 Hello! The in-class meeting dealing with phonology and the phoneme requires that students have a profound background in the following topics. They should understand the central aspects of phonetics, they should know what consonants are, they should understand the principles of classifying vowels, and they should know the phonetic principles of defining suprasegmental features. If students do not feel confident in any of these areas, we recommend to visit the respective e-learning units on the Virtual Linguistics Campus, so either the e-learning units or consult the relevant videos in our YouTube channel. This background knowledge is necessary for the goals of this in-class meeting. The prerequisite for this in-class meeting is that students have worked through the unit phonetics, phonology and the phoneme including the e-lectures, the phoneme 1 and 2. This is necessary to deal with the following topics in our in-class meeting. We will first define the central differences between phonetics and phonology. We will look at the central questions that phonologists want to solve, and then we will see how we can define the phoneme. And finally, we will take a brief look at free variation. So this is what we are going to do in this in-class meeting. Before we start with the practical, as usual, about 25% of our time should be dedicated to questions that students might want to ask about the virtual session, the e-lecture or the workbook content. The questions, for example, under what conditions are two phones phonetically similar, should be collected for future classes and for optional revisions of the online content. So far, all students should have understood how the field of phonetics is subdivided. Let me exemplify this with a short question and answering part with one of our first term students, Alexander Borchardt. Here is Alexander. Hello. Hello. So, Alexander, do you remember the two main sub-branches of phonetics spelled with a capital P? Yeah, it's phonetics spelled with a small p and it's phonology. Okay. So this is, of course, now something students should understand. And what is the difference between them? Phonetics describes human speech sounds in general and phonology looks at them language specific. Yeah, looks at them in a language specific way. Okay, this relationship between the two fields is often illustrated on the virtual linguistics campus by means of an animation which you see here. Let's first of all listen. And you see here two cooks, one cook to the left who puts the material into a pot and the other one who, well, what do they do? Yeah, it says phonetics gathers the raw material and phonemics cooks it. And it basically means that phoneticians collect speech sounds and suprasegmental features and phonemics or phonology makes a soup out of it for every language. Okay, very good. And you already mentioned that both fields are subdivided in such a way that we can deal phonetics, that we can treat phonetics in terms of segmental phonetics and suprasegmental phonetics. What are the main parts of segmental phonetics? What are the segments? Segmental phonetics deals with consonants and vowels. And suprasegmental phonetics deals with secondary articulation or with the loudness pitch and length. Okay, so these are the suprasegmental features, loudness, pitch, length and secondary articulation. And we will do the same thing in phonology. Okay, let us now see what phonologists do. Now here you see some speech sounds and some flags. And what we, in a first approach towards phonology, we want to define which of these sounds, there's another term for sounds. It's phones. Phones. Which of these sounds exist in English? So what about the first sound? What is it? The first sound is a bilabial plosive and it's aspirated. Okay, very good. It's aspirated. So it occurs in words such as... Pit. Pit, for example. So this would be pit. And of course it exists in present-day English. The next one is a vowel. It's a high central vowel. Do we know a word? I do think it occurs in girl. Girl would be a good example. And again, of course, it exists in present-day English. So we can drag the English flag over here. Okay, what about the next one? What is it? The next one, I think it's a voiceless lateral fricative. Very good. Something like... And that, of course, sounds strange for English. So it doesn't really exist in English. Do you know a language where it occurs? When I see the flex, maybe Welsh. Welsh, of course. It occurs in Welsh in items such as clan. And then we have the unrounded high back vowel. Do we know that in English? It doesn't occur in speech, but I think it's some kind of... It's an expression of disgust. I know, okay, an expression of disgust. But it doesn't really exist in English. But there's a language where we do have this. As in... Turkish. Turkish. So we have the Turkish flag here. All right. Well, and this one here down there is a... It's a velarized lateral. Velarized lateral. Alveolar lateral. And we've already had it in girl, in ball, girl, pill. So we have it... Let's write down pill. We do have it in present day English. And what about the last one? The last one is a labiodental nasal. Voiced labiodental nasal. Well, after five weeks of phonetics, you might have trouble with this, but Alexander is doing extremely well. It's a voiced labiodental nasal. It occurs in English, believe it or not, in words where you have this sort of combination here. Now I'm writing it down alphabetically. Information. And if you check the position of your tongue and your lips, you say something like information rather than information. So it exists in present day English. Okay. So, what we have done here is we could go on and find out more about the phones that are used in present day English. Eventually, we will end up with something like seventy-five phones or so in total that are used in present day English. So this is the first step, the definition of a sound or phone inventory of a language. Once you have found these phones, there may be a second question. And here it is. Now we could ask the question, does a certain sound segment represent one phone or two? So here we have a so-called African. Alexander, what is an African? An African is a combination of a plosive and a fricative. Okay, very good. So we have two options. Either is it one independent sound segment, sir, or is it just an accidental combination of two phones in a particular context? For knowledges, solve this question by looking at the word structure where this cluster occurs. In present day English, for example, well, what can we do here in words such as sits or mates? We can look at these words more morphologically. And we can split the S from the T. Okay, so we can do something like this and insert a morph boundary. So the S always crosses a morph boundary. Is the same possible in German? No, it isn't. And because you don't have words like karte or toe. Okay, so here it exists only as one unit and we cannot insert morph boundaries at all. So in present day English, we have two sound units, a plosive and a fricative, whereas in German, we have one africate. By the way, you can play the same game with tr, as in tray or treat and can ask the question, one sound unit or two. So for knowledges, first of all, define the phones that exist in a particular language and then, well, then they try to find out where phones in particular words occur. Here I have three words, tip, pit and spit. Alexandra, I want you to define the per in each case phonetically first. So what about the first one in tip? The first one is a bilabial plosive and it's... Incomplete, it's incomplete, it's stopped. Okay, so we use this diacritic, so we say something like tip and we don't say tip, but tip. The second one? The second one is a bilabial plosive as well and it's aspirated. Okay, it's fully aspirated. You feel it, the puff of air, pit, pit and you feel the puff of air that comes out. And finally, the last one? The last one is a bilabial plosive and it's unaspirated. Yeah, it's unaspirated. If you're interested, load the glossary linguistics campus and the example of the neutralization of exactly this effect where you have spit and the fricative portion is gradually cut off to show you that this is unaspirated. So it's something like pit, pit, pit, spit. Okay, so we have three occurrences. Let's now define the contexts. The contexts where they occur. The first one occurs after a vowel. Okay, so we have a vowel E and then the plosive. So here's the vowel, V stands for vowel and the underscore is the position of the plosive. The second one? The second one is the other way around. So we have the plosive at first. Underscore first, then a vowel. Okay, and the third one? And the third one occurs after the fricative S. Okay, so we can write it down like this. So here are the three contexts. In our cases, we could even add boundary. The first one occurs at the end of words. The second one occurs at the beginning of words. So we have clear cut and well defined contexts. So our three phones occur in very specific contexts. That is their occurrence or distribution is complementary. Where one of them occurs, you wouldn't expect the other one. And they are also phonetically similar. They are all bilabel plosives. Okay, so we have two essential properties that apply to these phones. Phonetic similarity and complementary distribution. And if this is the case, we can be sure that they belong to the same family. Shall we illustrate this with something else? Yeah, why not? Okay, I have an interesting example here from the world of soccer, football. Here we have two Spanish footballers. Now they are of course not phonetically similar, but they are similar in the following way. They are both world champions and they are fantastic footballers. So that is their similarity. Well, and what about their distribution? Well, those who understand the principles of football will understand that Ica Castillas is a goalkeeper. So he always stands in the goal. Andres Iniesta is a midfield player. So he is minus goal or minus goalkeeper. He will never be in the Spanish goal and try to save the Germans or prevent the Germans from scoring against the Spanish. So this is their distribution, complementary distribution. Well, and similarity, they are both world champions. Let us return to our example here. Our free bilateral closives constitute a family. A family like the family of cars, the family of footballers or what else? Families normally have a head term. So we can do something like this here. Families have head term. So what sort of head term shall we take? I think we should take the P, the autographical P. Yes. So this would be the head term, the P, the autographical P. And in order to show that it is now not a phone anymore, but a phoneme, we put it in these slashes, in these standard phonemic brackets. So this is a phoneme. And the same for the Spanish footballers. Well, they don't constitute a phoneme, but they constitute a family which could symbolize like this. They are Spanish footballers. So they're both members of one family. Knowing how to establish phonemes, we can now play the same game in another language. Let us take our mother tongue German. Now, this is what I suggest to do in class at this point. I, as a teacher, would step back. So let's exchange positions now. You need a pen. Here's your pen. The teacher should, of course, normally hide in the back and let the students do the work. The student is the writer, in this case Alexandra. And the other student is the organizer that decides whose turn it is. And the students in the audience have to do the job. So this is what we're going to do. We will look at German now. Here is the instruction. The task is the audience has to find out, has to find words that contain the orthographical character combination C-H in German. And that should involve the following phones. Alexandra, let's first of all define the phones here. We don't have to write it down, but what are they? The first one? The first one is a voiceless vela plosive. Very good. The second one is a voiceless vela fricative. Very good. And the last one is a voiceless pellet of fricative. Excellent. I couldn't have done it any better. So that's the three phonetic definitions. And now we want to collect words. So I'm the audience and Alexandra has to write it down. So I can think of a word like Fuchs, for example. So you see all these words contain the German character C-H. Another one could be something like Dach-Ruf. This means in English. And Pech, Pech, the opposite of Lach or... Okay, Pech. And another one I can think of which belongs to that column is Ich. Okay. And then we have Noch, Noch. So Noch, also Two. And the number Six, Six. And perhaps we can add Buch, Buch, Book. And finally one over here would be Küche. Okay. So once the students are ready, the teacher takes over and defines the precise context of C-H together with the students. So where does the first one occur, the Kü? The first one occurs before S. Yes. So we can write it down like this. The second one, the Kü as in Dach, Noch and Buch. The second one occurs after a back vowel. Okay, vowel, and so let's write down back here or plus back. And the one in Pech, Ich in Küche. It occurs after a front vowel. After a front vowel, so minus back. Okay, so that's what we get. Now, two of them are phonetically similar, aren't they? The two fricatives there phonetically similar, so we can group them into one phoneme, because they are in complementary distribution too. One occurs after back vowels, one after front vowels, so we clearly have a phoneme which satisfies the central conditions for net similarity and complementary distribution. And what symbol should we take? I think we should take the X. Well, this one, it's easier to write, isn't it? We have it on our computer keyboard, so we don't like these additional things to write. Well, and the Kü, the Kü is an allophone of something else, isn't it? So, this is something, this is only accidental that it's spelled with CH, but it has nothing to do with the allophones of this phoneme. Sometimes the story is not that simple and allophones may vary freely. A good example in this respect is the realization of R, across languages. So, to work on this again, to work on this again, you could interact with the students and let them list words in present day English, British English to select a variety that contain an audible R. So, Alexander, let's write down some words again. I can think of a word like red, can you think of a word? I think of a rhyming word red. Dread, yes, very good. Dread. And, well, a good example would be very, very, and perhaps treat, treat. Now, you see, in all these cases we could use this typical British English phoneme, the alveola approximate, red, dread, vary, and treat. In treat, however, it is automatically slightly devoiced because of the occurrence of the initial plosive, treat. And in very, we have an interesting possibility, we could use the alveola flap. Okay. Now, we have three phones. Obviously, they constitute a family, don't they? So, we have this sort of family, and we have a phoneme. What sort of symbol should we take? We should take the R like on our keyboard. Okay, the normal R, it's easier to write. And you see, quite interestingly, two of them are in complementary distribution. The devoiced version only occurs after voiced plosives. But the other one, especially, and now I want to mark that in red, this one here is quite interesting because this can be used freely in words which consist of where it occurs between two vowels. So, you can say vary or very in British English. So, something like take that very, very, my dear. Pre-variation. It should be explained on the basis of further examples, but this is just one of them. Okay. So, let's summarize. In this class meeting, we deepen the students' knowledge about two things. Some central approaches of phonology, the establishment of phonemes in present-day English and in German. After this session, most things should be clear, especially the two central notions of the physical view of the phoneme, the notation, never forget the slashes as the branches, the notions of allophones and their central properties, phonetic similarity and complementary distribution. Did we achieve this goal with this in class meeting or would you have preferred more details about this topic? Perhaps we could have used some more examples to deepen the understanding of the phoneme if there's time. The German in class meetings only lasts 90 minutes and I think that's enough for the students, especially if they're young students like Alexandra. So, in the next in class meeting, we will perhaps start with exactly this question. We will look at more phonemes and their allophones, maybe across languages. In the meantime, revisit the videos about the phoneme and thank you, Alexandra, for supporting me so well. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye.