Spectre, that’s an issue if you’re trying to use IPA for other languages. I’m trying to stick to speakers of English learning IPA to discuss English pronunciation with other speakers of English. The issue you point out isn’t relevant to that. For that you won’t have to learn symbols for sounds that aren’t phonemic in English.
Glad you wrote this. I listened again and realised she said aw as in “law”. I thought she said “lar”.
Yes, they do sound different. “Aw” is same as “oar”. To a US person, my “oar” would have a very soft /r/.
Good explanation. Ask a British English speaking person to pronounce Far and Fah, Bar and Bah, Shar and Shah, etc. I suspect each pair will sound the same.
Really? I aspirate the words spin and skin just like I do pin and kin. I can’t even imagine trying to do it without aspirating - how is that possible?
You have a good point about not being able to perceive sounds that aren’t in your dialect. When I was younger I was having a beer in Germany with an Englishman who spoke fluent German. I asked him the proper way to pronounce the name of the beer printed on the beer glass: König.
To my ear, he replied “koo-nig.” So I repeated “koo-nig” just like he said. He said “No, koo-nig.” So I repeated. No again. He was saying a subtly different pronunciation of the vowel sound that was important to him, but I couldn’t even hear.
I beg to differ, because it’s clear from this thread that speakers of even just different dialects of the same language will tend to describe the same sound differently.
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Right but not every variant has phonemic relevance in every situation. In the usual “Brits say this and Yanks say this” thread the issue of aspiration of pulmonic consonants is not phonemic, and both the Brit or the Yank will have not only to learn the symbols but will have to go to considerable effort to understand and hear the very concept.
I’m trying to show that the Brit and the Yank need only learn a handful of symbols—particularly for a handful of key vowel sounds—and they will be able to get their points across much easier.
If they then want to explore much more complex issues of pronunciation that cross language barriers or say Indian English accents then it would be useful to get into more complex subjects like aspiration, but that’s a more advanced class. IPA for Beginners doesn’t require it.
It’s crazy easy. You need nothing more than Wikipedia. Each of the IPA symbols on the IPA for English page is linked to its own article with a clearly pronounced audio file for each one. Also, study of the vowel chart makes the relationships between vowel sounds much clearer to visualize, and it is arranged according to the actual shape of your mouth.
While I don’t call myself an expert (it’s sweet of you, though, I’m not complaining), I rate myself with a “near-complete” understanding of IPA. Much of the nitty gritty of the many possible click articulations in Ju|'hoan still escapes me because I haven’t practiced it the way I’ve practiced the rest of our beautiful periodic table of phonetics.
But yeah, absolutely what he said.
That’s all I’ve been tryin to tell yas.
I wonder how dependent English communication is on coloration. We cope rather well with a very wide variety of accents, but sometimes barely intelligible speech can be understood by its coloring. The three based hues of cadence, pitch and stress combine to paint a statement sometimes to the extent that primary articulation is barely more than decoration. This is why sometimes we can pull the muddy words out of a spoken sentence to make sense of them, but when the word is uttered on its own in a strange accent, it is often harder.
Coloration probably applies to a variety of other languages, but it may lose some weight in the tonally semantic ones.
I should have been clearer. It’s only the /p/ or /k/ that is aspirated or not; aspiration is manifested as a puff of air spoken with the voiceless stop. In pronouncing the rest of the word you are usually exhaling the air that activates your vocal chords. But in the case of an unaspirated stop, the flow of air stops for the split second it takes for that sound to be pronounced. It is, after all, a ‘stop’.
The Wiki article explains it better than I was able to. Also, the passage reminds me of the word contrastive, which I really could have used earlier had I but remembered it.
If you listen to a Romance language native speaker pronounce a word-initial stop, e.g. perro in Spanish, you should be able to hear that it sounds different from a word-initial stop in English, and that happens because the stop is always unaspirated in those languages. I can’t describe the difference subjectively, other than to say that in those languages, stops in word-initial position sound crisper or brighter or more emphatic than they do in English. It wasn’t until I studied phonology that I learned the underlying reason for the difference.
It’s a bit like listening to a Hebrew speaker speak English - even when they’re very good, and they have all the obvious consonant and vowel sounds down pat, somehow their S and T just doesn’t sound right.
When I say perro I also don’t aspirate it - funny I never noticed the difference.
However I still aspirate the p and k in spin and skin. There’s not as much airflow because my teeth start out being closed to say the “s” sound but other than that it’s still aspirated.
The aspiration issue is critical to Chinese.
Americans are now being taught to say “doe fu” for “tofu” and “bay jing” for Beijing. But those B, D, and J sounds are really unaspirated (or breathless) P, T, and (close to) CH sounds.