Questions tagged [phonemes]
The phonemes tag has no usage guidance.
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Are there other examples of names similar to "McKeen", with multiple capitals within a word and non-initial capital letter placement within graphemes?
I'm breaking down the phoneme-grapheme pairs for the name, "McKeen".
The "M" grapheme appears to represent the sound /mə/ ("muh"). I've noticed the "uh" sound ...
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1
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American English retroflex 'd' in the word 'guardian'?
In American English fast speech, I have noticed that the 'd' sound in words like 'birdy' and 'guardian' sometimes appears to be pronounced as a voiced retroflex plosive (/ɖ/) instead of the standard ...
AehkGuu
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1
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How phonetically distinct in terms of quality (tongue gesture) are /ɜː/ and /ə/ in Received Pronunciation?
The English Wikipedia article on Received Pronunciation uses two particular vowel charts adapted from two sources, an article by Peter Roach titled British English: Received Pronunciation published in ...
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Occurrences of voiced VS unvoiced 'th'
Is there a resource for determining how common one or the other is in English? I doubt that it varies between BrE vs AmE etc
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Pronunciation of "es" at the end of the words [duplicate]
Is there a some of kind of rule affecting the pronunciation of "es" coming at the end of a word? In some words I hear "-es" as "ɪz" and in some others I hear it as a &...
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How do you syllabify "anxious" or "luxury" or "taxi"?
The grapheme X can sometimes be pronounced with a two-phoneme sequence, such as the following:
/ks/ - taxi
/gz/ - exact
/kʃ/ - anxious
/ŋz/ - anxiety
/gʒ/ - luxury
For these two-phoneme sequences, I'...
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Why are "er”, "ar” and "or" often listed as R-colored vowels but "air”, "ear" and "oor/ure" are not? Are they vowels or vowel+consonant?
NOTE: I speak a rhotic variety of English.
I am struggling with how to explain r-coloured vowels/vocalic R to teachers during a presentation on the phonemes of English. Many grapheme-phoneme lists ...
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Do "beaches" and "preaches" end with different phonemes?
Not being an English native speaker, I'm consulting an online tool that seemed to me most reliable in order to get the phonemic transcription of words, called "CMU Pronouncing Dictionary".
...
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Why is there a flap allophone of /t/ but not of /k/ or /p/?
In English, there are three (phonemic) voiceless stops: /t/, /k/, /p/. In most if not all American accents, a /t/ between vowels (the first of which is usually stressed and the second unstressed) is ...
user387044
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1
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Is the underlying form of "n" /n/ or /ŋ/ in words ending in -nk?
There are lots of words ending in -nk in Modern English. In (almost) all those words, the -nk is pronounced [-ŋk]. My understanding is that the "n" in spelling represented [n] originally but ...
user387044
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0
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Is [bʊt] (Northern England) analyzed as an allophone of /bʌt/?
In some/most Northern England accents, words that have [ʌ] in RP (or standard varieties of English) are pronounced with [ʊ]. So hut, cut, shut etc are pronounced with [ʌ]* in Southern British English ...
user387044
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1
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When is the "Short A" sound actually spelled with an AE?
I was reading a book on English spelling (Dictionary of the British English Spelling System, by Greg Brooks) and it mentioned that the Short A sound (æ) can be spelled using the following graphemes:
...
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1
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Why are there so many restrictions on /ŋ/ in English?
In (GA, SSBE) English, the phoneme /ŋ/ (in ring) seems to have so many restrictions:
it rarely occurs after /u:/, if at all: the only word that I have been able to find in which /ŋ/ occurs after /u:/ ...
user387044
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Why is the zh (ʒ) sound so infrequent in English?
I've always heard that the "zh" (ʒ) sound (e.g. in "vision", "usually") was an uncommon sound in the English language. A quick Google search returns multiple results (...
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Voicing of sibilants before liquids, after voiced vowels?
I just ran across an interesting question from a friend about
the voicing of sibilants in English. She was asking why English
speakers pronounce the word muslim as muZlim (with a voiced
sibi...
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IPA, Accents, and dictionaries, British and American Phonetics [duplicate]
As a non native english speaker, I'm trying to work on my accent. I've taken a lot of bad habits so I'm trying to go back to the fundamentals meaning learning phonetics. But they seem very imprecise ...
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Is there normally a lexicalized loss of phonemic /d/ in the coda of "depends"?
According to a blog article by Steven Norman under the title “My 100 most mispronounced words in English”, the word depends should be /dɪˈpenz/ when “correctly” pronounced.
Notice he provides for no ...
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Is /ɑ/ a back or central vowel in GA English?
/ɑ/ is called open back unrounded vowel, however it appears in the center bottom of the vowel trapezoid of General American English at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American#Phonology . Why?...
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How should you pronounce the word "wolf "?
If the dictionary’s IPA for the word wolf is /wʊlf/, then why do I sometimes hear people pronounce it /wolf/ instead of /wʊlf/?
Aren’t /ʊ/ and /o/ different phonemes?
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Why phonemic symbols are different between dictionaries
I find the phonemic symbols are different for the same word between dictionaries. Take the word "tuck" for example. In Oxford Learner's Dictionary, its /tʌk/ for both British English and ...
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How many speech sounds (phonemes) are there in English? [closed]
Is the following statement correct especially the section about there being 44 individual speech sounds as I'm thinking there's actually a lot more sounds than that?
"English words are produced ...
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What is the relative frequency of English graphemes and/or phonemes in printed UK English texts/spoken English?
Having reviewed freely accessible research I found references to The Grapheme-Phoneme Problem in Reading and other spelling studies and have sought other frequency tables that describe the relative ...
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Are there American English dialects which distinguish /ɑ/ and /ɒ/ but not /ɑ/ and /ɔ/?
I relied on the Logic of English (LoE) phonograms to give myself a better understanding of English pronunciation since the spelling gives me a hard time (even as native speaker), but I noticed that ...
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Is there a southern British accent in which emphasis changes /ɪf/ to /ɪv/, /wɒz/ to /wɒs/?
Is there a southern British accent in which different emphasis changes /ɪf/ to /ɪv/ and /wɒz/ to /wɒs/?
I'm just thinking that I want to do this. So the following phrases:
what was that?
what if?
user99677
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Psychology of diphthongs
First of all, technically this probably should be at the English Language Learners site, because I'm an English learner, but my intuition says I'll probably get more useful answers here because of my ...
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Are [ɪ] and [i] are allophones of the same phoneme in English? [closed]
I am leaning towards no, but would like confirmation and perhaps an example to illustrate.
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Is there such a thing as "pangram for phonemes"?
English has a lot of pangrams, which are short sentences that use every letter of the alphabet at least once. This website has several examples. But is there a similar thing that is designed to use (...
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vowel reduction phoneme overlapped
I'm learning phonemes used in English.
And, I came to know that there is the phenomenon called vowel reduction.
Vowels get closer in the quality to schwa sound by this phenomenon.
Here is my question....
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Are R-colored diphthongs phonemes or not?
There are some sounds called the "R-colored diphthong" in English, such as [or] sound in "court" or the [ir] sound in "clear".
My question is simple: are these R-colored diphthongs regarded as ...
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1
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Is schwa always from vowel reductions?
I'm learning about schwa sound used in English.
I've learnt that the phenomenon called vowel reduction can, in English, generate the schwa sound.
Are all schwa sounds a result of this process, or not?...
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Is there any Saxon word that contains /ʒ/?
Is there any Saxon (native) word that contains /ʒ/? All words containing that sound I can think of such as genre, garage, luge, vision, visual, etc. are from French.
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/ə/ in a stressed syllable?
According to this description of the English phonotactics, the schwa /ə/ doesn't occur in stressed syllables. But Cambridge Dictionary Onlines, Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and Longman ...
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Text for exhibiting different pronunciations
I'm looking for a text that can be used to showcase various differences in pronunciation across English accents. For example, it could include examples of the various splits/mergers (Mary/merry/mary, ...
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/ɪə/, /eə/, /ʊə/ as phonemes?
From what I understand on phonetics/phonology, /ɪə/, /eə/, /ʊə/ can simply be considered as allophones of /ɪr/, /er/, /ʊr/, but most traditional dictionaries treat them as distinct phonemes. Is that ...
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"Typo" for speech?
Is there a word that describes a spoken error wherein the speaker accidentally replaces a phoneme with an incorrect one?
For example, an English teaches I had in high school once uttered the response ...
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How many phonemes are in the word “queen”?
I am in the process of digging into phonemes as a way to help teach our son to read. I don't remember ever having formal instruction on the role of phonemes in speech, and I am actually having a lot ...
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How to pronounce "digne" and "na"?
I looked up unproduced in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)¹ and it gave an example quotation from the 1965 edition of John Ireland's 1490 compendium The Meroure of Wyssdome ("The Mirror of Wisdom"):...
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Where can I find an "official" list of English graphemes? [closed]
Do you know of a list provided by some academic institution? I did find some lists, but I am unable to judge the quality and/or completeness of these:
This pdf, referenced here.
and this pdf, ...
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Why is /k/ sometimes spelt with a C, and sometimes with a K? [closed]
This may sound silly. But I'm really confused why, when we pronounce (the phoneme) /k/, we sometimes spell it with a C and sometimes with a K (sometimes with CK).
Why wasn't 'k' used instead, in such ...
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Difference between word-final iː, i and ɪ
As we know, English usually contrasts the two high front vowels /i:/ and /ɪ/, and many different minimal pairs exist for this (e.g. /sli:p/ vs /slɪp/). However, at the end of a word, we usually have ...
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How many "monophthongs" are there in RP? Do all the varieties of spoken English in the UK have the same number?
A monophthong is a pure vowel sound. The monophthongs can be contrasted with diphthongs, where the vowel quality changes within the same syllable, and hiatus, where two vowels are next to each other ...
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Which does English “l” and “r” sound come under, an allophone or different phonemes?
I was very much embarrassed when I was pointed out by ELU Senpai that I made a great mistake by misspelling ‘Mod election’ as ‘Mod erection’ during ELU chat.
We Japanese often make a silly mistake of ...
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When does 'gi' sound like 'ji'?
Let us take, ginger, we actually pronounce it as /ˈdʒɪndʒə/ (jinjer). But take, giggling, we pronounce it as /ˈɡɪɡ(ə)lɪŋ/. There are numerous examples of this, and this confuses me a lot. So, how do I ...
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What phoneme symbols does Google show in its search results?
I'm familiar with the IPA characters, but google shows other symbols in its search results. What I want to find is an equivalence table or something to get the IPA characters of any particular word ...
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Distinguishing /f–t–θ/ in th-fronting and th-stopping dialects
In standard English, the digraph th is a dental fricative [θ, ð]. Several dialects feature th-fronting, where th becomes a labiodental fricative [f, v]; others feature th-stopping, where th becomes a ...
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What’s the difference between /ӕ/ and /ɑ/?
. . . alibis . . . appetite . . . rather . . . Mark . . . [audio source]
The first two a’s are different in their phonetic symbols in the dictionaries from the other two, but I can’t differentiate. ...
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What is the name of the ɔʏ sound?
What's the English name of the oi sound written as "eu" and commonly found in Germanic words like Deutschland, and names like Euler and von Neumann?
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Looking for a minimal triple with /ɑ, ɒ, ɔ/
I am looking for a minimal triple for a particular set of phonemes. By minimal triple, I mean three actual English words that differ in one and only one phoneme between them. Examples therefore ...
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In IPA, what is the difference between ə and ʌ?
In all the examples I've seen they seem to be the same sound.
Examples of ə:
a in about
a in comma
Examples of ʌ:
u in run
o in won
I am trying to decipher the difference between these sounds but ...
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How did the "double consonant to shorten vowel" thing come about? ("furry" vs. "fury")
In English, a doubled consonant most commonly means "shorten the previous vowel", where "shorten" means map phonemes like this:
[aɪ] -> [i]
[oʊ] -> [ɔ]
etc
For example, fury is pronounced [fjʊri] ...
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