In a discussion elsewhere, I observed that! in my dialect, the word “pink” has a unique vowel sound that is, oddly, not represented in the IPA. If I paint concentric circles of different colors and describe it as “pink in green”, the three vowel sounds in that phase are different. “Pink” falls between the other two, kind of long but almost short. This seems to apply to most or all words that end in “-ink”.
It kind of annoys me that the IPA overlooks this. They have a symbol that differentiates between the Midwest vowel sounds in “hawk” and “rock”, which sound the same in my dialect, but in the middle “i”.
How do you say “pink”? I mean, excluding the S-i-t-M version that sounds like “pank”. Can you tell a difference compared with the short i vs “ee”?
It my dialect, the 3 sounds in your sentence all sound different, but the IPA symbol is /ɪ/. Same as in “drink” etc. and clearly different from the “ee” in “green.” Peenk is a Peter Lorre accent.
The i in pink is partially nasalized which affects how it sounds. For me, it is far closer to the “ee” sound in “green” than to the “i” sound of “in”, but yes, it’s in betweenish.
The IPA I would use is piŋk not pIŋk.
I = pin, win, sit, shit, lip, brick, THAT kind of i sound
i = see, teen, peek, weiner, pita, eve, keep, THAT kind of i (or more often “ee” in English) sound
In all languages, the quality of a vowel is colored by the adjacent consonants. For speakers of the language, it is inescapable, and vowels are typically spelled the same regardless of the spillover from the consonant. Another good example is the difference in the /i/ in “wing” and “wind”.
'An Arabic example woulds be /q/ and /k/, which are different consonants in a language that has only three vowels. An English speaker would hear different vowels, but find the consonants indistinguishable. But an Arabic speaker hears different consonants, with the same vowel.
What you’re probably getting stuck on is the difference between a broad and a narrow transcription.
In a broad transcription, IPA symbols are used to represent the more interesting features of the word, whereas a narrow transcription attempts to write down every sound exactly as it occurs. For example, ‘little’ can be written as /ˈlɪtəl/, as a broad transcription, or [ˈlɪɾɫ̩], as a narrow transcription.
Broad transcriptions can be somewhat dialect-insensitive, but require more experience to figure out what specific sounds to make for any given IPA symbol; narrow transcriptions remove more of the guesswork, but are also more tied to specific dialects.
So, in short: IPA does have the symbols you’re talking about, OP, but you don’t know them because most of the time, IPA is used to make broad transcriptions.
The IPA should properly be used the same way you use the spoken language: render the word as you yourself speak it, or as you hear someone else speaking it, or perhaps as you think it ought to be spoken, I suppose… but it itself (the rendering of a spoken word or phrase into IPA) should not be considered to have a “right” version. This isn’t spelling.
Just curious – how many of you pronounce “wade” and “weighed” exactly the same, and how many vary the length of the vowel? Does the narrow IPA have a means of showing that distinction?