10 ms·

The 't' and 'd' (dental & postalevolar plosives) sound so close together.

by lainga 5y ago

intergalplan 5y ago
t͡ʃ, 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 ago
  well 't' specifically... it doesn't sound like I'd say it. almost like the tongue's not being puffed forward hard enough.
- timothyg 5y ago
  The latter two are distinguished in Mandarin Chinese, the difference between ‘q’ and ‘ch’ in Pinyin.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Note that that isn't the only difference between the Mandarin sounds. Pinyin "q" is also a laminal consonant, not an apical one.
leephillips 5y ago
If 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 ago
  Interestingly 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)
  - lainga 5y ago
    Maybe that's what I'm thinking of! I associate just 't' with 'tʰ'.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    That’s interesting, but the Spanish unaspirated t and the English one are different phonemes. The tongue is in a different position. If I forget and use the English t, my Spanish teacher stops me. The difference in sounds is quite obvious. So how, in IPA, do you spell the difference?
    - jgwil2 5y ago
      There are a bunch of subscripts/superscripts that describe the exact place of articulation but are omitted in most contexts. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_plosives#Varieties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > but the Spanish unaspirated t and the English one are different phonemes. The tongue is in a different position. That is not what "phoneme" means. They are different sounds, but they aren't different phonemes in either language; to be different phonemes, the same language would have to consider them different. Neither does -- in both cases, one is "/t/" and the other is "weird /t/".
      - leephillips 5y ago
        Thanks for the correction. I’m not a linguist (obviously). Just teaching and learning a foreign language.
    - jdmichal 5y ago
      Spanish <t> is dental, which requires the dental diacritic: [t̪] However, since there is no alveolar [t] in Spanish, it will generally just be transcribed as /t/ rather than having to put the diacritic on all the time.
  - 5y ago
- lalaithion 5y ago
  There's a distinction between _broad transcription_, which only cares about capturing distinctions between phonemes which change the meaning of at least one word in the transcribed language, and _narrow transcription_, which attempts to distinguish all of the fine nuances of accent and pronunciation. Most native english speakers would expect the broadly transcribed /ta/ to be narrowly transcribed as [tʰa], because we often aspirate plosives before vowels. Obviously this is a spectrum; some transcriptions are so broad that they transcribe the english <r> as /r/ when the context is clear that we're talking about english, even though it should properly by /ɹ/. And in my narrow transcription, I didn't bother to notate vowel length, because it didn't matter for the given example. (Note: I use <> for orthography (how it's written in the language), // for broad transcription, and, and [] for narrow transcription)
- DonaldPShimoda 5y ago
  > it does not capture, for example, the difference between the English and Spanish t Ah yeah, that's true. This is because most Spanish speakers pronounce /t/ as denti-alveolar (the tip of the tongue touches the back of the teeth) while most English speakers pronounce /t/ as purely alveolar (the tip of the tongue stops at the back of the alveolar ridge). I'm not sure why the IPA chart doesn't differentiate these specific phones, honestly. I imagine it's because although the sounds are very different cross-linguistically, maybe there aren't any languages where these phones are contrastive and thus they don't warrant separate glyphs in the IPA. Still, I'd love to see them! That said, I think this is actually a relatively uncommon case in the IPA, because in addition to this simple chart the IPA also specifies a number of diacritics for more complex and precise transcriptions. These diacritics are often not used in broad transcriptions within a single language because most languages don't differentiate phones at this level in a contrastive manner. But in a narrow transcription, the diacritics are used as appropriate, generally to help the transcriber make a point about what is noteworthy in that transcription. For instance, in English let's consider the "t" as you mention. We'll look at "tap" and "pat". The broad transcriptions for these words are /tæp/ and /pæt/, respectively. But the narrow transcriptions would be more like [tʰæp̚] and [pʰæt̚] (Note that broad transcriptions are phonemic and given between slashes, while narrow transcriptions are phonetic and given between brackets). What this shows is that, in English, syllable-initial voiceless stops are aspirated (indicated by the little "h"), while word-final voiceless stops have no audible release (indicated by the angle symbol, known as "corner"). So in addition to the main letter glyphs of IPA, there are tons of diacritics that help you write your transcriptions more precisely!
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > I'm not sure why the IPA chart doesn't differentiate these specific phones, honestly. I imagine it's because although the sounds are very different cross-linguistically, maybe there aren't any languages where these phones are contrastive and thus they don't warrant separate glyphs in the IPA. Still, I'd love to see them! It's because sounds vary continuously, but the IPA is by necessity discrete. (A problem that is much worse for vowels, but still comes up for consonants.) You have to collapse variation somewhere. The IPA notably doesn't have dedicated symbols for affricates. (Sounds that consist of a stop immediately followed by a fricative in the same location, like "z" in "pizza" or "ch" in "chill".) So English "ch" is represented /tʃ/, or if you want to be really explicit there's an affrication diacritic. Recognizing that affricates consist physically of a colocated stop and fricative was felt to be a theoretical advance. But there's a funny story -- Peter Ladefoged went to document a language somewhere (the Americas?) and was proud to use the IPA to record its sounds. He insisted on it. He insisted on it even after discovering that the language in question made a phonemic distinction between affricated tʃ, which he represented by /tʃ/, and /t/ followed by /ʃ/ without affrication, which he was forced to represent by /t.ʃ/. This would have been much easier to understand with a more bespoke system representing the two adjacent sounds as /tʃ/ and the affricate as /č/.
jfengel 5y ago
A lot of sounds are difficult even for a native speaker to distinguish in isolation. That's especially true for plosives, since they can't be held; you have only a moment to hear the difference. Native speakers have the advantage in spoken conversation. They quickly understand not just the word, but the context. No native speaker would ever confuse "Give that document to Ted" with "Give that document to dead" since the latter is nonsensical. Even if you actually said "dead", most people would interpret it as "Ted" without even noticing anything odd about your pronunciation. (In fact, in a context like that between two vowels, it's entirely possible that you would keep your vocal cords buzzing and produce a "d" even if you'd meant to say "t").
- potiuper 5y ago
  There are issues, for example: ren[t/d] the furniture.
  - jfengel 5y ago
    Definitely. English is hardly even the worst offender there. I'm learning French, and as a non-native speaker I am utterly lost at anything close to conversational speed. The language has many homophones and near-homophones, and liaison makes word boundaries unclear without context. Get slightly lost and it's all over.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > and liaison makes word boundaries unclear without context There's very little blame to be placed on liaison, since word boundaries are unclear in every language, including languages that e.g. don't allow syllable-final consonants. English speakers feel like they have a strong grasp of where word boundaries occur because of the orthographic space, but the space in the writing system does not coincide with word boundaries in the language; it is heavily conventionalized.
cjhveal 5y ago
These sounds are really close together to begin with, but in English, we don't actually use either of those sounds in word-initial position like the example recording, and so unless you speak a language that distinguishes these sounds in this context, they are going to be difficult to differentiate. Our word-initial voiceless stops (p, t, k) are actually aspirated stops, that is they are produced with a strong puff of air, while our word-initial voiced stops (b, d, g) are partially unvoiced and are actually somewhere between the t and d recordings. Hold your hand in front of your mouth and feel the difference in pressure when you pronounce the first sound of the word "tune" versus the word "dune". This will let you feel that puff of "aspiration." Next, try putting your fingers over the front of your throat, (on your layrnx or where the Adam's apple is on men), and pronounce the sounds slowly. You may be able to feel the difference when your vocal cords start to vibrate as you say the "d" sound. In native English speakers this happens shortly after the pressure is released from your tongue, while in the English "t" sound, the vibration doesn't start until the vowel does. The "d" sound in the example from the chart has the vocal cord vibrations start immediately as the pressure is being released.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > Hold your hand in front of your mouth and feel the difference in pressure when you pronounce the first sound of the word "tune" versus the word "dune". This will let you feel that puff of "aspiration." The aspiration will be even more obvious if you try speaking into a microphone.
  - euroderf 5y ago
    It's not a problem to speak into a mic if you can program yourself to pronounce all 'p's as 'b's. Works great.
- jdmichal 5y ago
  Yes! This is known as "voice onset time" and has a lot of variation between languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_onset_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_onset_time

The 't' and 'd' (dental & postalevolar plosives) sound so close together.

by lainga 5y ago

The 't' and 'd' (dental & postalevolar plosives) sound so close together.

t͡ʃ, 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 ago
well 't' specifically... it doesn't sound like I'd say it. almost like the tongue's not being puffed forward hard enough.
timothyg 5y ago
The latter two are distinguished in Mandarin Chinese, the difference between ‘q’ and ‘ch’ in Pinyin.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Note that that isn't the only difference between the Mandarin sounds. Pinyin "q" is also a laminal consonant, not an apical one.

leephillips 5y ago

If 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 ago
Interestingly 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)
- lainga 5y ago
  Maybe that's what I'm thinking of! I associate just 't' with 'tʰ'.
- leephillips 5y ago
  That’s interesting, but the Spanish unaspirated t and the English one are different phonemes. The tongue is in a different position. If I forget and use the English t, my Spanish teacher stops me. The difference in sounds is quite obvious. So how, in IPA, do you spell the difference?
  - jgwil2 5y ago
    There are a bunch of subscripts/superscripts that describe the exact place of articulation but are omitted in most contexts. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_plosives#Varieties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > but the Spanish unaspirated t and the English one are different phonemes. The tongue is in a different position. That is not what "phoneme" means. They are different sounds, but they aren't different phonemes in either language; to be different phonemes, the same language would have to consider them different. Neither does -- in both cases, one is "/t/" and the other is "weird /t/".
    - leephillips 5y ago
      Thanks for the correction. I’m not a linguist (obviously). Just teaching and learning a foreign language.
  - jdmichal 5y ago
    Spanish <t> is dental, which requires the dental diacritic: [t̪] However, since there is no alveolar [t] in Spanish, it will generally just be transcribed as /t/ rather than having to put the diacritic on all the time.
- 5y ago
lalaithion 5y ago
There's a distinction between _broad transcription_, which only cares about capturing distinctions between phonemes which change the meaning of at least one word in the transcribed language, and _narrow transcription_, which attempts to distinguish all of the fine nuances of accent and pronunciation. Most native english speakers would expect the broadly transcribed /ta/ to be narrowly transcribed as [tʰa], because we often aspirate plosives before vowels. Obviously this is a spectrum; some transcriptions are so broad that they transcribe the english <r> as /r/ when the context is clear that we're talking about english, even though it should properly by /ɹ/. And in my narrow transcription, I didn't bother to notate vowel length, because it didn't matter for the given example. (Note: I use <> for orthography (how it's written in the language), // for broad transcription, and, and [] for narrow transcription)
DonaldPShimoda 5y ago
> it does not capture, for example, the difference between the English and Spanish t Ah yeah, that's true. This is because most Spanish speakers pronounce /t/ as denti-alveolar (the tip of the tongue touches the back of the teeth) while most English speakers pronounce /t/ as purely alveolar (the tip of the tongue stops at the back of the alveolar ridge). I'm not sure why the IPA chart doesn't differentiate these specific phones, honestly. I imagine it's because although the sounds are very different cross-linguistically, maybe there aren't any languages where these phones are contrastive and thus they don't warrant separate glyphs in the IPA. Still, I'd love to see them! That said, I think this is actually a relatively uncommon case in the IPA, because in addition to this simple chart the IPA also specifies a number of diacritics for more complex and precise transcriptions. These diacritics are often not used in broad transcriptions within a single language because most languages don't differentiate phones at this level in a contrastive manner. But in a narrow transcription, the diacritics are used as appropriate, generally to help the transcriber make a point about what is noteworthy in that transcription. For instance, in English let's consider the "t" as you mention. We'll look at "tap" and "pat". The broad transcriptions for these words are /tæp/ and /pæt/, respectively. But the narrow transcriptions would be more like [tʰæp̚] and [pʰæt̚] (Note that broad transcriptions are phonemic and given between slashes, while narrow transcriptions are phonetic and given between brackets). What this shows is that, in English, syllable-initial voiceless stops are aspirated (indicated by the little "h"), while word-final voiceless stops have no audible release (indicated by the angle symbol, known as "corner"). So in addition to the main letter glyphs of IPA, there are tons of diacritics that help you write your transcriptions more precisely!
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > I'm not sure why the IPA chart doesn't differentiate these specific phones, honestly. I imagine it's because although the sounds are very different cross-linguistically, maybe there aren't any languages where these phones are contrastive and thus they don't warrant separate glyphs in the IPA. Still, I'd love to see them! It's because sounds vary continuously, but the IPA is by necessity discrete. (A problem that is much worse for vowels, but still comes up for consonants.) You have to collapse variation somewhere. The IPA notably doesn't have dedicated symbols for affricates. (Sounds that consist of a stop immediately followed by a fricative in the same location, like "z" in "pizza" or "ch" in "chill".) So English "ch" is represented /tʃ/, or if you want to be really explicit there's an affrication diacritic. Recognizing that affricates consist physically of a colocated stop and fricative was felt to be a theoretical advance. But there's a funny story -- Peter Ladefoged went to document a language somewhere (the Americas?) and was proud to use the IPA to record its sounds. He insisted on it. He insisted on it even after discovering that the language in question made a phonemic distinction between affricated tʃ, which he represented by /tʃ/, and /t/ followed by /ʃ/ without affrication, which he was forced to represent by /t.ʃ/. This would have been much easier to understand with a more bespoke system representing the two adjacent sounds as /tʃ/ and the affricate as /č/.

jfengel 5y ago

A lot of sounds are difficult even for a native speaker to distinguish in isolation. That's especially true for plosives, since they can't be held; you have only a moment to hear the difference. Native speakers have the advantage in spoken conversation. They quickly understand not just the word, but the context. No native speaker would ever confuse "Give that document to Ted" with "Give that document to dead" since the latter is nonsensical. Even if you actually said "dead", most people would interpret it as "Ted" without even noticing anything odd about your pronunciation. (In fact, in a context like that between two vowels, it's entirely possible that you would keep your vocal cords buzzing and produce a "d" even if you'd meant to say "t").

potiuper 5y ago
There are issues, for example: ren[t/d] the furniture.
- jfengel 5y ago
  Definitely. English is hardly even the worst offender there. I'm learning French, and as a non-native speaker I am utterly lost at anything close to conversational speed. The language has many homophones and near-homophones, and liaison makes word boundaries unclear without context. Get slightly lost and it's all over.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > and liaison makes word boundaries unclear without context There's very little blame to be placed on liaison, since word boundaries are unclear in every language, including languages that e.g. don't allow syllable-final consonants. English speakers feel like they have a strong grasp of where word boundaries occur because of the orthographic space, but the space in the writing system does not coincide with word boundaries in the language; it is heavily conventionalized.

cjhveal 5y ago

These sounds are really close together to begin with, but in English, we don't actually use either of those sounds in word-initial position like the example recording, and so unless you speak a language that distinguishes these sounds in this context, they are going to be difficult to differentiate. Our word-initial voiceless stops (p, t, k) are actually aspirated stops, that is they are produced with a strong puff of air, while our word-initial voiced stops (b, d, g) are partially unvoiced and are actually somewhere between the t and d recordings. Hold your hand in front of your mouth and feel the difference in pressure when you pronounce the first sound of the word "tune" versus the word "dune". This will let you feel that puff of "aspiration." Next, try putting your fingers over the front of your throat, (on your layrnx or where the Adam's apple is on men), and pronounce the sounds slowly. You may be able to feel the difference when your vocal cords start to vibrate as you say the "d" sound. In native English speakers this happens shortly after the pressure is released from your tongue, while in the English "t" sound, the vibration doesn't start until the vowel does. The "d" sound in the example from the chart has the vocal cord vibrations start immediately as the pressure is being released.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Hold your hand in front of your mouth and feel the difference in pressure when you pronounce the first sound of the word "tune" versus the word "dune". This will let you feel that puff of "aspiration." The aspiration will be even more obvious if you try speaking into a microphone.
- euroderf 5y ago
  It's not a problem to speak into a mic if you can program yourself to pronounce all 'p's as 'b's. Works great.
jdmichal 5y ago
Yes! This is known as "voice onset time" and has a lot of variation between languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_onset_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_onset_time