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Interactive IPA Chart

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Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#141

Post by cjhveal »

bradrn wrote: post #137
cjhveal wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, with a [u] at the end? That's really interesting, do you mind me asking what dialect you speak?

I’ve never been quite sure about my accent, but it’s probably closest to Australian English. The relevant sound change is /l/-vocalisation: syllable-final [ɫ] → [w] with accompanying vowel changes, and syllabic [ɫ̩] → [u]. So I have e.g. pool [puːw], wall [woːw], adult [ˈʔæɾʊwtˢ], peel [piːw ~ ˈpiju], apple [ˈʔæpʰu], middle [ˈmɪɾu].

Very interesting. After asking I wondered if there could have been some kind of velar connection but L-vocalization makes sense. Appreciate the in depth explanation with lots of examples from your idiolect.

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#142

Post by thaumasiotes »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #104
thaumasiotes wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure why the IPA chart doesn't differentiate these specific phones, honestly. I imagine it's because although the sounds are very different cross-linguistically, maybe there aren't any languages where these phones are contrastive and thus they don't warrant separate glyphs in the IPA. Still, I'd love to see them! It's because sounds vary continuously, but the IPA is by necessity discrete. (A problem that is…

Wow, that's really interesting about the affricates! Thanks for sharing! :) I get the continuous vs discrete aspect for sure, but you'd think we'd at least have different symbols for each place of articulation! /t/ crosses four different places (dental, denti-alveolar, alveolar, post-alveolar) and the best we can do is cut that down into two groups of two places with the dental diacritic which says "some teeth contac…

I don't think the places of articulation you list are considered all that different, really. Two speakers of different languages using sounds articulated along that continuum are likely to recognize the other language's sound as being their own, but sounding a little funny. (This phenomenon is especially notable for rhotics, where different languages may realize an "r" in very different ways -- for example, Spanish and Russian have loud alveolar trills, English has a retroflex approximant, and French has a uvular trill -- but everyone broadly agrees on which sounds are R-like, despite the fact that a Spanish R has much more in common with an English D, physically, than it does with an English R.)

Looking at the example sidethread of Mandarin pinyin "q", it is a laminal palatal aspirated affricate. Its equivalent in English is a much more complex issue than the equivalent of a Spanish "t", which everyone agrees on. The "q" may be perceived as a "ts" (witness "Tsingtao beer"), which is the English sound combination most closely matching the positioning of the tongue, though not the positioning of the restriction in airflow, or it may be perceived as "ch", which is the English single sound most closely matching the place and manner of articulation. Different English speakers may even disagree on the interpretation while listening to the same speech, and the same English speaker will disagree on (or be confused about) the interpretation when listening to the same speaker produce the sound multiple times.

There are languages that distinguish retroflex stops from alveolar stops, and IPA obliges those languages with different symbols for the two places of articulation. Do you know of a language that distinguishes alveolar stops from dental stops?

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#143

Post by tasogare »

bradrn wrote: post #122
40four wrote: post #118

I can’t be the only one to click on this to be disappointed it wasn’t a website about beer! 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. En…

> I wasn’t really aware of the IPA, is this mostly used for teaching purposes when learning a new language? It’s mostly used for linguistic purposes — most often in grammatical descriptions of obscure languages, or for precisely specifying the pronunciation of a word (e.g. in my dialect ‘mutable’, say, is [mjʉːtˢə̆bu]). But I believe it gets used in language learning as well.

> most often in grammatical descriptions of obscure languages

No, it's used everywhere in phonology, for every language.

I started a project like that (also to train myself using web components), except it listed the phonemes of a given language, selectable to the user. I should complete it one day...

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#144

Post by rahimnathwani »

chalcolithic wrote: post #87
rahimnathwani wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same happens with foreigners learning Mandarin Chinese. The consonants are easy, but each vowel can be pronounced with one of 4 different tones (or 5 if you count the 'neutral' tone). If you get a tone wrong, sometimes people will understand the erroneous word due to surrounding context. But pretty often you'll just elicit a blank stare. This is especially the case for short phrases, e.g. when you're asking for d…

>The consonants are easy I wish. My teachers have no problem telling apart my j and q, but I rarely hear the difference despite all the cosonants in my native language coming in palatalized/non-palatalized pairs.

I forgot that English speakers often have difficulty with these pairs of consonant sounds in Mandarin:

j / zh

q / ch (the former is further forward in the mouth than 'ch' in English, and the latter further back, with a fully clenched mouth)

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#145

Post by yongjik »

My IPA WTF moment was when I learned that "t͡ʃ Voiceless palato-alveolar affricate" and "t͡ɕ Voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate" are two different sounds. The first is English ch (as in church), and the second is Korean ㅊ (or so they say), but even being a native Korean speaker, I just can't tell the difference.

(They do sound somewhat different but that's because English ch is always pronounced with rounded lips.)

Also, seriously, couldn't they think of a better name than "palato-alveolar" vs "alveolo-palatal"?

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#146

Post by Bud »

bradrn wrote: post #122
40four wrote: post #118

I can’t be the only one to click on this to be disappointed it wasn’t a website about beer! 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. En…

> I wasn’t really aware of the IPA, is this mostly used for teaching purposes when learning a new language? It’s mostly used for linguistic purposes — most often in grammatical descriptions of obscure languages, or for precisely specifying the pronunciation of a word (e.g. in my dialect ‘mutable’, say, is [mjʉːtˢə̆bu]). But I believe it gets used in language learning as well.

It's also used for training singers. For instance, in grad school, I taught Singers' Diction in various languages. Being able to transcribe any given text into IPA, and then of course pronounce it accurately, is a core skill for classical singers. The usual languages covered are English, German, Italian, and French, those being the most important for classical music. Interestingly, the language that a lot of native English speakers have the most trouble with is...English! You'd be surprised.

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#147

Post by Bud »

xkjkls wrote: post #66

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.

If you need to communicate to someone how a given foreign word is pronounced, IPA is invaluable.

Audio doesn't do the same job, really, since it relies on a trained ear and the ability to distinguish what each individual sound is. Experts have this. The people that most need the help, don't.

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#148

Post by Bud »

jostmey wrote: post #121

Someday people will spell words phonetically. They will look back at our languages as primitive throwbacks, like hieroglyphics

Not in English, they won't.

In French, Italian, or German, though, they already do. Those languages are quite orthographically regular.

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#150

Post by ericbarrett »

shazar wrote: post #71
dvirsky wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a native Hebrew speaker. We basically have one way to say each vowel. It took practice for me (not with a coach but with some training videos etc) to even hear the different ways English speakers pronounce them, my brain just wasn't tuned to hear them, let alone pronounce them. Week, weak and wick will be pronounced and will sound exactly the same to a non trained Hebrew speaker, and to much much more hilarity -…

Aren't week/weak and piece/peace pronounced exactly the same?

I'd pronounce those the same (western US accent), but it can vary. Check out the caught/cot merger, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger
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