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0 pointsthaumasiotes4y ago0 comments

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?

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DonaldPShimoda4y ago

Right, again I'm with you!

> 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?

I actually mentioned this in the top comment:

> 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.

What I meant in my most recent comment was that, if I were going to create a new IPA from scratch, I would probably try to have some diacritic or distinct symbol for each place of articulation, such that any possible place/manner combination could be expressed uniquely. As it stands, the presence of distinct symbols in the IPA seems governed by whether there are examples of real-world languages in which phones are considered contrastive. This is perfectly pragmatic, but it leaves me feeling disappointed that I can't easily express something that is right there on the chart! Having <t> correspond to 3-4 places of articulation with only a diacritic to distinguish 1-2 of those is disappointing, even if it's technically sufficient for any transcription within a given language.