Talk:Estonian phonology

Voicing

Recent edits to the phonology table changed voiced consonants into voiceless ones. I have my doubts about whether length is the contrastive feature, though. Estonian has no problem contrasting lg and lk, so an sd to st contrast seems quite possible if length is the distinction. However, the distinction between the two consonant types is neutralised after a voiceless obstruent (ht, st etc.), which is hard to explain when length is the primary contrast. CodeCat (talk) 16:54, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

I just followed the source, but it doesn't seem to go in much depth about the phonemicity of certain consonants. They say that the palatalized consonants are phonemic (Asu & Teras (2009:368), which is obvious), but don't seem to say anything about the geminated nasals. About the plosives... they say that short plosives in spontaneous speech can become partially or fully voiced when intervocalic, and that long plosives occur as geminates in voiced surroundings, or in voiceless consonant clusters (Asu & Teras (2009:367–368). Maybe we just need to find a better source. Peter238 (talk) 11:20, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

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As a native speaker, this also seems very weird to me. /f/ and /ʃ/ are phonemes (those 2 would be the last to consider since they are rare, also some speakers fuse them with /v/ and /sʲ/, respectively) while /b/, /g/, /d/ are not? "palk" vs "palga", "pabul" etc, loanwords such as "gloobus", "beebi", "diivan" etc, Also "kadus" vs "katus", completely distinct. In the beginning of the word: "dušš" vs "tuss", also completely distinct.

There is a full 3 way distinction between voiceless, voiced and geminated plosives.

I've seen sources claiming "sada" is pronounced /sata/ and "jõulud" is pronounced /jɤulut/, which is complete nonsense. Strombones (talk) 22:21, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Feel free to alter the table if you have a source, but please don't do that if you don't. Peter238 (talk) 22:29, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't have a source. Strombones (talk) 22:30, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

@Strombones: Firstly, this is not "Estonian phonetics"; this is "Estonian phonology", which is supposed to describe the mental reality behind the phonetics, but in fact is just a way of creating an orthography with as little letters as possible, frequently also as little diacritics as possible. So if a language has [ŋ, ŋk] non-initially, like many Germanic languages, phonologists are usually going to claim that there's no [ŋ], only [nk, ng], where [ŋ] is a form ("allophone") of [n] before [k, g] & [<zilch>] is a form of [g] after [n]. It's an obvious nonsense synchronically, but it allows you to avoid using a seperate letter for [ŋ] & corresponds nicely to the established orthographies. Secondly, you're reading it wrong: it doesn't claim that kadus is pronounced the same way as katus, it only claims that all consonants of the three-way kadus/katus/kattus contrast are voiceless, which may well be true. The thing is, the tendency to avoid diacritics has led many phoneticians to use voiceless fortis symbols (e.g. [p, t, k]) for voiceless lenis consonants (e.g. [b̥, d̥, g̥]), obscuring the reality. So I guess that kadus is pronounced [kɑd̥us], i.e. the vast majority of foreigners would simply hear [kɑdus], but admitting that much would require using a baaaaad diacritic, and this would utterly ruin such a pretty convention. Other languages misrepresented because of this tendency are Icelandic, Scottish Gaelic, and perhaps (I'm not sure here) the state-enforced form of Mandarin Chinese. 37.190.146.24 (talk) 16:01, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Articles titled X phonology cover both phonology and phonetics on Wikipedia. The canonical IPA values of ⟨p, t, k⟩ aren't fortis, they're voiceless. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 05:24, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Internal contradiction

The current article text contains both:

"There are 9 vowels and 36 diphthongs, 28 of which are native to Estonian."

and:

"

Estonian diphthongs

Vowel	ɑ	e	i	o	u
ɑ		ɑe̯	ɑi̯	ɑo̯	ɑu̯
e	eɑ̯		ei̯	eo̯	(eu̯)
i	(iɑ̯)	(ie̯)		(io̯)	iu̯
o	oɑ̯	oe̯	oi̯		ou̯
u	(uɑ̯)	(ue̯)	ui̯	uo̯
ɤ	ɤɑ̯	ɤe̯	ɤi̯	ɤo̯	ɤu̯
æ		æe̯	æi̯	æo̯	æu̯
ø	øɑ̯	øe̯	øi̯	(øo)	(øu)
y	yɑ̯	(ye̯)	yi̯	(yo̯)

"

which actually contains 38 dipthongs.

Regardless of whether each of the parts of the article quoted above can be found in (various) publications (as the reference numbers suggest), they contradict each other: 36 ≠ 38.

Furthermore, the table quoted above is not the same as the one in the paper referenced. This paper does contain 36 diphthongs in its diphthongs table. Apart from that, it brackets different diphthongs than the current article text does.

Did anyone purposely change the table? And what arguments did s/he have for that? (They might be good arguments; I would not know, but I would be interested.) But I would have preferred any such change did not add any inconsistencies to the article.

In case no strong arguments are presented, I propose changing the table to the one in Asu and Teras.Redav (talk) 23:23, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

References

Phonemic geminates?

Why are the long consonants considered as seperate phonemes instead of 2 identical /C/s as in Finnish? AleksiB 1945 (talk) 09:25, 13 July 2022 (UTC)

Asu & Teras on quantity system

In addition to duration, a decisive factor in determining the degree of quantity is the duration ratio of the first (stressed) and second (unstressed) syllable in a disyllabic sequence. The characteristic ratios between these syllables are 2:3 for Q1, 3:2 for Q2 and 2:1 for Q3 (Lehiste 1960), and they have been shown to be stable also in spontaneous speech (Krull 1993). These ratios give evidence of foot isochrony: the longer the first syllable the shorter the second. Usually the second-syllable vowel in a disyllabic Q1 foot (containing an open short syllable) is so-called half-long (marked in the transcriptions with the IPA diacritic [󠀺ˑ]). A half-long vowel is considered to be a characteristic of Q1 and is best perceived in words pronounced in isolation.

These ratios say more about the whole short/long/overlong thing than anything written on this page. Asu & Teras should probably be cited more extensively. 37.47.205.253 (talk) 00:29, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

/b̥/, /d̥/, /ɡ̊/

Is there an established convention on how to represent plosives? This page has no /b̥/, /d̥/, /ɡ̊/ in the consonant phonemes table, but right below the table has an example "panga /pɑnkɑ/ [pɑŋɡ̊ɑ]". Later on we have "kabi /kɑpi/ 'hoof' (short) — kapi /kɑpːi/ 'wardrobe [gen. sg.]' (long) — kappi /kɑpːːi/ 'wardrobe [ill. sg.]' (overlong)".

Currently Wiktionary seems to use /b̥/, /d̥/, /ɡ̊/ everywhere for Estonian where b, d, g are written. This leads to pronunciations like /riːɡ̊iˈkoɡ̊u/ (was also used in Riigikogu article), which seems wrong to me, as all g/k sounds seem to be the same (short) phoneme to me. My personal (heavily non-expert) opinion is that at least word-initially there is no distinction between word-initial b/d/g vs p/t/k, e.g. buss and puss are homophones for most speakers, although for many it may not "feel" that way due having the ortography in mind. But word-finally using /p/, /t/, /k/ feels wrong. For intervocalic b, d, g, I don't know if it is exactly equivalent to Finnish intervocalic p, t, k (e.g. Estonian kadu vs Finnish katu), or if the Estonian plosive is slightly "weaker". In Finnish I've only seen /k/, /p/, /t/ used in this case. Mats84 (talk) 10:57, 16 February 2024 (UTC)