1

PK: Experimental Phonetics Autumn 2010.

A Note on Vowel Formants and Vowel Space.

In class on Wed 15 Jan I made a few remarks about plotting vowel formants on a chart to

make them resemble the articulatory vowel charts of first-year courses – but being of little wit

I couldn’t remember the details. Here is what I meant.

First, check out the famous pictures on pages 96 –9 7 of the old edition of Ladefoged’s

Elements:

These show the formants of the vowels I, i, e, æ,o,O,u and U. On p.102 he shows a

chart of the first and second formant of these vowels:

2

At this point, we can wind back and read J.C.Catford, 1988. Phonetics. Oxford, pp. 159-

63, to get a better idea of what we mean by “formants”. This is perhaps a simpler overview:

3

4

The figures on the top of p. 161 in Catford above deserve a comment. I repeat them here, but

this time I have pointed out the division between front and back, rounded and unrounded

vowels.

5

The left-hand column givers the unrounded Cardinal Vowels, while the left-hand column

gives the rounded vowels. Remember that the traditional IPA Vowel Chart for European

languages assumes that the normal front vowels are unrounded, while the back vowels

become progressively more rounded as they become higher. Here is the current vowel chart

used by the IPA:

where the cardinal vowels i, e, ɛ, a on the left-hand side are unrounded, and ɒ, ɔ,o,u on the

right-hand side are progressively (bottom to top) more rounded. These are traditionally called

the Primary Cardinal Vowels, while their (un)rounded counterparts are known as

Secondary Cardinal Vowels.

That said, let us look at the so-called Primary Cardinal Vowels i, e, ɛ, a, ɒ, ɔ,o,u in

Catford’s Figure 44 above, which is similar to the English vowels in Ladefoged’s Figure 7 on

p. 1 of this handout.. In Catford’s Figure 45, however, they are set up in the manner I talked

about in class, in a “Vowel Chart” with the x- axis (horizontal axis, or abcissa) showing the

reverse values of the F2, and the y-axis (vertical axis, or ordinate) showing the reverse

Cardinal values of the F1. In Figure 45. Catford has shifted and slanted the vertical and

horizontal lines on order to pruduce a “Vowel Chart” which has the same shape as the

traditonal chart. Below we shall see what happens if we plot the cardinal vowels as Catford

gives them with normal rectangular coordinates. (We might bring up in class the reason why

Catford uses “a male voice”…)

6

On the following pages I give this table again, without the vowels, for you to find the

position of your own vowels.

I also give the chart as I copied it many years ago – unfortunately I have lost the source. In

this version the x coordinates are “sqaushed up” to the left – in other words the scale is

geometric.

7

8