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Interactive IPA Chart

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Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#31

Post by thaumasiotes »

cjhveal wrote: post #24
lainga wrote: post #5

The 't' and 'd' (dental & postalevolar plosives) sound so close together.

These sounds are really close together to begin with, but in English, we don't actually use either of those sounds in word-initial position like the example recording, and so unless you speak a language that distinguishes these sounds in this context, they are going to be difficult to differentiate. Our word-initial voiceless stops (p, t, k) are actually aspirated stops, that is they are produced with a strong puff o…

> Hold your hand in front of your mouth and feel the difference in pressure when you pronounce the first sound of the word "tune" versus the word "dune". This will let you feel that puff of "aspiration."

The aspiration will be even more obvious if you try speaking into a microphone.

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#33

Post by thaumasiotes »

jfengel wrote: post #27
potiuper wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are issues, for example: ren[t/d] the furniture.

Definitely. English is hardly even the worst offender there. I'm learning French, and as a non-native speaker I am utterly lost at anything close to conversational speed. The language has many homophones and near-homophones, and liaison makes word boundaries unclear without context. Get slightly lost and it's all over.

> and liaison makes word boundaries unclear without context

There's very little blame to be placed on liaison, since word boundaries are unclear in every language, including languages that e.g. don't allow syllable-final consonants. English speakers feel like they have a strong grasp of where word boundaries occur because of the orthographic space, but the space in the writing system does not coincide with word boundaries in the language; it is heavily conventionalized.

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#37

Post by thaumasiotes »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #25
leephillips wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a native English speaker, these renditions will sound too close together for you, because the person pronouncing them is not a native English speaker. IPA is a coarse guide to phonemes; it does not capture, for example, the difference between the English and Spanish t , which is so great that I am still struggling to do it correctly. But they are both “t” in IPA.

> it does not capture, for example, the difference between the English and Spanish t Ah yeah, that's true. This is because most Spanish speakers pronounce /t/ as denti-alveolar (the tip of the tongue touches the back of the teeth) while most English speakers pronounce /t/ as purely alveolar (the tip of the tongue stops at the back of the alveolar ridge). I'm not sure why the IPA chart doesn't differentiate these spec…

> 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 much worse for vowels, but still comes up for consonants.) You have to collapse variation somewhere.

The IPA notably doesn't have dedicated symbols for affricates. (Sounds that consist of a stop immediately followed by a fricative in the same location, like "z" in "pizza" or "ch" in "chill".) So English "ch" is represented /tʃ/, or if you want to be really explicit there's an affrication diacritic.

Recognizing that affricates consist physically of a colocated stop and fricative was felt to be a theoretical advance. But there's a funny story -- Peter Ladefoged went to document a language somewhere (the Americas?) and was proud to use the IPA to record its sounds. He insisted on it.

He insisted on it even after discovering that the language in question made a phonemic distinction between affricated tʃ, which he represented by /tʃ/, and /t/ followed by /ʃ/ without affrication, which he was forced to represent by /t.ʃ/. This would have been much easier to understand with a more bespoke system representing the two adjacent sounds as /tʃ/ and the affricate as /č/.

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#38

Post by thaumasiotes »

timothyg wrote: post #15
intergalplan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

t͡ʃ, t͡ɕ, ʈ͡ʂ all sound so close to my poor ear that I'd struggle to articulate the difference. They sound like exactly the same thing at slightly different speeds.

The latter two are distinguished in Mandarin Chinese, the difference between ‘q’ and ‘ch’ in Pinyin.

Note that that isn't the only difference between the Mandarin sounds. Pinyin "q" is also a laminal consonant, not an apical one.

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#40

Post by thaumasiotes »

leephillips wrote: post #23
doomrobo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough, IPA actually does have a way of distinguishing these sounds. The Spanish t is always unaspirated [t]. But the English t can sometimes be unaspirated [t] as in "stamp" or aspirated [tʰ] as in "too" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspiration_(phonetics)

That’s interesting, but the Spanish unaspirated t and the English one are different phonemes. The tongue is in a different position. If I forget and use the English t, my Spanish teacher stops me. The difference in sounds is quite obvious. So how, in IPA, do you spell the difference?

> but the Spanish unaspirated t and the English one are different phonemes. The tongue is in a different position.

That is not what "phoneme" means. They are different sounds, but they aren't different phonemes in either language; to be different phonemes, the same language would have to consider them different. Neither does -- in both cases, one is "/t/" and the other is "weird /t/".

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