Hot answers tagged phonetics
12
First, if you're actually teaching English to non-native speakers, you must learn and use at least those IPA symbols that represent English phonemes. Get yourself a copy of Kenyon and Knott and use it; or borrow one of your students' bilingual dictionaries.
If you help them, your students can understand the pronunciations as they appear in their bilingual ...
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Yes, there is a connection between losing one phonemic property and gaining another. Most approaches to phonology conceptualize words as having double lives: on the one hand, they are made of a particular sound sequence which you have to pronounce correctly; on the other hand, the sounds in sequences are only recognized as discrete parts because they ...
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So which pronunciation is standard for the [ʊ] sound? Rounded or unrounded?
Certainly there is some rounding, but because roundedness is not phonemic in this position, there is also considerable variation in how much of it actually occurs in any given word and speaker.
For example, you will find that it is generally somewhat more rounded in pull and ...
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The reason this problem arises is that the consonant in the middle of usual - which phoneticians call the voiced palatoalveolar fricative, and which is written in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as [ʒ] - doesn't have a fixed representation in the English writing system. When it occurs in words borrowed from other languages, we usually keep the ...
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In California and the Southwestern U.S., the /ɪ/ in think is pronounced more like the vowel /i/ in bean, so it's close to /θiŋk/ in IPA. See this post on dialect blog, which calls it pre-velar tensing. In fact, I suspect this pronunciation is also present in the speech of some Americans who are not from the West, just judging from the way some speakers on ...
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At a guess (and without a recording it can be no more than that), you are doing one of two things:
If you are merely "overarticulating" the /k/, like an anxious student in a voice production class, you are probably producing a little puff of air when you release the consonant. This sounds like the "BrE" recording on this page, and in IPA it is notated ...
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Phonemics, or Phonology, is the study of the distribution of sound systems in human languages. A Phoneme is a particular set of sounds produced in a particular language and distinguishable by native speakers of that language from other (sets of) sounds in that language. That's what "distinctive" means -- the English phonemes /n/ and /ŋ/ can be told apart by ...
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The transcriptions are slightly different, but they're both correct. You'll have to decide which style of transcription you prefer.
Phonetizer appears to be a more phonetic and less phonemic rendering; it marks long vowels, which is a little unusual for American English transcription -- it's not clear just what the vowel length signifies since it's not ...
3
No, Chloë and Zoë are still stressed on the penult even when written as Chloé and Zoé.
Once upon a time people would write learnéd instead of learnèd, but it doesn’t change the stress in English — as opposed to in inglés, where it does.
3
There's no definitive spelling, but as per ushe is a common one with the benefit of being fairly unambiguous.
Alternatives include as per use, but that could be confused with "for each use", and as per uje, but that looks a bit odd.
The OED doesn't include either, but does note as per is also a shortened form.
3
Apparently this is considered the normal, default pronunciation in General American. Look at, and more importantly, listen to red at the Sound Comparisons site. Notice that the General American pronunciation is given as [ɻɛd], not [ɹɛd].
On the other hand, apart from the up-talking teen-aged boy’s pronunciation provided in the “General American” ...
3
Mitch is right. But onomatopoiea per se is a very insignificant phenomenon, since it can only refer to words about sounds, and how often do we talk about sounds?
Onomatopoeia is, however, part of a larger, more general, and sporadically studied field of linguistic research called (variously) sound symbolism, phonosemantics, ideophones, assonance/rime ...
3
Phonetics deals with the actual sounds and their articulation, like the difference between the articulation of 't' and 'd' (where the 't' is voiceless and the 'd' is voiced).
Phonology deals with the rules of how those sounds, the phonetics, are put together. For instance, how a 't' in medial position is pronounced as a flap and not a hard 't' sound (i.e. ...
3
In standard US English they are pronounced the same. I've heard Southerners pronounce "hear" as two syllables with the "r" silent, as in, "Y'all come back now, yuh he-ah."
I'm surprised by Sean's statement of Kentuckians pronouncing "here" as two syllables but "hear" as one, because, as I say, the only dialect I've ever heard had it the other way around. ...
2
I suggest that the differences are small and pronunciations vary widely. For example, although your reference lists /ˌɪndəˈrekt/ as the preferred British pronunciation, and doesn't list it at all for American English, I overwhelmingly hear /ˌɪndəˈrekt/ in the U.S.
In short, I don't think this is anything to be troubled about. People will know what you mean, ...
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Nasal vowels may be a feature of US speech, but I’m not sure they occur in non-regional British speech. I hear no difference between the vowel in bit and the vowel in think and for the latter, indeed, the OED has /θɪŋk/, and not /θɪ̰ŋk/, for the US pronunciation. Nasal vowels are a noticeable feature of French, where they typically occur without a following ...
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As @JohnLawler points out, it would take an extensive sociolinguistic study to arrive at something definitive. Based on various bits of research provided in the comments, this accent appears often in speakers from California who perform a "velar pinch." I'm marking this answered because I think until a deeper study is done, this is what we have:
...
2
As I've had occasion to say before,
English spelling does not represent English pronunciation.
Consequently the letter C can represent
- the voiceless alveolar sibilant /s/, as in pace /pes/
- the voiceless velar stop /k/, as in caucus /'kawkəs/
- (as part of CH) the voiceless palatal affricative /tʃ/, as in church /tʃərtʃ/
as well as other sounds, ...
2
This shows the typical pronunciation of any to be /ˈɛni/. The /ɛ/ is the same sound as at the beginning of end, not the sound at the beginning of anvil (/æ/).
Spelling and pronunciation are not strictly related. If you want to pronounce any as /ˈæni/ you're welcome to, it doesn't sound so different that you'll be misunderstood, it's just not the typical ...
2
Consider the letter A.
Now consider these:
All of these forms are very different; but they are all understood as the letter A.
Everybody pronounces the language differently; but what people hear is a very small number of “meaningful” sounds—phonemes. Just as we map the various physical realizations we see onto a small fixed inventory of characters, we ...
2
(first draft, part 1, to be edited)
You have asked so many questions, and many of them don’t have simple, irrefutable answers.
So, I’ll try to address some of your questions below - immensely simplifying things and ignoring exceptions and minor cases.
At first, some caveats (the following is mostly based on Hogg 2008).
Vowel length was rarely marked in ...
2
There are two distinct realizations of the /r/ (as in red) consonant phoneme in American English. Though the articulations are completely different, they sound quite similar.
There's an coronal realization [ɻ], often described as somewhat retroflexed, which is the one you read about. I think that this articulation is less retroflexed than the Mandarin /ɻ/, ...
2
Standard Written English doesn't use diacritics,¹ so there is no consensus for what they mean when you do use them. That is, a native speaker may not think that "Chloë" or "Chloé" is meant to be pronounced differently than "Chloe", and even if they do, no two speakers will necessarily agree on what the pronunciation is.
Culturally, people are entitled to ...
1
Phonetically, the letter c usually takes a hard sound when it comes before back vowels (a, u and o): car, coal, collect, calendar, curtain; and soft when it comes before the front vowels (e, and i); ceiling, cinder, circuit, certain.
Its not fair to name a few exceptions and say there are no rules. There are rules, and a few exceptions.
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Here's one of the seven variants listed in Dialect Blog's The Wild World of the English “R”...
The “American” R: /ɻ/ (Retroflex approximant) Similar to the “velar approximant” described above. It is pronounced the same way, except the tongue is curved back just behind the alveolar ridge. You hear this most commonly in American and some Irish accents.
...
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I think there are a number of Internet resources that could be consulted and I would encourage you to pursue that.
This site (for example)
http://funeasyenglish.com/american-english-pronunciation-word-and-sentence-stress.htm
has some of the "rules" I think you are after.
Stress on the first syllable
• most 2-syllable nouns – china, table, export, ...
1
Your stated question is:
Is there any technical term (or subfield) that can be used to refer to or that can best summarize this phenomenon?
Informally, no, there's not a subfield of phonology studying this phenomenon that has its own special one word latinate name.
Of course, there may be papers on the subject (which would de facto comprise a ...
1
Hmm, the "i" in "think" and the "i" in "bit" sound the same to me, at least the way I and people I know (native English speakers in New York, Ohio, and Michigan) say them.
Break up the words: th - i - nk, that is, say it as thuh - i - engk; and b - i - t, i.e. buh - i - tuh. The "i" has the same sound in both cases. As long as you don't run the "i" into ...
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In English, in a non-stressed syllable, a schwa often replaces the vowel. This is what is going on here. The second syllable of both indirect and organization is not stressed. In this word, it is acceptable to replace the /aɪ/ with a schwa. And in some American dialects, when you replace an /aɪ/ with a schwa, what you get is typically an /ɪ/ and not an /ə/.
...
1
I would agree with Mark T for his apt description of phonetics.
I would like to extend his phonology definition to include the study of which sounds can and cannot be combined in a given language. For example, in English, an initial t or p is aspirated (small puff of air follows: try speaking it in front of a lit candle!). But medial t or p is not ...
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