5 ms·

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

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 6y 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 6y ago
  Maybe that's what I'm thinking of! I associate just 't' with 'tʰ'.
- leephillips 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
      Thanks for the correction. I’m not a linguist (obviously). Just teaching and learning a foreign language.
  - jdmichal 6y 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.
- DonaldPShimoda 6y ago
  It's more complex. Spanish phonology dictates a denti-alveolar pronunciation of /t/, while typical English phonology (USA, England, etc.) uses purely alveolar /t/. So in Spanish, the tip of the tongue hits the back of the teeth, which doesn't happen in English. This distinction is not rendered in the IPA glyphs or any diacritic that I'm aware of.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    Is it not the t̪? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_consonant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_consonant
    - DonaldPShimoda 6y ago
      I think it's not perfect, because (I believe) Spanish /t/ is usually denti-alveolar and not fully dental. I don't think there's a way to express that specific aspect of it, though I'm also not a linguist so I may be mistaken!
  - leephillips 6y ago
    That’s what I’m talking about. The Spanish t is almost like an unaspirated English th.
    - DonaldPShimoda 6y ago
      Aspiration is a separate phenomenon. English also has unaspirated plosives — they just mostly only occur in word-final positions, like the <t> in "pat", and they are not contrastive with their aspirated versions. What I was talking about was how the Spanish /t/ has the tip of the tongue just a bit further forward, so that it touches the back of your teeth. English /t/ is, for most people, purely alveolar, so there's no teeth contact.
      - leephillips 6y ago
        Agreed. But some Spanish speakers pronounce t with the tongue quite far forward, between the teeth; that’s what I meant by comparing it to an unaspirated English th. But I think we are getting into regional variations now. It’s even more crucial with d. An English native speaker who is a beginner in Spanish will pronounce tened in a way that will be interpreted by Spanish speakers as tener.
lalaithion 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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/.

doomrobo 6y 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 6y ago
Maybe that's what I'm thinking of! I associate just 't' with 'tʰ'.
leephillips 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
    Thanks for the correction. I’m not a linguist (obviously). Just teaching and learning a foreign language.
- jdmichal 6y 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.
DonaldPShimoda 6y ago
It's more complex. Spanish phonology dictates a denti-alveolar pronunciation of /t/, while typical English phonology (USA, England, etc.) uses purely alveolar /t/. So in Spanish, the tip of the tongue hits the back of the teeth, which doesn't happen in English. This distinction is not rendered in the IPA glyphs or any diacritic that I'm aware of.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  Is it not the t̪? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_consonant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_consonant
  - DonaldPShimoda 6y ago
    I think it's not perfect, because (I believe) Spanish /t/ is usually denti-alveolar and not fully dental. I don't think there's a way to express that specific aspect of it, though I'm also not a linguist so I may be mistaken!
- leephillips 6y ago
  That’s what I’m talking about. The Spanish t is almost like an unaspirated English th.
  - DonaldPShimoda 6y ago
    Aspiration is a separate phenomenon. English also has unaspirated plosives — they just mostly only occur in word-final positions, like the <t> in "pat", and they are not contrastive with their aspirated versions. What I was talking about was how the Spanish /t/ has the tip of the tongue just a bit further forward, so that it touches the back of your teeth. English /t/ is, for most people, purely alveolar, so there's no teeth contact.
    - leephillips 6y ago
      Agreed. But some Spanish speakers pronounce t with the tongue quite far forward, between the teeth; that’s what I meant by comparing it to an unaspirated English th. But I think we are getting into regional variations now. It’s even more crucial with d. An English native speaker who is a beginner in Spanish will pronounce tened in a way that will be interpreted by Spanish speakers as tener.

lalaithion 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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/.