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This is our "Fava" episode: great with a nice Chianti (you can leave the liver out, Dr. Lecter...) Hosts Phil Thompson and Eric Armstrong talk their way through the sounds /f/ and /v/ in this episode. As it is our first episode dealing with fricative sounds, we spend quite a while talking through their nature.

Show Notes

[Don't have any time to go through the show this week and edit the show notes. These are the things Phil and I collected before we began recording; it's a bit messy, but may be helpful when listening along.\u2014Eric]

Fricatives: A sound being made by air being pushed through a narrow constriction in the vocal tract, making a turbulent airstream.

e.g. f \u03b8 \u0283 s

Most common consonant manner in the world's languages : Fricatives

FORMATION: voiced/unvoiced labiodental fricatives

SPELLING:

/f/

pretty darned simple, f

calf calves, calved
loaf loaves
half halves, halved
knife knives ( but knifed)
wife wives

"ff" off, offal
"gh" cough, draught, enough, laugh, laughter, rough, tough, trough, whooping cough
"ph" alphabet, amphibious, apostrophe, diphthong, nephew, philosophy, phlegm, phonetic,
photo, photograph, pteriodophyte, sphere, sphinx, telephone
"v" Chekov, Krushchev, Nabokov, Godunov, Romanov, Molotiv, Rimsky-Korsakov,
Ustinov,

/v/

"f" of
"ph" Stephen
"v" Vacate, vaccine, vacuum, vain, vale, valentine, Valkyrie, value, Vancouver, vane,
variation, varsity, vein, vengeance, have, hive, live, love, mauve, driving, living, Steven,
stevedore.
"vv" savvy

HISTORY:

of the letters:

FROM WIKIPEDIA:
F The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant, \u2039Y\u203a, but was also ancestor to Roman letters \u2039U\u203a, \u2039V\u203a, and \u2039W\u203a); and with another form, as a consonant, digamma, which resembled \u2039F\u203a, but indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. (Later on, /w/ disappeared from Greek, resulting in digamma being used as a numeral only.)
In Etruscan, \u2039F\u203a also represented /w/; however, they formed the digraph \u2039FH\u203a to represent /f/; when the Romans picked up, the letter, they had already borrowed \u2039U\u203a from Greek upsilon to stand for /w/. At the this time, the Greek letter phi \u2039\u03a6\u203a represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive, /p\u02b0/ though it has now come to approximate the sound of /f/ in Modern Greek.
The lower case \u2039f\u203a is not related to the visually similar long s, \u2039\u017f\u203a. The use of the long s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with \u2039f\u203a.

FROM WIKIPEDIA:
The letter V ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details.
In Greek, the letter upsilon \u2039\u03a5\u203a was adapted from waw to represent, at first, the vowel /u/ as in "moon". This was later fronted to /y/, the vowel spelled \u2039\xfc\u203a in German.
In Latin, a stemless variant shape of the upsilon was borrowed in early times as V\u2014either directly from the Western Greek alphabet or from the Etruscan alphabet as a middle man\u2014to represent the same /u/ sound, as well as the consonantal /w/. Thus, num \u2014 originally spelled \u2039NVM\u203a \u2014 was pronounced /nu\u02d0m/ and via was pronounced /wi\u02d0a/. From the first century A.D. on, depending on Vulgar Latin dialect, consonantal /w/ developed into /\u03b2/, then later to /v/.
In Roman numerals, the letter V is used to represent the number 5. It was used because it resembled the convention of counting by notches carved in wood, with every fifth notch double-cut to form a "V".
During the late Middle Ages, two forms of \u2039v\u203a developed, which were both used for modern \u2039u\u203a and \u2039v\u203a. The pointed form \u2039v\u203a was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form \u2039u\u203a was used in the middle or end, regardless of sound. So whereas valor and excuse appeared as in modern printing, have and upon were printed \u2039haue\u203a and \u2039vpon\u203a. The first distinction between the letters \u2039u\u203a and \u2039v\u203a is recorded in a Gothic alphabet from 1386, where \u2039v\u203a preceded \u2039u\u203a. By the mid-1500s, the \u2039v\u203a form was used to represent the consonant and \u2039u\u203a the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter \u2039u\u203a. Capital \u2039U\u203a was not accepted as a distinct letter until many years later.[2]


PHONETIC NOTATION: represented by lower case f and v

Similar sounds in IPA:

labiodental approximant \u028b
labiodental nasal \u0271

bilabial fricatives \u0278 \u03b2

using f or v in place of th sounds "th fronting" in Southern England working class accents, like Cockney

using labiodental place on preceding nasals, e.g. invest, infer, emphasis, emphysema, lymph with \u0271




VARIATIONS



use of bilabial fricative in its place \u028b
Challenge for Dutch/German article: Voiced labiodental fricatives or glides - all the same to Germans? by Silke Hamann* & Anke Sennema\u2021


List of languages that have f and \u028b

Language\tf\tv\t\u028b\t\u0278\t\u03b2\t
Danish\tf\t\xd8\t\u028b\t\xd8\t\xd8\tthree-way distinction
Dutch\tfits\to\u02d0v\u0259n\t\u028b\u0251\u014b\t\xd8\tin some Belgian dialects the /\u028b/ phoneme is realized as [\u03b2]\tthree-way distinction
English\tf\tv\t'red'\t\xd8\t\xd8\ttwo-way distinction \u2013
( Wikipedia entry claims labialized /r/)

Finnish\tf\t\xd8\t\u028b\t\xd8\t\xd8\ttwo-way distinction
German\tf
\u201cfau\u201d

v
\u201cwe\u201d

\xd8\t\xd8\t\xd8\ttwo-way distinction \u2013
approximant allophone of /v/ in Southern varieties

Hawaiian\t\xd8\t\xd8\t\u028b\t\xd8\t\xd8\tMay also be realized as [w] or [v].
Hindi\tf\t\xd8\t\u028b\t\xd8\t\xd8\ttwo-way distinction \u2013
Serbo-Croatian\tf\t\xd8\t\u028b\t\xd8\t\xd8\tMay also be realized as [v], depending on the speaker's dialect.
Norwegian\tf\t\xd8\t\u028b\t\xd8\t\xd8\t
Japanese\t\xd8\t\xd8\t\xd8\t\u0278\t\u03b2\tthese are considered weak forms of /p/ and /b/
Ewe\tf\u0348\tv\u0348\t\xd8\t\u0278\t\u03b2\tEwe is one of the few languages known to contrast [f] vs. [\u0278] and [v] vs. [\u03b2]. The f and v are stronger than in most languages, [f\u0348] and [v\u0348], and thus more distinctive from the rather weak [\u0278] and [\u03b2].

Japanese: e.g. Mt. Fuji is said with \u0278\u026fd\u0291i or "furigana" sounds more like "hurigana" to most English speakers, almost \u028d

Hindi-English: very well with \u028b

devoicing of final voiced labiodental fricative /v/ becomes /f/


Old fashioned Cockney "a wery fine vife". Is it labiodental approximant \u028b?

Shaw: thought it was fictional until he heard someone actually said it

The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language

Traditional West Country /v/ for /f/ in Lear "varmer" for "farmer" and "volk" for "folk"

Use of /b/ in place of /v/ in Spanish: On the Labiodental Pronunciation of Spanish /b/ among Teachers of Spanish as a Second
Language Author(s): John J. Stevens
Source: Hispania, Vol. 83, No. 1 (Mar., 2000), pp. 139-149

"phonic variants to the Modern Spanish voiced bilabialphoneme /b/, orthographically b or v: a voiced bilabial stop [b], which
is said to occur after a pause or a nasal; and a voiced bilabial fricative which occurs [\u03b2], elsewhere (Alarcos 1994; D'Introno, Del
Teso, and Weston 1995; Real Academia Espan\u0303iola 1992). The voiced labiodental [v], if mentioned at all, is not generally considered to form part of the Spanish allophonic inventory (Barrutia and Schwegler 1994).

Pedantic /v/, hypercorrect, used to demonstrate orthographic differences, which has been part of Spanish teaching until mid-20th century when it was abandoned by the Real Academia Espa\xf1iola

\t-\t"So, you teach 'boice'?" story

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