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> 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/

> 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/.
- DonaldPShimoda 5y ago
  Wow, that's really interesting about the affricates! Thanks for sharing! :) I get the continuous vs discrete aspect for sure, but you'd think we'd at least have different symbols for each place of articulation! /t/ crosses four different places (dental, denti-alveolar, alveolar, post-alveolar) and the best we can do is cut that down into two groups of two places with the dental diacritic which says "some teeth contact". I think if I were to design such a transcription system from scratch, I would try to make it at least possible to express each place/manner combination, but that's just me!
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    I don't think the places of articulation you list are considered all that different, really. Two speakers of different languages using sounds articulated along that continuum are likely to recognize the other language's sound as being their own, but sounding a little funny. (This phenomenon is especially notable for rhotics, where different languages may realize an "r" in very different ways -- for example, Spanish and Russian have loud alveolar trills, English has a retroflex approximant, and French has a uvular trill -- but everyone broadly agrees on which sounds are R-like, despite the fact that a Spanish R has much more in common with an English D, physically, than it does with an English R.) Looking at the example sidethread of Mandarin pinyin "q", it is a laminal palatal aspirated affricate. Its equivalent in English is a much more complex issue than the equivalent of a Spanish "t", which everyone agrees on. The "q" may be perceived as a "ts" (witness "Tsingtao beer"), which is the English sound combination most closely matching the positioning of the tongue, though not the positioning of the restriction in airflow, or it may be perceived as "ch", which is the English single sound most closely matching the place and manner of articulation. Different English speakers may even disagree on the interpretation while listening to the same speech, and the same English speaker will disagree on (or be confused about) the interpretation when listening to the same speaker produce the sound multiple times. There are languages that distinguish retroflex stops from alveolar stops, and IPA obliges those languages with different symbols for the two places of articulation. Do you know of a language that distinguishes alveolar stops from dental stops?
jdmichal 5y ago
> 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. I think this is a pretty spot-on observation. IPA does offer a bunch of diacritics for making more narrow transcriptions. For instance, Spanish's dental <t> is [t̪]. However, the narrower the transcription, the less applicable it is to a language in general. Things like dialectal and even individual differences start to come into play. So in general transcription will only be as narrow as necessary to achieve some point.

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/.

DonaldPShimoda 5y ago
Wow, that's really interesting about the affricates! Thanks for sharing! :) I get the continuous vs discrete aspect for sure, but you'd think we'd at least have different symbols for each place of articulation! /t/ crosses four different places (dental, denti-alveolar, alveolar, post-alveolar) and the best we can do is cut that down into two groups of two places with the dental diacritic which says "some teeth contact". I think if I were to design such a transcription system from scratch, I would try to make it at least possible to express each place/manner combination, but that's just me!
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  I don't think the places of articulation you list are considered all that different, really. Two speakers of different languages using sounds articulated along that continuum are likely to recognize the other language's sound as being their own, but sounding a little funny. (This phenomenon is especially notable for rhotics, where different languages may realize an "r" in very different ways -- for example, Spanish and Russian have loud alveolar trills, English has a retroflex approximant, and French has a uvular trill -- but everyone broadly agrees on which sounds are R-like, despite the fact that a Spanish R has much more in common with an English D, physically, than it does with an English R.) Looking at the example sidethread of Mandarin pinyin "q", it is a laminal palatal aspirated affricate. Its equivalent in English is a much more complex issue than the equivalent of a Spanish "t", which everyone agrees on. The "q" may be perceived as a "ts" (witness "Tsingtao beer"), which is the English sound combination most closely matching the positioning of the tongue, though not the positioning of the restriction in airflow, or it may be perceived as "ch", which is the English single sound most closely matching the place and manner of articulation. Different English speakers may even disagree on the interpretation while listening to the same speech, and the same English speaker will disagree on (or be confused about) the interpretation when listening to the same speaker produce the sound multiple times. There are languages that distinguish retroflex stops from alveolar stops, and IPA obliges those languages with different symbols for the two places of articulation. Do you know of a language that distinguishes alveolar stops from dental stops?

jdmichal 5y ago

> 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. I think this is a pretty spot-on observation. IPA does offer a bunch of diacritics for making more narrow transcriptions. For instance, Spanish's dental <t> is [t̪]. However, the narrower the transcription, the less applicable it is to a language in general. Things like dialectal and even individual differences start to come into play. So in general transcription will only be as narrow as necessary to achieve some point.