111–120 of 185 posts
And here I was expecting to read about hoppy beers... :(
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Edit: er, I meant high-pass filter, I guess.
If you like this you may enjoy the "Pink Trombone" an interactive speech synthesizer that you control by moving around the virtual tongue and lips: https://dood.al/pinktrombone/
Pink Trombone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18912628 - Jan 2019 (75 comments)
Pink Trombone: Speech Synthesis Simulation in JavaScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14135658 - April 2017 (52 comments)
A mouth simulator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13973261 - March 2017 (1 comment)
I'm a non-native English speaker, and I've been working with an accent coach to improve my pronunciation. The IPA chart has been instrumental teaching tool, and after about two years it's finally starting to sink in. It's really helpful to understand the theory behind the pronunciation, instead of just repeating words and attempt to make the same sounds as my coach. As in "this is what your tongue should be doing, bu…
Can someone explain the usefulness of IPA currently? I guess I wonder what benefit there is to learning IPA at this point in time. I feel like its major usefulness was when there existed no way to communicate audio information easily, which is no longer the case.
I assume we're all working on our voiceless alveolo-palatal fricatives this week?
Can someone explain the usefulness of IPA currently? I guess I wonder what benefit there is to learning IPA at this point in time. I feel like its major usefulness was when there existed no way to communicate audio information easily, which is no longer the case.
I wasn’t really aware of the IPA, is this mostly used for teaching purposes when learning a new language?
As far as people learning English as a second language it seems like one of the biggest hurdles is learning all the ‘exceptions’. Especially for people coming from languages where all vowels only have one pronunciation.
English pronunciations are so flexible & varied that it must be frustrating. There are so many words that you just have to learn individually through repetition, since they don’t follow the ‘framework’ of the base pronunciation rules.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gesoel /ʒɛʒuɛl/ (Going off of memory here, I probably butchered the pronunciation anyway). /ʒ/ does not occur in word-initial position in English, and for whatever reason it was incredibly hard for me to perceive it there. There was probably other more subtle differences between the two that did not make it into the transcription (e.g., his native name was pronounced with his native accent instead of his English acce…
> /ʒ/ does not occur in word-initial position in English I never noticed that until now. While it's obviously not an English word, plenty of English speakers have discussed French explorer Jacques Cousteau. I can't think of any other examples.
aɪ ˈwʌndə wɒt aɪ piː eɪ wʊd lʊk laɪk ɪf ɪt wɜːr ɪnˈvɛntɪd təˈdeɪ ˈprɒbəbliː nɒt laɪk ðɪs
I agree! I’ve heard that IPA was optimised for movable type, a medium in which it was easy to reverse and flip letters — thus we get e.g. ʌ,ɐ,ə,ɘ,ɔ,ɟ etc. (This, incidentally, is why you can write text upside-down using Unicode.) This can be contrasted with e.g. Americanist notation, which was optimised for handwriting: š, ȼ, ƛ etc. are easier to write than the IPA equivalents ʃ, t͡s, t͡ɬ. I’m not sure what a phonetic alphabet invented today would look like though — probably it would look something like X-SAMPA [0], restricted to mostly ASCII characters and making heavy use of uppercase, punctuation and digraphs. (A_i j}:z It r\e:li:, ba_"t It lUks lA_ik DIs.)