Exercises to learn to produce ejectives?

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Exercises to learn to produce ejectives?

Postby nooj » Wed Aug 19, 2020 12:17 pm

Does anyone know of exercises to learn how to make ejectives? Like [k'] or [q']. It has me flummoxed. I've read the descriptions in Wikipedia but from reading about what my mouth/throat should do to actually doing it, there's a gap.
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Re: Exercises to learn to produce ejectives?

Postby jonm » Wed Aug 19, 2020 1:28 pm

Hi nooj, I recommend looking at A Practical Introduction to Phonetics by J.C. Catford, specifically exercises 11–14 in chapter 2.4 on glottalic initiation. Google Books doesn't have a preview, but I'm able to preview those pages on Amazon. You may need to have an account and be signed in. If that doesn't work, I can copy the pages for you. And I've studied phonetics, so if you have any questions about the exercises, I'd be happy to help.
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Re: Exercises to learn to produce ejectives?

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Aug 19, 2020 2:29 pm

One way of thinking about an ejective is that you pronounce it while holding your breath. A Navajo book I've used gives an instruction to not hold your breath too long while practicing ejectives so you don't pass out.

Another way of thinking about it is that an ejective is a consonant that is pronounced at the same time as a glottal stop. That is why ejectives are also called glottalized consonants. The glottal stop cuts off the air supply before the production of the other consonant, so this explanation is just another way of framing the previous explanation.

There are a couple of good videos I can recommend. The first is part of a video series on Navajo phonology, complete with anatomical charts. The discussion of the ejectives begins at around 8 minutes.



He gives a great example that the affricate ts’ is essentially the sound you would make while imitating a lawn sprinkler.

Another good video is by David Peterson's YouTube series "The Art of Language Invention". He is the creator of Dothraki and High Valyrian for Game of Thrones as well as many other conlangs for TV and film.

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Re: Exercises to learn to produce ejectives?

Postby Ingaræð » Wed Aug 19, 2020 9:45 pm

jonm wrote:Hi nooj, I recommend looking at A Practical Introduction to Phonetics by J.C. Catford, specifically exercises 11–14 in chapter 2.4 on glottalic initiation. Google Books doesn't have a preview, but I'm able to preview those pages on Amazon. You may need to have an account and be signed in. If that doesn't work, I can copy the pages for you. And I've studied phonetics, so if you have any questions about the exercises, I'd be happy to help.

I've just had a quick skim-through of this, skipping to the exercise for χ/ʁ. For that alone, I'd say this book is worth its weight in gold. Thank you!

(Also, I didn't need to sign in to preview on Amazon.)
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Re: Exercises to learn to produce ejectives?

Postby caledi » Wed Aug 19, 2020 10:31 pm

Another textbook if that's what you're into: A Course in Phonetics by Ladefoged and Johnson. When I took a phonetics course we an oral exam where we had to pronounce various ejectives, implosives, clicks, etc., and that was the book we used. I found it really enjoyable and the instructions easy to follow.

Specifically, in the version I have (6th edition), there are instructions on pronouncing ejectives in chapter 6. I would quote them here but I'm not sure if that's against the rules :D
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Re: Exercises to learn to produce ejectives?

Postby lowsocks » Thu Aug 20, 2020 5:33 am

This is an odd coincidence. I was just beginning to have a look at some of the Dene languages in northern Canada and Alaska. (They are also related to both Apache and Navajo in the United States.) But they turn out to have a very rich phonemic inventory. They use far more distinct sounds than I have seen in other languages, and which must be distinguished from one another to avoid misunderstanding. And some of those sounds include ejective consonants (just as in Navajo). I was wondering how these sounded, and how to produce them - and then your posts appear ;)

Having said this, I don't expect to get very far in this task. The phonology alone looks intimidating. But also, the language resources are rather meagre; and of what we do have, some are technical linguistic studies that are rather opaque to me. Still, I am hoping to get some general understanding of the structure of at least one of these languages, and some idea of how it expresses a thought as a sentence.

So, thanks for the unexpected help!
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Re: Exercises to learn to produce ejectives?

Postby jonm » Thu Aug 20, 2020 6:15 am

Ingaræð wrote:I've just had a quick skim-through of this, skipping to the exercise for χ/ʁ. For that alone, I'd say this book is worth its weight in gold. Thank you!

You're welcome! It's such a great book. What I appreciate most is that it's designed to give the reader a real familiarity with their own speech apparatus and an understanding based on experience and not just theory. I wish every field of study had an introduction that took the same experiential approach.

caledi wrote:Another textbook if that's what you're into: A Course in Phonetics by Ladefoged and Johnson. When I took a phonetics course we an oral exam where we had to pronounce various ejectives, implosives, clicks, etc., and that was the book we used. I found it really enjoyable and the instructions easy to follow.

Another great book. And the two books complement each other well. I'd say they're both thorough in their coverage of articulatory phonetics, with A Practical Introduction to Phonetics really emphasizing the guided experiences. And then A Course in Phonetics definitely goes further in its coverage of acoustic and auditory phonetics, which I find especially helpful when it comes to vowels.

I love those oral exams where you get tested on different speech sounds. :) We would pull slips of paper from a bowl, and they would have nonsense words written in IPA for us to pronounce.

By the way, I got to take two of my phonetics classes with Keith Johnson, coauthor of recent editions of A Course in Phonetics. He's wonderful. Great at sharing his expertise, and also just a genuinely nice person and very approachable.
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Re: Exercises to learn to produce ejectives?

Postby jonm » Thu Aug 20, 2020 12:08 pm

Deinonysus wrote:There are a couple of good videos I can recommend. The first is part of a video series on Navajo phonology, complete with anatomical charts. The discussion of the ejectives begins at around 8 minutes.


Just watched these. I like David Peterson's explanation (and admire his work as a conlanger). And the video quoted above has good stuff too (the lawn sprinkler comparison is great), but there's one part that's misleading and I think worth correcting.

I'll try to write this in such a way that it could perhaps help explain how to produce ejectives for those here who are trying to get the hang of them.

Basically, he seems to be confusing the epiglottis and the glottis. Around 1m, he correctly identifies the epiglottis in the diagram and correctly explains what it does: It's the flap that comes down when we swallow to prevent food going down the trachea (aka windpipe). You can probably get your epiglottis to open and close if you imagine you're gulping down water.

So far, so good. But then starting around 7m30s, he again talks about the epiglottis and how it comes down to close off the trachea, but he a) refers to it as both the epiglottis and the glottis, as if the terms were interchangeable, and b) makes it sound like the epiglottis closing in this way is what produces glottal stops and ejectives.

The epiglottis and glottis are two different things, and it's the glottis that closes to make a glottal stop or an ejective. The epiglottis is not involved at all, except in the specific case of the epiglottal ejective, where both close (but that isn't a sound in Navajo, and there too, it's what's happening with the glottis that makes it an ejective).

The glottis is the opening between the two vocal folds. When you breathe normally, your vocal folds are apart ("abducted"), and the glottis is open. When you use your voice, your vocal folds are together ("adducted") with just the right amount of tension that air passes through in pulses as the vocal folds vibrate against each other. If instead you pull the vocal folds together tightly, that's what we mean by "closing the glottis."

If you imagine you're about to pick up something heavy, you may find that your glottis closes automatically. Or you could silently say "uh oh" and stop after the "uh."

The vocal folds are housed in the larynx (aka voice box), which you can raise and lower within a range of about 2–3cm. To make an ejective, you close your glottis as just described, and you also make a closure somewhere further along in the vocal tract. For example, to make a bilabial ejective [pʼ], you would close the glottis and close your lips. And then you raise the larynx quickly and forcefully. This abruptly decreases the volume and increases the pressure in the space between the glottis and lips, causing the lips to burst open.

So in addition to knowing how to close your glottis, you also need to know how to lower and raise your larynx. To practice that, Catford suggests going back and forth between the lowest note you can make, which lowers the larynx, and the highest note you can make, which raises it. At first you might actually make the notes, but then you could try to do it silently, just moving the larynx up and down. And once you can raise the larynx, work on raising it quickly and propulsively.
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Re: Exercises to learn to produce ejectives?

Postby jonm » Fri Aug 21, 2020 1:52 am

I was just looking at Catford's explanation of ejectives, and I realized I got something wrong in the last sentence of this paragraph...

jonm wrote:The vocal folds are housed in the larynx (aka voice box), which you can raise and lower within a range of about 2–3cm. To make an ejective, you close your glottis as just described, and you also make a closure somewhere further along in the vocal tract. For example, to make a bilabial ejective [pʼ], you would close the glottis and close your lips. And then you raise the larynx quickly and forcefully. This abruptly decreases the volume and increases the pressure in the space between the glottis and lips, causing the lips to burst open.

So you have a closed glottis and another closure further along in the vocal tract, creating a pocket of trapped air. Then you raise the larynx, increasing the pressure in that pocket. But that doesn't force the other closure to burst open. You could keep everything in that state for as long as you can hold your breath. What it means is that if you do release the other closure, the compressed air will come out in a burst. As Catford puts it, "if the oral closure is suddenly released, the entrapped high-pressure air will momentarily burst forth in a short sharp explosion."
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Re: Exercises to learn to produce ejectives?

Postby jonm » Sat Aug 22, 2020 6:22 am

For anyone who might be interested, I started a thread and potentially a reading group for the Catford book over here.
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