On December 14th, 2017, Prof. San Duanmu from the University of Michigan gave an academic lecture on International Phonetic Alphabet and World Phonological Database: Theoretical Discussion and Practical Demonstration. Itis the second lecture made by Prof. Duanmu as a senior visiting scholar of ACLR.
Prof. San Duanmu first listed problems that have been discussed in the academic circle, how many symbols are needed to describe all languages in the international phonetic alphabet, how many vowels and consonants there are in the world's known languages and how can two sounds be judged whether they are opposite across languages, etc. He believed the world phonological database can deal with these problems. The he introduced four free phonological databases including SPA, UPAIS, P-base and Phoible, and took Phoible as an example to show his ongoing work, that is, based on the principle of opposition in phonology, he used the world phonological system in Phoible to verify the number of basic vowels. His preliminary conclusion was that there were probably only 16 basic vowels.
After the lecture, Prof. San Duanmu had an in-depth discussion with teachers and students on scene for nearly an hour on issues of comparability of phonology, the causes and conditions for determining the number of vowels and the way to analyze vowels.
