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Interactive IPA Chart

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Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#91

Post by jdmichal »

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 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.

I think this is a pretty spot-on observation. IPA does offer a bunch of diacritics for making more narrow transcriptions. For instance, Spanish's dental is [t̪].

However, the narrower the transcription, the less applicable it is to a language in general. Things like dialectal and even individual differences start to come into play. So in general transcription will only be as narrow as necessary to achieve some point.

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#92

Post by ff7c11 »

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.

What is a good way to communicate audio information. Listening to audio doesn't necessarily explain how the sound was made (well it does kind of), whereas seeing a word in IPA makes it easy to reproduce (for people familiar with IPA) and compare.

English writing is not a good phonetic system for representing speech even for the English language: IMO a 1-to-1 mapping between pronunciation and spelling should be the goal.

You might want to explain how to pronounce the word in a British or Australian accent or compare it to how a word was pronounced 200 years ago. In that case you can use a phonetic alphabet to show the difference.

The idea is to have a writing system which can be used to accurately record all possible sounds. It's helpful for learning languages with bad alphabets such as English (https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/teaching-pronunci...), for describing accents and for comparing languages and linguistics work.

PS: I don't know IPA so I'm probably wrong about everything.

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#93

Post by jdmichal »

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?

Spanish is dental, which requires the dental diacritic: [t̪]

However, since there is no alveolar [t] in Spanish, it will generally just be transcribed as /t/ rather than having to put the diacritic on all the time.

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#94

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

3pt14159 wrote: post #74
shazar wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They're really quite close, both pairs of them. But the emphasis isn't quite the same as most people speak it.

As a speaker of fairly standard British English, I would say they are homophones; I tried but couldn't find any natural way in which I could pronounce them differently.

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#95

Post by gizmo686 »

StavrosK wrote: post #90
gizmo686 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm giving up my search for it, but I once read a research paper on categorical perception. If you compare [ta] and [da], you find that the only difference is the time between when you make the consonant, and when your vocal chords start vibrating (voice onset time). In theory, VOT is a contimum, with any value being possible. However, in English it forms a tri-modal distribution /tʰ/ /t/ and /d/. The experiment arti…

Hmm, very interesting, thank you! Is it this one? https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.103... Seems to be exactly what you describe.

That is along the lines of what I was thinking, but does not make the point as cleany (they end up combining the speach-primed and non speach-primed data because participants said they percieved it as speach from the start.

They also used an ABX methodology, which forces the subject to put sounds into boxes by essentially asking if X is more like A or B, not if X is different from both.

The one I am thinking of used an odd-one-out methodology, where the subject was presented with AAX, and asked to pick which sound was different from the others (where the others were genuinly the same sound). The one I am thinking of also found a priming effect, which yours apparantly didn't.

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#96

Post by irrational »

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?

They are for me. Exactly the same pronunciation and emphasis. Maybe there are some dialects of English where they are not pronounced the same.

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#97

Post by desert_boi »

ff7c11 wrote: post #79
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 -…

French speakers often struggle with beach/bitch :)

In German, the vowels between schwül and schwul were really difficult to do for me as an American English speaker. I couldn't ever hear the difference between rounded and unrounded vowels. American English vowels are only rounded in the back. u and o (and in the East the au in caught).

Re: Interactive IPA Chart

#99

Post by alfonsodev »

ff7c11 wrote: post #79
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 -…

French speakers often struggle with beach/bitch :)

As Spanish speaker I struggled myself with that one, sweating, and probably over correcting making the e super long beeeeach to be safe. :D
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