14 ms·
The Swedish phoneme notorious for having a dedicated IPA symbol, /ɧ/ (2016)
- gerikson 7y ago"Stjärn" is not the Swedish word for star, that's "stjärna".
- viceroyalbean 7y agoThe author seems to be from Finland, so I wonder if it's a difference between "normal" Swedish and Finnish Swedish (finlandssvenska)
- nils-m-holm 7y agoIt's "stjärna" in both, it is just pronounced a bit differently.
- tilt_error 7y agoThe Finnish form of Swedish resembles how Swedish was like a hundred years a go. "Skjorta" (a shirt) uses the pronunciation described in the article, but was earlier pronounced as "Skiorta" which I believe is the form used in Finland. Same thing with "Stjärna" (a star) which was formerly pronounced "Stierna". On the other hand, I was born a Norwegian so I could be all wrong :) Norwegians have a special relationship with "kj"-sounds -- which the younger generation is avoiding. Youngsters are actually replacing the hard "kj" with the soft sound described in the article.
- jacobush 7y agoStierna is closer to proto-indo-european. :)
- bklyn11201 7y agoGoogle Translate can provide a basic sample of the sj sound. Ask for a Swedish translation of "seventy-seven hospitals near the lake" (sjuttiosju sjukhus nära sjön): https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&tl=sv&text=seventy-seven%20hospitals%20near%20the%20lake https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&t...
- jfk13 7y agoOr my (Swedish) mother's old favourite, "Sju sjösjuka sjömän på skeppet Shanghai".
- bklyn11201 7y agoThis one is much better!
- jbarberu 7y agoMy sister likes to poke fun at our grandmother as she tries to do this one. Granny usually counters with "Jamás jamarás jamón, jamón jamás jamarás"...
- narag 7y agoThat's cruel, not only because the throat rasping for the foreigner but also because the meaning.
- htyden 7y agoSjuttiosju sjösjuka sjömän från skeppet Stjärnan sköttes av sjutton sköna sjuksköterskor. https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=sv&tl=en&text=Sjuttiosju%20sj%C3%B6sjuka%20sj%C3%B6m%C3%A4n%20fr%C3%A5n%20skeppet%20Stj%C3%A4rnan%20sk%C3%B6ttes%20av%20sjutton%20sk%C3%B6na%20sjuksk%C3%B6terskor https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=sv&t....
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- imedadel 7y ago
- username90 7y agoThese things are interesting, this sound is so common in Swedish so it feels like it would be common everywhere but I can't think of any English word where I use it. Like, chocolate has that sound in Swedish but not in English. It is kinda like when I learned that J and Y are pronounced differently in English, both are pronounced like Y in Swedish and the J sound doesn't exist. I didn't even hear the difference between them when native English speakers talked for over a decade. It was only when I saw people making fun of a guy for not knowing the difference that I looked it up, and now the difference sounds so obvious!
- ljm 7y agoI’m not a linguistic but there seems to be an amazing ambiguity around I, E and Y. The English E covers е, и, (roughly) ы in Russian. The English y covers the same but also partially у and ё. When you get to dialectic English, then all of those vowels have different vocalisations or they otherwise don’t exist. And in all cases Y is a vowel and the same as J. I love languages and linguistics and this kind of thing. What’s more, take this to Spain and South America and in Castellano your ‘ll’ is more like an English ‘y’, but in Latin American it’s more of a ‘dj’ or an English ‘j’.
- jdmichal 7y agoWhat you're seeing is the fact that /j/ (English Y as in <you>) is a semivowel, which is paired with /i/ (English long-E as in <feet>). This means that the sounds are almost exactly the same -- the consonant version tends to be a bit more restricted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel EDIT: Also, the Spanish <ll> as /ʒ/ (S in English treasure) is not nearly as extent in South America as you might think. It's still mostly limited to Argentina and Uruguay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo#She%C3%ADsmo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo#She%C3%ADsmo EDIT EDIT: I misread the symbols a bit, and in other areas of South and Central America it's /ʝ/ instead of /ʒ/, which is not a very big difference at all. (Palatal vs postalveolar... Basically neighbors.)
- DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
- headcanon 7y agoSorry but I'm not clear on what IPA means, I assume we're not talking about the beer?
- blissofbeing 7y agoI'm more curious with this question > "A better question, however, might be why aren’t other similar cases around the world treated in the same fashion…? " It would seem you can't really divorce science from politics, ever.
- knolax 7y agoTBF linguistics as a field doesn't seem to apply empiricism as strictly as the hard sciences. It seems that it was only relatively recently that descriptivism became the norm.
- ars 7y agoIs this sound basically the same as the Hebrew Chet? You can hear it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI5EJGAUGsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI5EJGAUGsc
- russellbeattie 7y agoI have to assume IPA is basically gibberish to 99.9% of the world, if not more. Is there a digitally synthesized version? Whenever I'm reading Wikipedia/Wiktionary and see the phonetic version of a word, I wish I could click on it and hear the sounds (without having to have someone upload a sound file). The pronunciation key (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English) isn't particularly helpful. Honestly, we're all basically just hoping whoever wrote it knows what the symbols mean. An example: Greenwich (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich).
- brummm 7y agoI mean, one could say the same about musical notation. It might not be 99.9%, but probably close to 75%.
- VectorLock 7y agoIf the annual Wikipedia top-banner donation ask simply said "Donate $5 and we'll make the IPA keys produce an actual sound" I'd donate.
- peristeronic 7y agoThis IPA to speech tool seems fairly accurate: https://itinerarium.github.io/phoneme-synthesis/ https://itinerarium.github.io/phoneme-synthesis/
- yorwba 7y agoIt seems limited to IPA symbols that also appear in English. (Understandable, given that it uses an English TTS synthesizer under the hood.) It didn't produce any sound for ʈ͡ʂʐ̩
- girzel 7y agoLiving in China, I was curious to discover that many people there were actually pretty familiar with IPA, I assume it's taught as part of advanced language learning, to cope with all the very different sounds in other languages. On several occasions people expressed great puzzlement that I had no idea how most IPA symbols were pronounced.
- knolax 7y agoI'm not a linguist but it seems that most phonemes exist as areas (or multiple discontinuous areas as seen in TFA) in phonetic space while IPA attempts to describe only points in phonetic space[0]. Wouldn't it be better to instead just define X = {(F1min,F2min,...),(F1max,F2max,...)} for every dialect instead of making a universal X = (F1,F2,...) and then using it describe any area in phonetic space that happens to contain it? [0] https://sail.usc.edu/~lgoldste/General_Phonetics/Source_Filter/SFc.html https://sail.usc.edu/~lgoldste/General_Phonetics/Source_Filt...
- Qwertystop 7y agoIPA seems to describe areas as far as I can tell; each consonant is how-do-you-make-the-sound and where-is-the-sound-made, not specific frequencies, charted on a grid. The vowel chart is "where is your tongue in your mouth".
- knolax 7y agoBut it seems that the "where the sound is made" aspect is being described as discrete whereas the positioning approaches more of a spectrum. Even if it were discrete, the fact that most phonemes can be produced with multiple positions would require at least a list of points.
- DonaldPShimoda 7y agoIPA is about phones, not phonemes. Phones are described precisely and are (mostly [1]) constant across all languages; phonemes are broader and are language-specific. Multiple phones can belong to a single phoneme within a given language. For example, English groups the aspirated stops with their non-aspirated counterparts (e.g., [pʰ] and [p] both belong to /p/ because they are non-contrastive, despite being different sounds phonetically). This is why it is the International Phonetic Alphabet, and not the International Phonemic Alphabet. [1] Worth noting that there can be some variance among different speakers when it comes to the articulation of specific phones, but the IPA essentially is the result of determining whether languages draw any meaningful distinctions among these. If there are separate symbols in IPA, the phones are noticeably distinct. It is very uncommon for multiple sounds to get mapped to a single phone in IPA by rule, and this usually happens based on some dispute among linguists. A good example might be the "tensed" consonants of Korean, which have their own diacritic applied but are not fully understood (meaning linguists cannot precisely identify what, if anything, separates them from their un-tensed counterparts).
- hashmush 7y agoThe Wikipedia article on the Sj-sound has some audio samples for those wanting to know what it can sound like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sj-sound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sj-sound
- uoaei 7y agoI lived in Sweden for a little over a year. This sound wasn't the hardest to figure out, but it's one of the harder ones to remember to use since the natural instinct is to make the "syuh" sound. To make the sound with your mouth, make a really guttural 'H' sound like a golf swing.
- ksaj 7y agoWhen I was a kid, they taught us to say words like "white" with that sound for the 'wh'. I thought it was rather odd, since nobody outside of English class ever said it that way.
- blompa 7y agoThe 'wh' sound /ʍ/ isn't the same as the Swedish 'sj' sound /ɧ/, but depending on the realisation (like how it's pronounced Stockholm) it can sound fairly similar. The 'sj' sound is more fricative. Also, some English dialects (such as those in Ireland and Scotland) definitely still pronounce 'wh' that way, I refer to the following article for an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_%E2%9F%A8wh%E2%9F%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_%E2%9...
- tom_mellior 7y agoNot to poop on this article, but isn't the point of IPA that every phoneme has "its own dedicated IPA symbol"?
- zeckalpha 7y agoYes, but most phonemes are in multiple languages.
- crazygringo 7y agoActually no -- otherwise there would be thousands of them, because languages often have sounds that are very close to a sound in another language but not identical. The point of IPA is to provide a phonetic alphabet that can provide enough symbols, each covering a range of similar sounds across languages, such that for each language, every sound within that language has a unique symbol to differentiate it from other sounds within that language. E.g. "bête" in French and "bet" in English are identical in IPA: /bɛt/. But all three sounds are definitely slightly different, which is how you can tell whether the speaker is, say, American or French. The process of coming up with IPA and deciding what sounds in different languages deserve the same symbol or not involved just as much art as science, since there are tons of gray areas, especially when dialects are involved.
- hoseja 7y agoHuh. I thought IPA was universal. Bummer.
- vilhelm_s 7y agoNo, it's not a phonemic alphabet. The idea is that it should have a symbol for each phone, i.e. each sound you can make with your mouth. Different languages will then cluster those phones into different equivalence classes (phonemes), but the standard practice is to pick a representative sound from the equivalence class, and use that as the IPA letter for the phoneme. Allocating a symbol to a phoneme is is odd.
- galaxyLogic 7y agoWhat about Danish? I think they would need a lot of IPA symbols of their own?
- AnanasAttack 7y agoOnly stød is unusual. It is written with a superscript glottal stop (ˀ) letter
- galaxyLogic 7y ago:-)
- jefftk 7y agoThis reminds me of /ꜧ/ which is used as a hypothetical phoneme that sounds [h] at the beginning of a syllable and [ŋ] (as in "ing") at the end of one. Since a given context can only ever have either [h] or [ŋ], there are interesting philosophy of science questions over why we shouldn't analyze it as /ꜧ/. (Though I don't think anyone actually thinks /ꜧ/ is right.)
- taejo 7y agoFor some people "being it" [biŋɪt] and "be hit" [bihɪt] are minimal pairs. I can't think of any vowels that can both come at the ends of words and before [ŋ] in my own speech, though.
- jefftk 7y agoEnglish has juncture, so "the grey tape" and "the great ape" are also distinct. We'd write your two as [biŋ+ɪt] and [bi+hɪt].
- scandinavegan 7y agoPronouncing the sound is one thing, spelling it is another. Here's a (probably non-exhaustive) list of 65 different variants. The article in Swedish, but it should be possible to understand the list: https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=411&artikel=3963073 https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=411&art... Edit: I don't know of any rules for when to use which spelling. When I was a kid, I just learned how the different words were spelled individually, even though the sound is the same. Same thing when I'm teaching my kids: "Sju (seven) is spelled like this, schack (chess) is spelled like this, charmig (charming) is spelled like this", and so on.
- boomlinde 7y agoIMO the list confuses a number of different dialectical oddities and makes it seem more of a labyrinth than it really is. It makes some rather sveamål-centric assumptions, even then for some subset of sveamål, which is rather notorious for joining long stretches of consonants ending with an "sj" phoneme into just "sj". For example any of the variants that start in "r" only happen in dialects where the "r" is barely pronounced. In most of Sweden, it is distinct; guttural or rolling. Others only occur when consonants that are distinct in other dialects are dropped, and definitely not only the ones marked as "sloppy pronunciation". Others occur only when crossing words in compound words with distinct "sj" sounds (again, in some dialects), where pronouncing them as a single phoneme again may happen in some sveamål. Some of them seem really forced.
- henrikschroder 7y agoYeah, the list has examples where someone in some dialect might pronounce a word with the sound. I would say that a word like "duschschampo" has two different sounds for me. I'm from Stockholm so I would do the "schsch" part like /ʃ ɧ/, I have a friend from Kalmar who would say it like /ɧ ɧ/, and probably, somewhere, someone would merge them into a single /ɧ/, but I have no idea where you'd find that person.
- lukego 7y agoThis is the same sound as in "cool whip" a la Family Guy, right? Like the way a southern gentleman would pronounce "wh." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZmqJQ-nc_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZmqJQ-nc_s
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tengbretson 7y agoMy understanding of it from swedish lessons was that it was kind of like "sh" and "wh" at the same time.
- ethor 7y agoMore similar to the sh sound in shell (am swedish).
- gfaure 7y agoThe whole point of this article is that sj-ljudet has a bunch of different realisations, some closer to the initial in "shell" and some closer to the initial in "whip".
- lukego 7y agoSorry, hadn't read TFA, was thinking of the "sk" ("skönt") sound rather than "sj" ("sjuk.") EDIT: Clear as mud now, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x7C6qeh-SQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x7C6qeh-SQ.
- henrikschroder 7y agoWait, what? Would you pronounce those two words with a different sound? I can't think of any Swedish dialect where that is true?
- croon 7y agoAlso Swedish, and disagree. GP is close(r). Are you perhaps from Norrland? Then I see what you're saying.
- Tomte 7y agoThe bane of my learning Swedish. I do understand this sound on a cognitive-analytic level (some phonetics courses at university help when learning sounds). I can pronounce it, at least passably. There are big regional variations to pronouncing sj and so on. Fine, I can live with that, just pick one and use it consistently, preferably that of your teacher. But when it comes to the sound the article is about, I hear something else. At some point I cut together many instances of words with that sound from Swedish pop songs and told my teacher which sound (IPA) I clearly hear in all those instances. She told me flatly that I'm wrong. Those singers clearly sing another IPA sound. It must be similar to when Russians try to show me the difference between hard and soft consonants. They tell me they really over-pronunciate now and they sound starkly different, I'm not even sure I hear a difference.
- bjoli 7y agoAs a native swedish speaker I like to tease people with word stress (accute vs grave accent). Words like tomten, regel and slutet mean different things depending on accent, which is very confusing for people who don't have swedish as a native tongue. An example video: https://youtu.be/lXp7_Sjgm34?t=273 https://youtu.be/lXp7_Sjgm34?t=273
- stevekemp2 7y agoEven English has words that are pronounced differently depending on context. For example "I read to my son" could be pronounced two different ways depending on tense. "I read", vs. "I red". There are other examples too, off the top of my head "I polish my shoes", vs. "I have a polish friend.". Or "the bow of a boat", vs. "at the end of the play the actors take a bow".
- einr 7y agoIt also has words that are pronounced the same despite of context, cf. Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo ;) Ever-relevant poem: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html English is kind of a hot mess.
- 7y ago
- gpvos 7y agoThe link to Caramelldansen inside the article does not actually contain the swedish pronunciation, because it has some English mishmash text there. Here is the Swedish original, with the linked text at 0:58: https://youtu.be/PDJLvF1dUek https://youtu.be/PDJLvF1dUek
- dariosalvi78 7y agothis is one of my favourite videos about the sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFyAN1m2iug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFyAN1m2iug The guy has some really good videos BTW!
- neilwilson 7y agoIt's not uncommon for languages to have a sound with a dedicate phoneme. There are still some slots free in the sounds matrix that no language as yet uses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uZam0ubq-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uZam0ubq-Y
- DagAgren 7y agoThe issue here is that this symbol does not correspond to a single position in the matrix, but varies quite wildly depending on regional accent.