gauze")
emu WebApp
k a ʑ a
("name", gen.)
emu WebApp



Examples recorded at IPS, Munich

s a l i
("room", gen.)
emu WebApp
ʂ a l i
("scale", gen.)
emu WebApp
ɕ a l i
("sown", gen.)
emu WebApp
z a l ɛ f
("bay")
emu WebApp
ʐ a l i
("complains")
emu WebApp
ʑ a l i
("grasped")
emu WebApp
k a s a
("case")
emu WebApp
k a ʂ a
("groats")
emu WebApp
k a ɕ a ʂ
("burglar")
emu WebApp
s k a z a
("flaw")
emu WebApp
g a ʐ a
("gauze")
emu WebApp
k a ʑ a
("name", gen.)
emu WebApp



Audio Source
Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, LMU Munich.
The Sounds of the World's Languages.

References
International Phonetic Association (1999): Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide To The Use Of The International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge University Press.
Ladefoged, P. (2005): Vowels and consonants: an introduction to the sounds of languages. Malden: Blackwell.
Ladefoged, P. / Maddieson, I. (2008): The Sounds of the World's Languages. Malden, MA: Blackwell. p.154/5 (with sketches of tongue shape).