The sound of a language, how it is heard and flows, is one of its most defining features. This is the case especially when the structure and motive behind the sound is removed, for example when one hears a foreign tongue. No one will comment on a Spaniard’s sly use of the subjunctive when he or she simply hears a funny string of “Spanish-like” utterances. Correct use of sound is also vital; mispronunciation of words can lead to confusion and ill ends.
But this seems all very obvious, sounds are just sounds, but once we start latching concepts to them we stop hearing them as their pure audial form. This is because our brains have selective cognition as not to overload them. Otherwise, your own language would SOUND to you, much like a foreign one does: a confusing stream of vowels and consonants that make no sense; communication would be impossible. This is why you can’t really know how your native language sounds to a foreigner, because your understanding of what is being said blocks out the true nature of the words, that is their audial form. Now, this wouldn’t frustrate many people, because it helps us speak and understand unburdened, but many linguists have dedicated many an hour to the study of a language’s sound: that is, its phonology.
One of the most immediate things you will notice when wading in the world of phonology is that describing the human sounds is very difficult without the proper tools. Yes, you can say that the word ‘pain’ sounds like when you say ‘pain’; when you put a ‘p’, an ‘a’, an ‘i’ and an ‘n’ together, but that would be dismally insufficient. Not only because you are describing something with itself in a circular fallacy, but you are also being very narrow minded. A Londoner would say ‘pain’ far more differently than a Cajun prawn farmer. And, ‘pain’ would be said and hold a much different meaning to a Parisian.
So we can see that even our tool for representing language, our alphabet, fails miserably at describing it. This is due to it not holding the same meaning universally. Heck! English is known to hate letters that have a corresponding a unique sound; the radicalist’s use of the blasphemic ‘ghoti’ being a prime and harrowing example[1] .
But do not despair, for there does exist an alphabet specifically designed to describe human sound, which I shall focus on from now on.
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a constructed script based upon the Latin alphabet to be used exclusively for the exact noting down of spoken language, thus allowing the transferal of a language’s exact phonetics via non-audial forms, e.i. text. It does this by putting a specific phonetic value to a specific symbol. /p/ will sound /p/ anywhere you place it; the IPA basically maps out all the possible human sounds, which are not few. This leads to there being many, many IPA symbols.
Let’s take a quick peek?
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Full chart of the IPA.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
It can be very overwhelming at first, but the linguists who built it where not sadistic torture minions, they made it have a logical structure, a set of regular parameters to the maelstrom of the human mouth.
There are two main IPA charts, one being the consonant chart and the other the vowel chart, that is, between sounds that are produced by obstruction of the air through the mouth and sounds that pass through unobstructed, respectively.
Consonants:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
IPA consonant chart.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
For consonants, a symbol’s position is based on two factors:
The point of articulation: Wherein one produces and obstruction to alter the sound. Using your tongue or lips. Represented by the top row, ordered from most forward to most back. /t/ is a dental because the tongue touches the teeth when produced.
The manner of articulation: the way in which the sound is let through the mouth. Does not really have a stringent order on the chart. /t/ is plosive because the sound is ‘forced out violently’.
A third additional factor is whether the sound is voiced or unvoiced, that is, ‘Do your vocal chords vibrate or not when you say it?’. Many sounds come in voiced and unvoiced pairs, like /t/ and /d/.
The most important thing about this format is that you can know a sound without ever seeing the symbol. For example, we see the name “unvoiced labiodental fricative”. It means nothing if you don’t know what each name means but we’ll get there. The name shows us the three factors I mentioned before, ordered in the voicing, point and manner format. So we know this:
It is unvoiced, so our vocal chords to not vibrate when we say it.
It is labiodental, so we use our lips and our teeth together when pronouncing it.
It is a fricative, so we force the air out through a narrow channel, letting it exit gradually.
Now, to produce it: press your lower lip against your upper teeth and gently blow out air without making a sound in your vocal chords. If you are successful then, congratulations, you have pronounced the unvoiced labiodental fricative whose symbol is /f/ and exactly the same as our own <f> symbol. This method of naming is useful when one wants to be exact on a sounds description. Much like explaining the fingering of a guitar chord rather than saying the letter for the chord itself.
But we’re not finished! Consonants are not limited to one sole articulation, they can be co-articulated. These supplementary articulations are normally marked by diacritics or letters in superscript.
So you can have a unvoiced labiovelar plosive /kʷ/, which is basically a /k/ (as the Spanish ‘c’) but you round your lips when you say it. /kʷ/ is seen in words such as ‘quail’ and ‘queen’ and other ‘q’ using words because the Latin ‘q’ represented the Indo European /kʷ/ sound. There are many more co-articulated consonants but that will be reserved for another time.
Vowels:
The vowel chart is simpler than the consonant chart, this is due to there being less factors to a vowels sound.
The vowel chart is very much like a graph with two axis. The x axis marks how forward or backward the tongue is when the sound is produced. Vowels to the left are front and you get back by going right. The grades of frontness are front, near-front, central, near-back and back. The y axis marks how opened or closed your mouth is when the sound is produced: the higher the vowel, the more close and the lower, the more open. The high-low distinction can also be used instead of the opened-closed one. The grades of openness are open, near-open, open-mid, mid, close-mid, near-close and close.
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
IPA vowel chart.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
There is a third distinction that works in pairs, similar to the unvoiced-voiced pairs of the consonants. Vowels have rounded and unrounded pairing, this describes the state of your lips when you are saying the vowel. /i/ (as in the ‘i’ in Spanish) is unrounded, while /y/ (like the ’ü’ in German) is its rounded counterpart. Just try saying the vowel in ‘beach’ but with rounded lips (as when you say ‘o’).
Vowels are named by roundedness, openness and frontness, in that order. Thus /u/ (like ‘u’ in Latin) would be a rounded close back vowel and /ə/ (like the ‘e’ in ‘je’ in French) would be an unrounded mid central vowel.
You may have noticed a stark lack of English examples for introduced IPA symbols, but that’s because English is terribly complex on that level, rarely does an English letter and an IPA symbol agree. But, for English vowels, there is another reason why I have not complicated you: most of them are not a single vowel, they are two and thus diphthongs.
Most English diphthongs delve from its ‘long’ vowels, such as the long a, i, o and u. They are /æɪ/, /ɑɪ/, /oʊ/ and /ɪʊ/ in long form respectively.
Diphthongs are classified depending on what direction of openness they are going. For example, /æɪ / is made up of /æ/ (unrounded near-open front vowel) and /ɪ/ (unrounded near-close near-front vowel). So it goes from a near-open vowel to a near-close, thus it would be called a closing diphthong. /ua/ would be an opening diphthong because it goes from a close vowel /u/ to an open vowel /a/.
They are represented by arrows on the chart:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Directions of /æɪ̯/ and /ua/ on the chart.
Diphtongs of the English language.
Source: Linköping University
A thing that happens particularly in diphthongs is that many a times they are not diphthongs at all but a combination of a glide and a vowel. Glides, also known as semi-vowels, are sounds that hold the same properties of a vowel but do not function as syllable’s nucleus [2]. Notable examples would be /j/ and /w/ (the ‘y’ in ‘you’ and the ‘w’ in ‘would’). They function much like fricatives but without and turbulence in the airflow release. Thus in Spanish, diphthongs such ‘ai’ and ‘ua’ are /ai/ and /wa/ and so not truly diphthongs. There is of course much debate on what is what because even with my prior example of the English diphthong /æɪ/ there is some inaccuracy. The correct form would be /æɪ̯/, with the /ɪ/ carrying the non-syllabic marker, showing that it is not a true vowel. But that is the thing with the IPA and phonetics on the whole: nothing is ever exact or truly definite.
When it comes to each symbol, each one only represents a theoretical articulation of the sound. Two people, no matter how close, will not pronounce the same sound the same. That is because no human is alike, our mouths and palates are of different shape and, as with a trumpet and a trombone, produce a different register of sounds.
So when we say that a language has a /g/ we are saying that many sounds in that language fall within the area that /g/ covers and thus can be categorized as so. Same goes with vowels, because as the change from one vowel to another is gradual, there are infinite amounts of ‘e’s in between /i/ and /a/. It’s like the shades of purple between red and blue, some are purple, some not so purple and some are called purple or blue or red depending from who you ask.
But this failure of exactitude is not solely a problem of the IPA, language is an ever changing being and is not constrained by any rules. It continually is changed by the speakers and the rules simply have to chance on after it; which is the reason why a Latin dictionary is very useless for French or Catalan or Romanian. So far in its very short life, the IPA serves fairly well, until, maybe, several thousand millennia in the future when us humans have evolved into things with very different sound producing tools then now. But we won’t know about that just yet.
[1] pronounced identically as the English ‘fish’. That is, taking the sounds of the ‘gh’ in ‘laugh’, ‘o’ in ‘women’ and ‘ti’ from the ‘-tion’ suffix.
[2] a syllable is made out of a nucleus (a vowel) and boundaries (consonant or glide).
e.g. "cat" [kæt]. Nucleus, 'æ'; boundaries, 'k' and 't'.
The Takeda clan, as you might know, were among the most prominent and powerful families in fifteenth century feudal Japan. The land of the rising sun was in turmoil with smaller warlords, known as daimyo, controlled their own patches of land and quarreled with their neighbors for supremacy. During this period, the Takeda were allowed to rise high in the society, at some point they may have been the most influential of all the clans in Japan.
The man commonly blamed for the sudden perish of the great clan is Takeda Katsuyori. His father was Takeda Shingen, who fathered him under queer circumstances during an early campaign in the province of Shinano. Katsuyori was what in Europe would be called baseborn, and was hushed away and put in a small castle to live with his mother and govern the land as a small lord. Shingen already had a son to continue his lineage.
Over twenty years passed, however, and Katsuyori became a grown man. As did Shingen’s oldest son, Takeda Yoshinobu, and he was ambitious. Over decades of near constant warfare, the Takeda now controlled a large landmass and the loyalty of Shingen’s retainers is still today admired along with his skills not only in battle but also in administration. But suddenly, a plot designed by Yoshinobu, the son and heir, was discovered and his compatriots were ordered to commit seppuku, traditional suicide, or banished – as was Yoshinobu, who would spend the short remainder of his life confined to a temple in the hills of the Takeda province, Kai.
So Shingen was heirless, and he called upon Katsuyori, who had previously taken the name of Suwa (though he was now restored to the Takeda name) and he was named to be heir, though interestingly he was only made to be warden of his own son, Nobukatsu (a child), who would rule the clan once he became sixteen years of age.
The next years Katsuyori would follow Shingen on his new conquest, into the provinces Suruga and Sagami, where they fought the Hojo and Imagawa clans. Katsuyori reportedly proved himself well as the son of his father and in battle fought with great valor and “almost reckless bravery”. He was instrumental in many battles, where he would lead a cadre of samurai as befit his high birth. His greatest exploits had not been shown, however, as he would prove to be an event more shrewd commander in the following campaigns.
It seems also that Katsuyori took up some followers and close friends during the years on the battlefields, among them his cousin, Takeda Nobutoyo, whom was his uncle Nobushige’s eldest son, and Atobe Katsusuke, a major strategist and commander in the army (at Nagashino a few years later he would command the largest contingent of heavy horse, at five hundred mounted samurai.)
With the eastern borders partially subdued, the patriarch of the Takeda turned his eyes westwards – to the lands of Tokugawa Ieyasu and Oda Nobunaga. During the summer of 1572, they marched along the high royal road of Japan into the Totomi province, now the main province and home to the capital of the Tokugawa clan.
While Shingen himself took the greater part of the host further into the region, he dispatched Katsuyori to take the fortress of Futamata. Futamata would prove quite a challenge for even the most seasoned commanders, as it lay on a cliff, with no real means to attack it, and starvation was futile, as the garrison had access to a river by way of a water tower complex, which allowed the defenders to gather water without being in peril. Katsuyori showed great tactical as well as logical brilliance as he ordered great wooden logs to be floated down the river, smashing into the water tower and ruining it. The citadel surrendered soon after.
Katsuyori then rejoined with his father’s troops before the battle of Mikatagahara, where he would lead the cavalry detachment which gave the finishing assault to the Tokugawa samurai. The victory was not a complete one, as Shingen failed to take advantage of the retreating soldiers, but still it was a great day for the Takeda, and once again, Katsuyori was contributory.
Sadly, soon after Shingen was mortally wounded or sickened at the siege of Noda alter that winter (the manner of his death is a subject of great debate which I will not endorse myself into here) and he died a month later at Komaba in Shinano. Now Takeda Katsuyori was head of the Takeda clan.
The Oda and Tokugawa clans were thirsty to take vengeance for the defeats they suffered previously at the hands of the Takeda. With a new, young, warlord put in charge of the clan, they were eager to exploit the changes. Katsuyori, however, continued the raiding into their provinces, whilst sending a larger force of some twenty thousand men under the general Kosaka Masanobu to guard his rear from his father’s archenemy, Uesugi Kenshin, a rival daimyo.
In addition, Katsuyori levied hundreds of workers to construct a huge fortress in the home region. This is considered the first mistake made by Katusyori during his reign as it was against so much his father had worked to build up over decades of governship. Shingen had been known to say “my people are my castles” and he preferred to fight his battles in the open, the Takeda way had always been to exploit their powerful cavalry charges. Commanding common men to work for him was also against the principles Shingen had worked hard to accommodate everyone. The commoners became weary of Katsuyori’s rule, they did not know him, neither had they heard of his victories or any reason he should order them.
Another great mistake made by Katsuyori was the fact that he distanced himself from his chiefest retainers and generals. Takeda Shingen had always kept his generals closely and valued their opinions. Perhaps Katsuyori was trying to be his own man, to step out of the vast shadow of his father and make his own legacy, certainly his generals judged his every move and were suspicious as to who Katsuyori were compared to his father.
His rule did not lack for his cunning in battle, however, even if he lacked some of his father’s administration. In 1584 Katsuyori besieged and successfully took the castle of Taketenjin from the Tokugawa, expanding his lands further. Katsuyori sought to isolate Tokugawa Ieyasu in his fortress, Hamamatsu, by taking all the castles lying between Nobunaga and Ieyasu. As Katsuyori set his eyes upon the castle Nagashino, Ieyasu addressed Nobunaga and both marched towards Katsuyori, combining their forces to stand against the young daimyo.
Nobunaga had also brought with him about two thousand arquebusiers, or matchlock gunners. The new way of war Nobunaga had started was much the like shoot-and-pike tactics of Renaissance in Europe utilizing the long pikes of pikemen to defend the lightly armored gunners from close combat. In all, the joint forces of Oda and Tokugawa numbered forty thousand men, mostly foot soldiers.
As Katsuyori saw the armies approaching him, his own force counting no more than fourteen thousand (two of which would be needed to mask the siege of Nagashino), he decided to attack the oncoming host. His generals and advisors plainly begged him to retreat instead, but in doing so the reputation his father had built over the years and his own leadership would have been greatly damaged. Should Katsuyori prevail in the battle, however, he would have the chance to dispose of both Tokugawa Ieyasu and Oda Nobunaga in one battle, which would leave their lands ripe for the taking.
After the battle, Ieyasu reportedly commented:
“…if he had taken up a position behind the Takigawa River he could have held us up for ten days anyhow, and we should have had to retire. Then he could have launched an attack on us, and ten to one it would have been successful. It is a pity he was such a fool.”
The Takeda lost the battle, and several of the higher ranking generals as well (among them Baba Nobufusa, Sanada Nobutsuna, Naito Masatoyo, Yamagata Masakage and Takeda Nobuzane).
Regardless of their great defeat, the Takeda would survive for another seven years. Though much land was lost, Katsuyori continued to trouble Ieyasu with raids and his warring with the Hojo clan also held on. The system of government his father had worked on for so long ran off course, and in addition (in 1581) Katsuyori moved the capital from the fortified mansion of Tsutujigasaki to the newly built castle Nirayama.
In 1582, the castle Taketenjin had fallen to Ieyasu and a coalition of the Oda, Tokugawa and Hojo clans invaded Shinano and Kai territories. Most of Katsuyori’s retainers abandoned him in the hopeless situation, and during what would be known as the battle of Temmokuzan (between the alliance and the remainder of the Takeda forces) Katsuyori and his son, Nobukatsu (who, ironically, was about to turn sixteen), committed seppuku and the line of the Takeda was broken, their reputation tarnished.
Yet today, Shingen is admired as a mastermind whom, had it not been for his untimely death at the height of his power, could have become shogun, leader of Japan. Katsuyori, however, would be remembered as the reason of the Takeda defeat, I, however, prefer to think of him as a young aspiring commander living in the shadow of his father and trying to be his own man, yet still lacking some of the skills necessary in governance and administration.
Once again, I thank my excellent team of writers for their continued hard work in making The Helios what it is, and your support as a receptive and interested readership.
After reading this edition, now would be an excellent time to pay a visit to one of the other TWC publications, which can be done by clicking on either of the images below.
Last edited by Legio; February 20, 2013 at 07:56 AM.
Reason: minor formatting