SPEECH ORGANS FOR ARTICULATION

SPEECH ORGANS FOR ARTICULATION

a.  THE LIPS. These are too familiar to need further comment, and the involvement of the upper and lower lip in sounds like [p] and [b] is also very obvious. (Details about exactly what happens will be provided later.)

b. THE UPPER FRONT TEETH. These are involved for example in the production of [t] and [ð] (as in thin
and this), for which the tongue comes into contact with the back of the teeth. As the tongue is the moveable organ
which initiates the contact, it is said to be an active articulator, and the teeth, which don’t move, are a passive articulator.
The lower teeth and the remaining upper teeth don’t appear to have any role in language.

c. THE ALVEOLAR RIDGE. Place the tip of your tongue against the rear of your upper front teeth. Then
draw it slowly backwards along the roof of the mouth. You’ll notice that there is a bulge or ridge just behind the teeth,
after which the roof of the mouth rises in quite a steep, domelike way. This bulge is the teethridge - in phonetics morecommonly called the alveolar ridge or alveolum. It’s an important passive articulator for sounds like [t], [d], [s] or [z].
Again the tongue is the active articulator.

d. THE HARD PALATE. This is the steeply rising section of the roof of the mouth behind the alveolar ridge. It serves as a passive articulator in sounds like the h of huge.

e. THE SOFT PALATE or VELUM. If you continue to run your tongue backward along the roof of the mouth(as far back as it can go) you will come to a point where the hard bone of the palate gives way to soft tissue. This section of the roof of the mouth is accordingly known as the soft palate, or, more commonly, the velum. The back of the tongue comes into contact with the velum for consonants like [k] and [g].
The velum is an important organ of speech because it’s moveable and its movement controls the entrance to the nasal cavity. (That’s why it’s soft not hard: it consists of muscle tissue.) Raising the velum so that it’s pressed against the rear wall of the throat has the effect of closing off the nasal tract, so that air is diverted into the mouth.
If you want to breathe through your nose, you have to lower the velum
Nasal consonants like [m] or [n] and nasalized vowels are articulated with the velum lowered. For non-nasal sounds
(that’s the vast majority), the velum must be in the raised position, so that the airstream passes into the mouth. Note that the velum can’t block the entrance to the oral cavity, even when it’s lowered. So even for nasal sounds, some air enters the mouth.

f. THE UVULA. This is the extreme tip of the velum, and isn’t directly involved in the closure of the nasal cavity:  it dangles down instead of being pressed against the rear wall. Some r sounds in French and German are made by vibrating the uvula.

The tongue.

The tongue has long been thought of the speech organ par excellence, even though its biological role lies in tasting and swallowing, not in vocalizing. In many languages the word for “tongue” and the word for “language” are one and the same (French langue, Spanish lengua, Russian iazyk for instance, or tongue in Biblical and Shakespearean English). In actual fact the larynx is also important, as we have seen - but as people are much less conscious of it, it seems to haveattracted less attention.

Anyway, the tongue is certainly involved in the articulation of a large number of sounds, just a few of which have been mentioned above. Its versatility is due to the fact that it consists entirely of nerve and muscle tissue, so it is highly flexible and mobile. ,the tongue is not thin and flat (even though it may feel that way), but has a considerable amount of depth or body.
It’s convenient to consider the tongue as consisting of a number of different sections. As there are no clear
cut-off points on the tongue itself, these division are somewhat arbitrary, and can vary from one authority to another.

But most phoneticians distinguish between the TIP, the BLADE, the FRONT (not a good name, as it’s more like the middle than the front!), the BACK and the ROOT. These articulate against different parts of the roof of the mouth, giving sounds like the s of so (with the blade), the sh of shall (with the front), and so on.

 The pharynx

Even more so than roof of the mouth and tongue, the term throat is somewhat vague and general. (Should it be taken as including the larynx, for example?) Consequently throat isn’t a word that’s used much by phoneticians, who prefer more specific terms. Larynx is one which you already know, and another - not to be confused with it - is PHARYNX.
This designates the tubular cavity bounded by the larynx, the root of the tongue and the soft palate,
 the pharynx is a kind of crossroads: air passes through it from the lungs to the nasal cavity;
food passes through it from the mouth to the oesophagus or food-pipe.

On the face of it, this mingling of food passage and airway sounds a rather unsatisfactory arrangement. And in fact in animals the larynx is situated higher up, so that it’s linked directly with the nasal cavity: no danger of choking for our dumb friends. But a high larynx is much less efficient for the articulation of speech sounds. It looks as though the “low-slung” human larynx has been favoured by evolution, as it allows better vocal communication. That the occasional unfortunate individual should choke to death is presumably a price well worth paying! Incidentally human babies have a high larynx, which “migrates” downwards during the first months of life: a nice example of “ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny”.

In some non-European languages, the rear wall of pharynx serves as a passive articulator. The root of the tongue is pulled back towards it, causing a constriction used for certain characteristically “guttural” sounds in Arabic or Hebrew.

Remember the difference: the larynx is a cartilaginous box immediately above the trachea; the pharynx is the cavity or“crossroads” above the larynx.