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, but you're doing this other thing instead."
You can even use the chart (and maybe Wikipedia) to identify specific reasons as to why you're doing something wrong. For example, there's just one way to pronounce "S" in Finnish, whereas there are four ways to do that in English. It's just something that never crossed my mind before starting to work with a professional.
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 - sheet/shit, peace/piece/piss.
In the beginning of the class, the professor introduced himself with "my name is X, but you can call me Y if that is too difficult". The two names were mostly the same, except that the first sound in X was a complete mumble, where I could not make out what he had said (and he repeated it several times). Later in the first class he handed out a syllubus which included his name in IPA. I immidietly knew not only how to pronounce it, but was able to do so without any difficulty.
(For those curious, his real name started with /ʒ/, while his nickname started with /dʒ/)
There are (at least) 3 different consonants in Hindi that just sound like "T" to me. So it took me 3 attempts to spell this Hindi word correctly. The kids all absolutely lost their minds with laughter at this - they were all yelling (what I heard as) "no not tuh, TUH" and just couldn't understand why I couldn't tell the difference.
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 directions.
https://fluent-forever.com/product/fluent-forever-pronunciat...
There's a book called "Learner English" by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith for identifying common problems faced by English learners coming from different language backgrounds. They don't have a section on Finnish, at least in my second edition.
What are those four ways?
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)
However, the IPA has one distinguishing feature: it’s standardised, by the International Phonetic Association. By contrast, Americanist notation (the main competitor) is mostly unstandardised; for the most part, it’s not so much a ‘phonetic alphabet’ as much as a set of conventions people follow. And this doesn’t matter if the author has been careful to define their terms correctly, but it can be a real pain if they’ve forgotten. (e.g. for a while, I believed that Kalam had [r] as an allophone of [d], until I realised that the author had used ⟨ř⟩ to mean [ɾ], not [r]…) Thus, the linguistics community has mostly standardised on IPA, with the exception of some subfields which still use Americanist notation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation
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.
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.
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...
https://americanenglish.state.gov/resources/color-vowel-char...
One of the developers of this technique of teaching English sounds is a friend of mine. There's also games, matching words to colors, that can be played with all ages.
The few times I've been able to participate in one of these sessions, I learn something...
The difference between "door", "orange", and "dog" -- in southeastern states, I hear a vowel shift from one towards the others. My Californian friends couldn't quite hear it.
The next level up would be "phonemes", which must contrast against other phonemes within a particular language. For instance, in English /b/ and /v/ are phonemes, because "bat" and "vat" are two different words with only that portion changing. (This is known as a minimal pair.) However, in Spanish, /b/ and /β/ are not separate phonemes; they are two phones in complementary distribution.
It would be nice to extend this, perhaps on a different page, to examples from specific languages. That would fill in some missing parts---long and short vowels, nasal vowels, and diphthong---and also show the vowels within a specific context. I have these for a few languages and will try to reach out to the author in case they are interested in collaborating.
That's almost as magical to me as people who look at a sonograph and casually read off what the speaker said.
- phoneme, ns:"US English letter combinations", []
- phoneme, ns:"schema.org/CreativeWorks which feature said phoneme", []
AFAIU, WordNet RDF doesn't have links to any IPA RDFS/OWL vocabulary/ontology yet.
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.
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.
It took me ~6 months to understand where a word started and ended. When I tried saying the most simple things I got blank stares. But when when they repeated it back to me it sounded exactly like what I said all along.
Try to say "Dry wood burns doesn't it?" in Thai and you get different variations of the word "Mai" which sounds like "Mai mai mai maii?" ... or "spicy duck with pepper" that is just "phet ped pet ped PET ..." etc
I eventually ended up marrying a Japanese girl (so heating with wood was never an issue neither was ordering spicy duck with pepper). And their language is all rather monotone (as you probably know from your own time there).
using this IPA would have gotten me more ridicule than ordering spicy duck from a wooden grill. And if I would have trusted HN (and this chart) I'd still be feckless today thank you very much :P (I'll take an Indian Pale Ale though without all the moaning)
(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"?
I was trying to find the Swedish "u" sound. According to the Swedish Wikipedia page on the sound, it says it's written as "u" in IPA, but it doesn't sound right at all. The "ʉ" sound is a lot closer, but still not right.
What is the correct IPA representation of the Swedish u, as in "ful"?
IIRC, Swedish /u/ is somewhat fronted, but not quite /ʉ/. It's somewhere inbetween those two. There isn't an IPA symbol for every possible sound, just the most common among languages, but there are diacritics for special cases or more precision.
See the "Advanced" diacritic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...
The diacritics are also used for _phonetic_ rather than _phonemic_ renderings as the surrounding sounds in a word, etc. affect the exact outcome of an individual sound. Phonemic renderings in the IPA are typically enclosed in slashes and phonetic in square brackets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...
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." Next, try putting your fingers over the front of your throat, (on your layrnx or where the Adam's apple is on men), and pronounce the sounds slowly. You may be able to feel the difference when your vocal cords start to vibrate as you say the "d" sound. In native English speakers this happens shortly after the pressure is released from your tongue, while in the English "t" sound, the vibration doesn't start until the vowel does. The "d" sound in the example from the chart has the vocal cord vibrations start immediately as the pressure is being released.
The aspiration will be even more obvious if you try speaking into a microphone.
Native speakers have the advantage in spoken conversation. They quickly understand not just the word, but the context. No native speaker would ever confuse "Give that document to Ted" with "Give that document to dead" since the latter is nonsensical. Even if you actually said "dead", most people would interpret it as "Ted" without even noticing anything odd about your pronunciation. (In fact, in a context like that between two vowels, it's entirely possible that you would keep your vocal cords buzzing and produce a "d" even if you'd meant to say "t").
Obviously this is a spectrum; some transcriptions are so broad that they transcribe the english <r> as /r/ when the context is clear that we're talking about english, even though it should properly by /ɹ/. And in my narrow transcription, I didn't bother to notate vowel length, because it didn't matter for the given example.
(Note: I use <> for orthography (how it's written in the language), // for broad transcription, and, and [] for narrow transcription)
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 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!
That said, I think this is actually a relatively uncommon case in the IPA, because in addition to this simple chart the IPA also specifies a number of diacritics for more complex and precise transcriptions. These diacritics are often not used in broad transcriptions within a single language because most languages don't differentiate phones at this level in a contrastive manner. But in a narrow transcription, the diacritics are used as appropriate, generally to help the transcriber make a point about what is noteworthy in that transcription.
For instance, in English let's consider the "t" as you mention. We'll look at "tap" and "pat". The broad transcriptions for these words are /tæp/ and /pæt/, respectively. But the narrow transcriptions would be more like [tʰæp̚] and [pʰæt̚] (Note that broad transcriptions are phonemic and given between slashes, while narrow transcriptions are phonetic and given between brackets). What this shows is that, in English, syllable-initial voiceless stops are aspirated (indicated by the little "h"), while word-final voiceless stops have no audible release (indicated by the angle symbol, known as "corner"). So in addition to the main letter glyphs of IPA, there are tons of diacritics that help you write your transcriptions more precisely!
> “Mr Vimes," said Mrs Winkings, "ve cannot help but notice that you still haf not employed any of our members in the Vatch..."
> Say 'Watch', why don't you? Vimes thought. I know you can. Let the twenty-third letter of the alphabet enter your life.”
I am not a native English speaker, yet I decifer everyone execept gargoyles:
— e cuns uk ere um-imes an awks oo ugg
Language is unconscious and you won't understand how it works until you let go of a lot of false culturally-programmed notions, and then actually study it by engaging with the work of linguists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coarticulation
For Hindi there are additional phenomena that will alter the sounds of spoken language in certain contexts.
In French, Italian, or German, though, they already do. Those languages are quite orthographically regular.
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.)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Edit: er, I meant high-pass filter, I guess.
I spent months brewing IPA's using the same basic recipe with tweaks in yeast, mash temperatures, and ingredients and have now moved on to do the same with a saison (just kegged the first today), but am very happy to see this chart pop up.
