How to read the international phonetic alphabet
hollymath.dreamwidth.org
hollymath.dreamwidth.org
Sometimes we clip the g, and say goin'. Then there is the standard way to say it, goiŋ. Then there is the way she was saying it, goiŋ-guh.
I find it fascinating that languages have different sets of sounds. For example, in English p and b are two different letters, and pat and bat are two different words. But other languages don't distinguish them, and their speakers really wouldn't notice a difference if you said pat or bat. On the other hand, I don't hear the difference between p at the beginning of word, like pat, and p at the end of a word, like stop. But one is "aspirated" and one isn't, and in some languages they are different letters, so pat and pʰat could be two different words. The only difference is a puff of air following one and not the other.
They say in the babble of babies you can hear all the consonants of the world, but as we take on our mother tongue we lose the ability to hear or say many of them.
In German "ng" is always without a distinct g-sound (like German "Finger", or its n and g like "Ungeheuer")
"This means that the words finger and singer do not rhyme in most modern varieties of English, although they did in Middle English."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Engl...
Depends on the dialect. For example, older speakers of Swabian may totally say "Feng-ger" to "Finger", as opposed to the more "modern" Swabian variant of "Fenger".
She becomes from “Lon gisland” and is planning on “goin gout” later.
I am also from Long Island, and have largely moderated my pronunciation to match a more standard pronunciation, but when I interact with natives of north Jersey, parts of NYC and Long Island, I somehow start adopting the accent a bit, unconsciously.
It’s most commonly found with African Americans and minority/immigrant communities, since in professional or unknown settings people will use more standard registers of English.
(My accent is odd because I was born in Brooklyn and we spoke Yiddish at home, grew up on "Lon Gisland" then did college and beyond in Israel, and now spend about 2/3rd of time in US and 1/3 in Israel)
"Hog", "log", and "bog" all rhymed, buy we couldn't figure out (not even the teacher) why "dog" (dowg?) sounded so much different. I was telling this story as a teenager when it suddenly occurred to me that I had a very strong accent.
everything east of bushwick till the hamptons triggers me
It was slight, like a pop. The irony is, she tried so hard to say the g without making too much of it, that she often removed its voice. The unvoiced g is k. So, most of the time she ended up saying goink.
Southern where? So far I've able to deduct not Italy, probably native English speaking, somewhere south. So South Africa? But then why be cryptic about it?
(former graduate school singers' diction teacher, and current professional classical singer, here. IPA is a key tool of the trade.)
I speak a US dialect where [iŋ] is a standard pronunciation, as mentioned in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ing#Pronunciation and more obliquely in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis..., but in other dialects (especially RP) [ɪŋ] and [ɪn] are the standard pronunciations and [iŋ] and [in] are not. There's a fairly comprehensive exploration of the vowel-quality-alternation question in https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3037 if you're interested. From the summary:
As I mentioned, it's part of the folklore of sociolinguistics that the [in] pronunciation exists, and that it's (apparently) not stigmatized in the way that the [ɪn] pronunciation is, and that in fact it may be heard as [ɪŋ] or [iŋ] and even transcribed that way in some studies.
As for singing diction, singing diction is prejudiced against high vowels (like [i]) to a sometimes absurd degree; you often hear the “-ing” suffix pronounced [ɛn] in popular music, because it lowers the vowel and thus increases the volume. The surprising thing is that this lowering is obvious to me, even though my dialect has the pin–pen merger, which would normally neutralize that contrast. A similar lowering transformation lowers things like "baby" [beɪbi] to the outlandish [beɪbɛ]. When I was a kid, this bothered me a lot. Now I no longer think there's anything wrong with it, but I think it's strong evidence that singing pronunciation has important differences from spoken pronunciation.
There was a Language Log post on a student project analyzing differences in the same speaker's language between musical performances and interviews, focusing in particular on the alternation between [ɪn] and [ɪŋ], at https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3687. There's some good discussion in the comment thread there about how sung pronunciations often reflect not only the exigencies of singing to project (perhaps more important before microphones, but still practiced today) but also musical-genre-specific diction traditions. Some discussion also ensues about the [i]/[ɪ] alternation.
"ㅇ"
This is related to a question I've been wondering about for a long time.
One of the first stages in language processing is converting a sound's raw physical waveform into a sequence of phoneme tokens. Different languages divide different sounds differently -- as you note, [p] and [b] are distinct in many languages, but not all of them.
What I'd like to know is how nonexistent sounds get classified. Take [θ], the thorn sound. It is rare, but physically similar to several other common sounds -- the stop at the same place of articulation would be [t̪], the closest nearby tongue-based fricative is [s], and [f], while not tongue-based, is even more similar.
All of those are attested substitutions for the difficult [θ] sound. And they appear to be predictable -- English-speaking babies reliably substitute /f/, which they can pronounce, for /θ/, which they can't. Mandarin speakers hear /θ/ as /s/. Cantonese speakers hear it as /f/. (As, I believe, do Russian speakers.) In Ireland, the sound is replaced by some kind of /t/. But all of the languages I just mentioned offer the full set of /f/, /s/, and /t/ as available options.
To a certain degree this is conventionalized. I'd believe that modern Irish pronunciation is based more on what you hear from other Irish people than on a difficulty with thorn. And in English, the Mandarin sound /tɕʰ/ has sometimes been recorded as "ts" and sometimes as "ch", and if you pronounce it to untrained listeners and ask them what they heard, you'll get a mix of both answers. (Today it is less helpfully spelled "q".)
But nobody trains babies that if they can't produce a correct /θ/, the proper thing to do is to fall back on /f/, because /s/ would be a faux pas. The babies just do their best, and they all independently agree that their best approximation to /θ/ is /f/.
I think it should be possible, if you know the phonology of a language, to determine which phoneme (or possibly phonemes) a particular foreign sound would be understood as by a speaker of that language. As things stand today, it isn't -- we know that different languages will cause the same sound to be heard differently, and we know experimentally what the likely options are for a given sound, but we can't predict an individual mapping. And there's enough consistency in what people hear that we _should_ be able to do that.
Arabic has separate consonants for /ð/ (ذ) and /z/ (ز). But it also has a consonant ظ that can be pronounced as either /ðˤ/ or /zˤ/. For me as an English speaker trying to learn Arabic it was confusing because /ðˤ/ and /zˤ/ don't sound the same at all, but evidently to Arabic speakers they do and the pharyngealization makes all the difference.
Malay/Indonesian also turns fricatives into sibilants. So /θ/ becomes /s/ e.g. ath-thulathaa /aθ-θulaθa:ʔ/ (الثلاثاء) becomes Selasa. /ð/ would become a /z/ but that sound isn't native to most languages in that part of the world either, so it can become all kinds of sounds including /dʒ/ and even /l/!
Contemporary Indonesians substitute /ts/ for Arabic /θ/ if they have only so-so Arabic pronunciation. But this is on the basis of the contemporary transliteration of Arabic. Indonesians do not have the English speakers' concept of spelling - only transcription. In English, they're more likely to use /t d/ but sufficiently many people who speak English have learnt proper Arabic in school that they can pronounce the English sounds.
The use of /s/ is not a contemporary substitution, it's a historical borrowing. It's like saying "English substitutes french /s/ with /ʃ/" on the basis of words like "fashion". Yeah, at one point, French had an /s/ sound that sounds like English /ʃ/, but the pronunciations of both has changed and that doesn't happen any more.
The replacement of /ðˤ/ with /l/ in e.g. lohor is likewise a borrowing - but it seems to be ancient. ض is reconstructed as a velarised voiced lateral fricative in Wikipedia. And that borrowing is widespread; Indian Muslims going full Indian on me are surprised that I recognise "Lohor" from Indonesian. For my part, I pronounce it as thoohoo (book), but most native Australian English speaking Muslims seem to use /s z z/ for Arabic /θ ð ðˤ/ - they learnt the Arabic words from their Pakistani/Indian parents - and therefore say "zohaw" (hot). Even in recitation - Arabs seem to ask them to stop leading salah~sholat, but that hasn't happened to me.
Also, it's not actually /dʒ/ but more of a palatal stop. My wife - and even I - can certainly hear my accent in Indonesian. I also can't hear the difference between c and j unless I already recognise the word.
They are the same. You're comparing substitutions that happened hundreds of years ago to substitutions that happen today. They follow different rules for obvious reasons, but they're not different things.
But that's a little different from what I asked about. These correspondences can be learned directly -- a child growing up to speak Old English would have known to treat [v] as a form of /f/ because he would have heard [v] all the time, as a form of /f/. The language had an explicit opinion, and [v] was a common sound.
But that isn't the case for foreign sounds. A child growing up in a Mandarin-speaking environment will never hear [θ] at all. Instead, the correspondence of [θ] to /s/ is an implicit rule, driven by the rules that actually do exist. I want to use the explicit rules, like [v] = /w/, to predict the implicit ones, like [θ] = /s/.
You might also be thinking about the fact that, where English speakers would use /pʰ/, they tend to hear /p/ as /b/. So while an English speaker would say <pat> as /pʰat/, they will hear /pat/ as <bat>.
Part 1: https://hollymath.dreamwidth.org/981594.html (has nice intro; good place to start)
Part 2: https://hollymath.dreamwidth.org/983513.html
Part 3: https://hollymath.dreamwidth.org/999852.html (the link posted)
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Devanagari
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari#Consonants
The consonants are neatly divided into five categories, depending upon where the tongue touches the roof of the mouth/teeth/lips (back to front) - guttural (k as in kite, g as in go), palatal (ch as in chair, j as in jug), retroflex (t as in tap, d as in dog), dental (th as in thin, dh as in them), and labial (p as in pet, b as in bear).
Each of these also have an aspirated version, and there's a nasal at the end - so 5 in each category times 5 categories = 25 main consonants.
Then there are the vowels, semi-vowels, and spirants as different categories by themselves, each of which can be systematically tacked on to each of the consonants.
This systematic categorization of sounds and writing forms is amazing for a language that was developed a few thousand years ago.
There are of course some sounds that are not part of the system, like x, z and f. Some vowels too - like the a in bad, but all in all, the amount of thought put into the system is amazing.
पि
This theory is motivated by the observation that words with पि have an ( inclination towards) F in other branches of Indo-European (Also just the left-hand side of पि without the 'P' which cannot be pasted due to Unicode restrictions)
Eg
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/पितृ#Sanskrit fpita’=father
fp Here could have been a merged consonant, similar to PF in German: But in other cases just a pure F
While English could probably withstand some changes to orthography, there are also advantages to the spelling being somewhat disjoint from the exact pronunciation.
Ended up with, if I recall, about 47-53 distinct “letters”, although it was a flat hierarchy so a, æ, e, and è were all distinct letters from one another for sorting and reference purposes. Part of my motivation was to reduce the character count of individual words by combining digraphs and trigraphs into a single letter… so I could fit more on the Twitter. Secondary was to have one letter to one sound, although I don’t think I covered every sound in English.
When I soured on Twitter, I also lost interest in my modified alphabet, but my main takeaways: remaking the English alphabet from scratch can be done in about an afternoon, including a reference word list to act as a guide for new spellings. Your main problem is the only one that will be literate in your new alphabet is you, not an insurmountable problem in itself, but it’s probably not worth re-educating society for something you put together in an afternoon.
If you want to see a more successful manifestation of an alphabet put together in a way you suggest, try Hangul. It’s flexible enough to adapt to other languages as well.
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.
The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.
Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.
Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
1) http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz....
2) https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/what_is_man/chap...
I learned from Larry Wall of ʘ which is a bilabial affricate clic, used in some African languages.
It's the smack of a kiss, which is kinda cool.
But these are really marginal cases. The IPA is where it's at.
Perhaps I'm being too nit-picky, but that's actually more just like an alternate English alphabet than it is a phonetic alphabet. The goal of a phonetic alhpabet is to map symbols any sound that is distinguishable in any language, not simply the ones that are distinguishable in English.
X-SAMPA is a lot more like the IPA. It's basically an incomplete encoding of IPA in ASCII. It's a little hack to get around the insufficiencies of inputing characters into computer devices.
This has the advantage of carrying pronunciation and spelling simultaneously.
For the most part, those funny little phonemic notations that dictionaries come up with are just alternate alphabets, and not intendend to be a standard phonetic alphabet.