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Interactive IPA Chart
- mikro2nd 5y agoAnd here I was expecting to read about hoppy beers... :(
- quaffapint 5y agoMe too. There's this one... https://vinepair.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IPA-final.jpg https://vinepair.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IPA-final.jp... I'm not a big fan of the New-England which seems to be all the rage.
- devNoise 5y agoI get that IPAs and neIPAs will dominate the taps at my local breweries, but kinda disappointed I haven't seen any Maibocks on tap this spring.
- Kalium 5y agoI heartily recommend taking up homebrewing. You can produce your own gallon-sized batch of Maibock!
- dhritzkiv 5y agoGallon… or five
- jamesmaniscalco 5y agoHomebrewing - the most expensive way to enjoy free beer.
- jerrysievert 5y agooh, that's a great chart, thanks for sharing! I spent months brewing IPA's using the same basic recipe with tweaks in yeast, mash temperatures, and ingredients and have now moved on to do the same with a saison (just kegged the first today), but am very happy to see this chart pop up.
- choward 5y agoSame. This one of the reasons I can't stand initialisms.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 5y agodamn yeah huge mislead haha
- DyslexicAtheist 5y agosame.
- dang 5y agoI know IPAs can be hard to resist ("the kind of thing you like, if you like that kind of thing"), but please let's apply a low-pass filter to this sort of HN comment. Otherwise the thread will fill up with content making for better drinking than reading. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... Edit: er, I meant high-pass filter, I guess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-pass_filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-pass_filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-pass_filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-pass_filter
- dmerrick 5y agoSuper useful! I would have loved this in undergrad when I was taking linguistics courses
- lainga 5y agoThe 't' and 'd' (dental & postalevolar plosives) sound so close together.
- intergalplan 5y agot͡ʃ, t͡ɕ, ʈ͡ʂ all sound so close to my poor ear that I'd struggle to articulate the difference. They sound like exactly the same thing at slightly different speeds.
- lainga 5y agowell 't' specifically... it doesn't sound like I'd say it. almost like the tongue's not being puffed forward hard enough.
- timothyg 5y agoThe latter two are distinguished in Mandarin Chinese, the difference between ‘q’ and ‘ch’ in Pinyin.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoNote that that isn't the only difference between the Mandarin sounds. Pinyin "q" is also a laminal consonant, not an apical one.
- leephillips 5y agoIf you are a native English speaker, these renditions will sound too close together for you, because the person pronouncing them is not a native English speaker. IPA is a coarse guide to phonemes; it does not capture, for example, the difference between the English and Spanish t, which is so great that I am still struggling to do it correctly. But they are both “t” in IPA.
- doomrobo 5y agoInterestingly enough, IPA actually does have a way of distinguishing these sounds. The Spanish t is always unaspirated [t]. But the English t can sometimes be unaspirated [t] as in "stamp" or aspirated [tʰ] as in "too" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspiration_(phonetics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspiration_(phonetics)
- yumraj 5y agoFor most people: this is not the IPA you’re looking for..
- ithkuil 5y agoWhat other IPAs are there?
- isoprophlex 5y agoThe mildly alcoholic, hoppy kind
- ardit33 5y agoBeer yo.... I was 'hopping' for that too.....
- ithkuil 5y agoBut what would you need an interactive chart of IPA beer for?
- ch4s3 5y agoYou've got hazies, sours, Cascadian Dark/black, West Coast, English, general American IPAs, Doubles, Triples, BelgiCo, Brutt, mixed ferm, and probably some other options. It's a fairly complicated category.
- trhaynes 5y agoAt least 4 different types of hops that can be mixed in different ratios, at different times during brewing, etc.
- Tomte 5y agoI still marvel at people who can transcribe IPA in real-time. That's almost as magical to me as people who look at a sonograph and casually read off what the speaker said.
- JaakkoP 5y agoI'm a non-native English speaker, and I've been working with an accent coach to improve my pronunciation. The IPA chart has been instrumental teaching tool, and after about two years it's finally starting to sink in. It's really helpful to understand the theory behind the pronunciation, instead of just repeating words and attempt to make the same sounds as my coach. As in "this is what your tongue should be doing, but you're doing this other thing instead." You can even use the chart (and maybe Wikipedia) to identify specific reasons as to why you're doing something wrong. For example, there's just one way to pronounce "S" in Finnish, whereas there are four ways to do that in English. It's just something that never crossed my mind before starting to work with a professional.
- rootbear 5y agoThis chart is awesome. I agree about understanding the theory. My best friend is Hungarian and I could not get the 'gy' sound in his name (Gyuri) right until I read up on just how it's articulated. I read up on Finnish before I visited there a few years ago and it seemed a lot easier, although I'm not sure I understand the 'o' vowel correctly.
- euroderf 5y agoFinnish 'o' is familiar enough, perhaps you mean 'ö' ?
- gizmo686 5y agoI had this realization during one of my later linguistics classes. It was a syntax class, so didn't really have anything to do with pronunciation; but it was an upper level class, so it was a safe assumption that everyone knew IPA. In the beginning of the class, the professor introduced himself with "my name is X, but you can call me Y if that is too difficult". The two names were mostly the same, except that the first sound in X was a complete mumble, where I could not make out what he had said (and he repeated it several times). Later in the first class he handed out a syllubus which included his name in IPA. I immidietly knew not only how to pronounce it, but was able to do so without any difficulty. (For those curious, his real name started with /ʒ/, while his nickname started with /dʒ/)
- yread 5y agoIt's missing my favourite: voiced alveolar fricative trill
- euroderf 5y agoThose of us with dirty minds favor the bilabial fricative.
- wxs 5y agoIf you like this you may enjoy the "Pink Trombone" an interactive speech synthesizer that you control by moving around the virtual tongue and lips: https://dood.al/pinktrombone/ https://dood.al/pinktrombone/
- dang 5y agoSome past discussions: Pink Trombone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18912628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18912628 - Jan 2019 (75 comments) Pink Trombone: Speech Synthesis Simulation in JavaScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14135658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14135658 - April 2017 (52 comments) A mouth simulator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13973261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13973261 - March 2017 (1 comment)
- giantg2 5y agoThe title made me think this was about beer.
- laGrenouille 5y agoThis is a great interfact and perfect for learning the IPA system (perhaps as part of a linguistics course?). It would be nice to extend this, perhaps on a different page, to examples from specific languages. That would fill in some missing parts---long and short vowels, nasal vowels, and diphthong---and also show the vowels within a specific context. I have these for a few languages and will try to reach out to the author in case they are interested in collaborating.
- fastball 5y agoSlightly tangential: it looks like some of the sounds your units make in Age of Empires II when you direct them are apparently just phonetic sounds. Specifically in the bottom two sections ("Other symbols" and "Affricates"), a number of those sounds appear to be the exact "words" your units will use on occasion. I thought they were actual words but apparently they're just letters / phonetic units (not really sure what the term for this is)!
- jdmichal 5y agoThe word would be "phones" -- distinct units of sound regardless of meaning. The next level up would be "phonemes", which must contrast against other phonemes within a particular language. For instance, in English /b/ and /v/ are phonemes, because "bat" and "vat" are two different words with only that portion changing. (This is known as a minimal pair.) However, in Spanish, /b/ and /β/ are not separate phonemes; they are two phones in complementary distribution.
- fastball 5y agoGreat explanation, thank you!
- johnsonap 5y agoNot going to lie I thought this was going to be about beer
- StavrosK 5y agoWow, this is fantastic. It's amazing to me to think that all speech everywhere is made from composing these few sounds. Amazing.
- bloak 5y agoaɪ ˈwʌndə wɒt aɪ piː eɪ wʊd lʊk laɪk ɪf ɪt wɜːr ɪnˈvɛntɪd təˈdeɪ ˈprɒbəbliː nɒt laɪk ðɪs
- bradrn 5y ago> I wonder what IPA would look like if it were invented today? Probably not like this. I agree! I’ve heard that IPA was optimised for movable type, a medium in which it was easy to reverse and flip letters — thus we get e.g. ʌ,ɐ,ə,ɘ,ɔ,ɟ etc. (This, incidentally, is why you can write text upside-down using Unicode.) This can be contrasted with e.g. Americanist notation, which was optimised for handwriting: š, ȼ, ƛ etc. are easier to write than the IPA equivalents ʃ, t͡s, t͡ɬ. I’m not sure what a phonetic alphabet invented today would look like though — probably it would look something like X-SAMPA [0], restricted to mostly ASCII characters and making heavy use of uppercase, punctuation and digraphs. (A_i j}:z It r\e:li:, ba_"t It lUks lA_ik DIs.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA
- worik 5y agoI was hoping for information on hoppy beer....
- worik 5y ago...don't hactivists like hoppy beer?
- xkjkls 5y agoCan someone explain the usefulness of IPA currently? I guess I wonder what benefit there is to learning IPA at this point in time. I feel like its major usefulness was when there existed no way to communicate audio information easily, which is no longer the case.
- idlewords 5y agoBeing able to represent speech in writing is still pretty useful, even in 2021!
- DyslexicAtheist 5y agospent some time in Asian countries learning Chinese and Thai (mostly trying to impress my local GF's at the time). It took me ~6 months to understand where a word started and ended. When I tried saying the most simple things I got blank stares. But when when they repeated it back to me it sounded exactly like what I said all along. Try to say "Dry wood burns doesn't it?" in Thai and you get different variations of the word "Mai" which sounds like "Mai mai mai maii?" ... or "spicy duck with pepper" that is just "phet ped pet ped PET ..." etc I eventually ended up marrying a Japanese girl (so heating with wood was never an issue neither was ordering spicy duck with pepper). And their language is all rather monotone (as you probably know from your own time there). using this IPA would have gotten me more ridicule than ordering spicy duck from a wooden grill. And if I would have trusted HN (and this chart) I'd still be feckless today thank you very much :P (I'll take an Indian Pale Ale though without all the moaning)
- 252452d 5y agoIPA has tone markings, obviously. What's with the constant barrage of people on HN who are proud of being ignorant?
- xkjkls 5y agoIs it? I mean, like I would never want to invest the time to actually learning how to decipher it. It doesn't seem worth the effort when there are audio ways to convey the information.
- idlewords 5y agoThis is so cool! I hope the author finds time to add tones, too.
- whymauri 5y agoThis website carried me through Intro Linguistics, lol.
- readingnews 5y agoCame looking for beer, found sounds.
- watersb 5y agoFor English pronunciation, there's also the Color Vowel Chart. https://americanenglish.state.gov/resources/color-vowel-chart https://americanenglish.state.gov/resources/color-vowel-char... One of the developers of this technique of teaching English sounds is a friend of mine. There's also games, matching words to colors, that can be played with all ages. The few times I've been able to participate in one of these sessions, I learn something... The difference between "door", "orange", and "dog" -- in southeastern states, I hear a vowel shift from one towards the others. My Californian friends couldn't quite hear it.
- jdonaldson 5y agoDownvoting this because it is not about beer.
- brianzelip 5y agoIt’s not about beer.
- dirtyid 5y agoQuite the collection of vinegar stroke utterances.
- quercusa 5y agoI assume we're all working on our voiceless alveolo-palatal fricatives this week?
- carabiner 5y agoshah, ah shah
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 40four 5y agoI can’t be the only one to click on this to be disappointed it wasn’t a website about beer! I wasn’t really aware of the IPA, is this mostly used for teaching purposes when learning a new language? As far as people learning English as a second language it seems like one of the biggest hurdles is learning all the ‘exceptions’. Especially for people coming from languages where all vowels only have one pronunciation. English pronunciations are so flexible & varied that it must be frustrating. There are so many words that you just have to learn individually through repetition, since they don’t follow the ‘framework’ of the base pronunciation rules.
- bradrn 5y ago> I wasn’t really aware of the IPA, is this mostly used for teaching purposes when learning a new language? It’s mostly used for linguistic purposes — most often in grammatical descriptions of obscure languages, or for precisely specifying the pronunciation of a word (e.g. in my dialect ‘mutable’, say, is [mjʉːtˢə̆bu]). But I believe it gets used in language learning as well.
- 40four 5y agoThanks, I’ll have to read about this more. That makes sense, gives you system to precisely describe particular pronunciations I guess. TIL :)
- cjhveal 5y agoReally, with a [u] at the end? That's really interesting, do you mind me asking what dialect you speak?
- bradrn 5y agoI’ve never been quite sure about my accent, but it’s probably closest to Australian English. The relevant sound change is /l/-vocalisation: syllable-final [ɫ] → [w] with accompanying vowel changes, and syllabic [ɫ̩] → [u]. So I have e.g. pool [puːw], wall [woːw], adult [ˈʔæɾʊwtˢ], peel [piːw ~ ˈpiju], apple [ˈʔæpʰu], middle [ˈmɪɾu].
- jostmey 5y agoSomeday people will spell words phonetically. They will look back at our languages as primitive throwbacks, like hieroglyphics
- andreareina 5y agoRegional accents won't play nice with that.
- bradrn 5y agoPhonetic spelling is useless when you’ve got more than one dialect. For instance, consider the word ‘castle’. Is this [kæsɫ̩], or [kɑːsl̩], or [kɑːsu] (as it is for me), or something else entirely? Having an orthography which is not purely phonetic avoids this problem.
- sergeykish 5y agoTerry Pratchett plays a lot with language, and it is funny > “Mr Vimes," said Mrs Winkings, "ve cannot help but notice that you still haf not employed any of our members in the Vatch..." > Say 'Watch', why don't you? Vimes thought. I know you can. Let the twenty-third letter of the alphabet enter your life.” I am not a native English speaker, yet I decifer everyone execept gargoyles: — e cuns uk ere um-imes an awks oo ugg
- bradrn 5y agoHuh, what a coincidence — I just re-read Thud! a couple of weeks ago! An excellent illustration of my point that phonetic spelling is highly dialect-dependent. (Oh, and don’t worry; I’m a native English speaker, and I can’t understand Pratchett’s gargoyles either.)
- yumraj 5y agoThere are phonetic languages. For example, Hindi and probably most other Indian languages are written phonetically. What you write is what you speak.
- bradrn 5y agoInterestingly enough, the IPA is in fact not the only phonetic transcription system. The most famous alternative is Americanist notation [0], but there’s also the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet [1] and probably others as well which I’ve forgotten. However, the IPA has one distinguishing feature: it’s standardised, by the International Phonetic Association. By contrast, Americanist notation (the main competitor) is mostly unstandardised; for the most part, it’s not so much a ‘phonetic alphabet’ as much as a set of conventions people follow. And this doesn’t matter if the author has been careful to define their terms correctly, but it can be a real pain if they’ve forgotten. (e.g. for a while, I believed that Kalam had [r] as an allophone of [d], until I realised that the author had used ⟨ř⟩ to mean [ɾ], not [r]…) Thus, the linguistics community has mostly standardised on IPA, with the exception of some subfields which still use Americanist notation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_Phonetic_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_Phonetic_Alphabet
- malkia 5y agoI came for the beer, but was not left speechless!
- zargon 5y agoI was curious what information an isopropyl alcohol chart would contain. This IPA makes more sense.
- leemcd56 5y agoI’m more of a porter and stout fan, but I’ll give a good IPA a try.
- yongjik 5y agoMy IPA WTF moment was when I learned that "t͡ʃ Voiceless palato-alveolar affricate" and "t͡ɕ Voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate" are two different sounds. The first is English ch (as in church), and the second is Korean ㅊ (or so they say), but even being a native Korean speaker, I just can't tell the difference. (They do sound somewhat different but that's because English ch is always pronounced with rounded lips.) Also, seriously, couldn't they think of a better name than "palato-alveolar" vs "alveolo-palatal"?
- westurner 5y agoIs there a [Linked Data] resource with the information in this interactive IPA chart (which is from Wikipedia FWICS) in addition to?: - phoneme, ns:"US English letter combinations", [] - phoneme, ns:"schema.org/CreativeWorks which feature said phoneme", [] AFAIU, WordNet RDF doesn't have links to any IPA RDFS/OWL vocabulary/ontology yet.
- timwis 5y agoI’ve never heard of any of those beers
- euroderf 5y agoInternational Phonetic Ale - "We'll have your speechmaking apparatus all loosened up and ready for making unfamiliar new sounds in no time."
- aloukissas 5y agoCame here for beer, got nothing
- herewulf 5y agoI thought of beer first too, but lucky for me I enjoy both these IPAs!
- kewp 5y agoSounds like someone dry heaving. Is that we actually sound like when we talk?
- lokedhs 5y agoVery nice chart. It really helps when understanding IPA. I was trying to find the Swedish "u" sound. According to the Swedish Wikipedia page on the sound, it says it's written as "u" in IPA, but it doesn't sound right at all. The "ʉ" sound is a lot closer, but still not right. What is the correct IPA representation of the Swedish u, as in "ful"?
- bradrn 5y agoI don’t speak Swedish, but I found a sketch grammar (Andersson’s) which says that it’s [y]. Not sure if that’s correct or not though.
- herewulf 5y agoUnsurprisingly there's some regional variation. Wikipedia says "Central Standard Swedish /ʉː/ is near-close near-front [ʏː]." Note that [y] and [ʏː] are not the same, but very close. Fascinating! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Vowels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Vowels
- herewulf 5y agoEdit: The Wikipedia phonology article says it's /ʉ/ However, I stand by the fact that the IPA symbols do not always reflect exactly what a speaker produces, so you may be picking up on that (or the speaker in the IPA chart recording isn't quite capable of producing the requisite sound as it's probably not in his native inventory). IIRC, Swedish /u/ is somewhat fronted, but not quite /ʉ/. It's somewhere inbetween those two. There isn't an IPA symbol for every possible sound, just the most common among languages, but there are diacritics for special cases or more precision. See the "Advanced" diacritic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet#Diacritics_and_prosodic_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... The diacritics are also used for _phonetic_ rather than _phonemic_ renderings as the surrounding sounds in a word, etc. affect the exact outcome of an individual sound. Phonemic renderings in the IPA are typically enclosed in slashes and phonetic in square brackets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet#Brackets_and_transcription_delimiters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...
- novaleaf 5y agoI'm not a linguist, but I think they could have done better with the Plosive "P" sound. It's too close to the "B". In Standard American English the P is more obvious than this.
- herewulf 5y agoThe top of the page states that /p,t,k/ are non-aspirated. These sounds are always aspirated in English when word initial (in most if not all varieties of English). That means that the only difference between /p/ and /b/ here is vocal chord vibration of the latter, which is not what you expect to hear word initial as a "Standard American English" speaker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant
- sMarsIntruder 5y agoCame here for Indian Pale Ale