Phonetics

Karl Verner, world-famous linguist – a former student from Aarhus Cathedral School. Part 1

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karlverner

Few people who walk into the buildings of Aarhus Cathedral School, the red and the gray, are aware that someone who once spent many hours studying here went on to being world famous. And even better that the basis of this fame was founded at the Cathedral School, in an area of study unknown to most people.

Few of the students rushing along Vestergade in Aarhus on their way to school even pay attention to the memorial plaque on the gray house number 5: “The linguist Karl Verner 7th of March 1846 – 5th of November 1896 lived here from 1851 to 1875”. Today there is a shoe store and a fur store on the ground floor, but … ↪

What is schwa?

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what is schwa

A friend asked me this question recently. I thought the answer was simple, something along the lines of ‘it is the sound you make in unstressed syllables when your oral articulators are doing nothing and your vocal folds vibrate’. A sort of unmarked setting of the articulatory muscles if you will. But alas, nothing is ever as simple as it seems which I quickly realised during my reading. And what better way to share my new insights than with a Lingoblog entry! The focus of this blog post is the articulatory aspects of schwa, though many other interesting fields are relevant to a description of the sound.

Is schwa a mid-central vowel?     
Schwa (named after a Hebrew diacritic by German … ↪

Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1911-2010)

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600

Lingoblog continues to provide you with suggestions for your summer readings on various linguistic topics. This week we have found a biography of language researcher Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1911-2010).

In January 1999, a few years after I had moved to Denmark, I was astounded to come across an interview in the Danish weekly Weekendavisen with the renowned Danish phonetician Eli Fischer- Jørgensen (henceforth EFJ) and marveled: She is still alive! Having made her name in publications as early as the first half of the past century, in the interview EFJ still appeared intellectually unabated, and full of new writing plans yet. She even remarked that she hoped soon to finish a major work on a special liturgic form of Danish!

In … ↪

The menstrual cycle in linguistics?

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Billede1

When people find out I’m a phonetician who happens to be interested – among other things – also in the potential effects of the menstrual cycle on language and speech, they typically present me with fairly excited reactions. Why would a linguist be interested in anything to do with the menstrual cycle? I’ll attempt to answer this question in this blog entry, with the caveat that my research focuses on phonetics and phonology, i.e. sounds and not, for instance, word order.

Larynx as a sexual organ

The larynx has been called a secondary sexual organ (e.g. Abitbol et al. 1989; Amir & Biron-Shental 2004; Collins & Missing 2003; Hall 1995; Henton & Bladon 1985). This is because the larynx does … ↪

Phon-phon for phun

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phonphon1 e1541536995298

You may have heard about an entity that exists at Aarhus University, titled Phon-phon for phun. What is it? Why is it? Should you care about it? Let me explain.

Phon-phon for phun stands for “Phonetics and phonology for fun” and is the unofficial but very commonly used name of one of the official research groups of interest to those who are associated with the programme of Language, Linguistics, Communication, and Cognition. The research group was initiated in spring 2017 and officially established as a research group in autumn 2017. We’ve got our own website, which you are very welcome to explore: https://soundsoflanguageandspeech.wordpress.com/

What is it we do, exactly? Well, we do all sorts of things because we’re interested … ↪