Questions tagged [ipa]
The International Phonetic Alphabet: A Latin-based alphabet designed for transcribing all sounds of all languages.
219
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Resources for Bantu Language IPA
I am a developer for a Bantu language, Shona to be specific.
Where can I find resources that allow me to learn the IPA for this language.
Is there an IPA alphabet that I can use.
Thank you
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2answers
113 views
Do we have acoustic phonetics alphabet?
After looking for something like this, I have found only IPA as a system that tries to represent human sounds with symbols; but there is an argument that IPA does not actually represents the sounds ...
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1answer
61 views
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) chart handbook
As a gift for a friend who is finishing a translatio degree I wanted to get a large IPA chart poster and would like to accompany it with a guide for it.
I have seen there is an official handbook but I ...
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0answers
99 views
Is there an API that converts a word into an IPA Transcriptions?
We want to automatically generate the IPA Transcription for a person's name when we create a record for them in our application. Does anyone know of an API service that can do this?
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2answers
106 views
Are there any letters in the International Phonetic Alphabet that are considered universal?
English is full of sounds that are difficult for people of other cultures to hear and pronounce. H (for the French), L (for many Asian languages), Th (for pretty much everyone), etc.
What, if any, ...
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3answers
190 views
IPA consonant chart confusion, which chart to use?
I'm a bit confuse between three IPA consonants chart.
The consonant chart from the official IPA chart;
The chart from the English Wikipedia which has different symbol for the same sound but contains ...
1
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1answer
76 views
pronunciation of [əj]
According to Wiedenhof's A Grammar of Mandarin, page 42,
The pronunciation of the final -ui [weı] vary with the accompanying
tone for some speakers. With first or second tone, the u sound tends
...
9
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2answers
239 views
Do voiceless approximants exist? What is the consensus among phoneticians/phonologists?
Voiceless sounds that are produced with supralaryngeal configurations that would be considered approximants if voiced are attested in languages (i.e. [j̊], [l̥], etc.), but none are found to contrast ...
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4answers
139 views
What is the most universally understood way to represent the “ay” sound of “CAKE” substituting the standard a for a single character?
I am making up an imaginary word to be used as a name.
Right now I seem to have it ending in "tata", but want it to be clear it is pronounced as "tay-tah" not "tah-tah"
I admit that I do not know my ...
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1answer
71 views
Transcription of this computer-generated pronunciation of 1991 in Danish
I came across this Google Translate pronunciation of 1991 (which it appears to be interpreting as the year rather than the cardinal or ordinal); click the thumbnail for the video on YouTube:
I don’t ...
3
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1answer
181 views
Google Translate Thai with IPA transcription?
IPA is international standard for transcribing phonetic of any language (AFAIK, I am not a linguist), and https://translate.google.com/ is excellent tool for translating between languages. But when I ...
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3answers
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Can the IPA represent all languages' tones?
The IPA's current tone system can show five different tone levels, and any contours formed from them.
Is there any language for which this is insufficient? In other words, is there any (known, ...
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2answers
203 views
How can I write an interdental lateral in phonetic transcription?
Inspired by this answer here is my question: How can I write a interdental lateral in phonetic transcription (IPA preferred, but not a necessary requirement, other wide spread phonetic notation ...
2
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1answer
381 views
Can someone explain the English 'W' sound?
I have found out that the English letter 'W', as in the word "weep", is classified as a voiced labiovelar approximant. To quote Wikipedia:
Its place of articulation is labialized velar, which means ...
2
votes
2answers
88 views
What is the standard representation of a stop which could be either ejective or aspirated?
I’m working with a language which differentiates between aspirated and ejective stops. Is there a linguistic convention that I can use in writing descriptive rules for processes which both aspirated ...
2
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1answer
150 views
IPA Sound used for grapheme 'R' in some English dialects?
A number of years ago, I was working with some friends on conlanging for a fictional society. At the time, we didn’t know about IPA or formalized sound descriptions like “voiceless ...
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1answer
89 views
IPA transcriptions for Norwegian
Are there online sources for Norwegian transcription?
NAOB gives an orthographic one, UiB Ordbokene do not have transcription at all.
4
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1answer
489 views
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) words with IPA
Are there any resources that can show IPA pronounciation for each PIE word? Either with laryngeals or without laryngeals?
Wikitionary gives me only small list Category:Proto-Indo-European terms with ...
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4answers
2k views
Is the schwa sound consistent?
The first syllable in "about" (ə'baʊt) is schwa, so is the second one in the "salad" ('sæləd), but iv'e never heard them pronounced the same way.
in salad it sounds more like the i in "trick".
...
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2answers
72 views
British English offglides
The offglide of the English diphthongs /aʊ/ and /əʊ/ is represented by the vowel /ʊ/. In other languages, such as Portuguese and Spanish, they are represented in the same way, but they sound ...
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2answers
3k views
What do you call an IPA symbol that lacks a name (e.g. ɲ)?
Some IPA symbols such as ɲ lack any name, and when I tried searching for the symbol online, the pages I got only showed palatal nasal.
But I wonder what I should call it when I talk with others. Is ...
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1answer
131 views
The TRAP vowel: a or ä?
If my mouth is open and my tongue is completely relaxed, do I make an [a] or an [ä]?
Which one is more common for the TRAP vowel in British English?
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1answer
54 views
With SSML phoneme tags using IPA phonetic symbols, how can I insert pauses to slow down pronounciation?
Note
For my text to speech engine (I use Cereproc, William Voice).
The engine can be used on the website here:
https://www.cereproc.com/
and it supports the ssml tags used in this question..
...
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1answer
1k views
How to split IPA spelling into syllables
First, please forgive my ignorance, I'm completely new to linguistics.
Given the IPA spelling for word, is it possible to programmatically split it into its sounds? So, for example, given the word "...
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0answers
217 views
Why do we transcribe the vowel sound in 'how' as /aʊ/?
The diphthong /aʊ/ doesn't really make sense to me as a transcription. I'm a Southern British English speaker, and when I say and hear 'how' it sounds to me like /hæɒw/.
/a/ doesn't seem to exist as ...
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1answer
152 views
What does a long mid-high unrounded back vowel sound like?
I'm trying to figure out what the Livonian character ȱ sounds like. As far as I can tell, it's a long mid-high unrounded back vowel. In IPA it seems to be written as /ɤː/ but that seems to be a non-...
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3answers
148 views
Why are two versions of a word written in the same IPA pronounced differently?
My question is to be applied on any language; why do I find for instance two versions of the same word written in the same IPA symbols pronounced differently, in case of different accents for example. ...
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2answers
180 views
Do any modern orthographies use capital esh?
The letter "esh" (ʃ) is well-known from the IPA, and is also used in some languages' orthographies. Because of this second use case, Unicode includes a capital esh at U+01A9 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ESH (...
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0answers
47 views
What is the difference between ŋ͡͡j and ɲ? [duplicate]
I was thinking about how a "b̃" is the same thing as an "m" and a "s̪" is the same thing as a "θ". Maybe the same applies to ŋ͡͡j and ɲ?
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2answers
533 views
Question about nasal vowels in IPA
Probably a silly question, but why are there no nasal vowels in IPA charts? Should we assume that nasal vowels are placed in the same position as the corresponding oral vowels in the vocal chart? So ...
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2answers
394 views
IPA Pronunciation of Unvoiced Consonants Seems Like Voiced
This might be a trivial question, but it seems to me that certain unvoiced example pronunciations for IPA sounds resemble the voiced one. For example, on this site:
http://www....
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0answers
110 views
Is it appropriate to say that [ɕ] is an intermediate form of [ʃ ç]?
The description is found in a paper about the German fricatives
https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/labphon.2014.5.issue-1/lp-2014-0005/lp-2014-0005.xml
How do the three sound differ from each other in ...
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1answer
122 views
What is the maximum number of IPA diacritics that can be added on a vowel?
What would the symbol look like, and how would it sound like? E.g. a long rhotacized nasalized vowel with tone?
2
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1answer
377 views
What the palatalized [ʲ] means
So I'm pretty sure I understand labialized [ʷ] and some of the other superscripts, but I don't fully understand palatalized [ʲ]. An example of palatalized is Abkhaz, Selkup, Bulgarian, and Yanesha. ...
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1answer
107 views
What IPA does in these complex cases
I'm trying to think of examples where the IPA symbols get really complex, and find phonologies with those symbols. I'm not quite there in understanding all the aspects of IPA, but I wanted to see if ...
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2answers
121 views
System for intermixing IPA with Orthography
So in English the word hi sounds like /haɪ/, but can be spelled "hi", "high", etc. So if you wanted to define the word "high" in English you would have to write two things:
high (the spelling/...
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2answers
173 views
Given both a word and the corresponding IPA, how to match/map the letters together?
Given both the word and the corresponding IPA equivalent, is there any stable algorithm for mapping the letter of each word to the IPA letter?
For example, given close-quote and IPA kloʊzkwoʊt -- I'd ...
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2answers
160 views
Some questions on pieces missing from the IPA sheet [closed]
So the tilde used on the top vs. the bottom means different things (nasal vs. creaky voice). This got me wondering if the [ ̥ ] ring means anything differently when it is on the top as seen here ŋ̊. ...
0
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1answer
88 views
Accurately representing stress
Wondering how to accurately represent stress. In IPA, stress, is marked with ˈ◌. But in languages like Spanish (don't know of other languages that use acute accent, other than Ancient Greek), you have ...
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1answer
97 views
How to annotate the difference between blended vowels and non-blended vowels
Similar to this question about consonants, I'm wondering how you annotate with IPA (or any other system if IPA doesn't support it) the difference between blending vowels together (morphing between ...
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1answer
88 views
If diacritics cause duplication in IPA
So in first learning the IPA I went through the consonants and the vowels. This is confusing because in the consonants chart you see stuff like [d̪] or [ʎ̥˔]. At first I thought these were just some ...
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1answer
100 views
How to annotate “popping” vs. non-popping sounds of sequential consonants
How to write (orthography) words in a distinct way to capture the essence of these pronunciations (I'll try to use IPA but probably will do it wrong so adding another variation).
hip /hɪp/
hipo /hɪpo/...
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1answer
54 views
How to write IPA for a slovenian word Midva? [closed]
can someone please help me how to write the pronunciation for the word "Midva" that English speaking people will understand?
In Slovene it is [ˈmiːdva]
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1answer
182 views
General American English words for IPA vowel sounds
Looking at the Danish vowels, it came up with this translation:
a hat
ɑ art
ɑː father
ʌ off
ɒ og
ɒː dog
æ bet
æː bed
e face
ɛ ?
eː phase
ɛː ?
i leaf
iː leave
o oak
ɔ thought
...
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1answer
2k views
The difference between [h] and [ħ]
I am trying to tell the difference between [h] and [ħ]. I get the technical difference of pharyngeal vs. glottal, but I don't see how it's possible to control those two regions of your anatomy ...
2
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1answer
424 views
What parentheses and tildes mean in IPA / phonology chart
Why some symbols in phonology charts are put in parentheses or brackets, such as (z), or [ɲ], and why there is a tilde ~ in some places, such as dz [dʒ ~ dz]. Wondering what that means exactly, if it ...
1
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1answer
126 views
Missing IPA symbols
Sometimes phonologies have symbols that I haven't seen in the IPA, such as ᵘa or k͜xʰ. Wondering how I go about finding out what these mean, and/or why they don't use the IPA symbols. Wondering if ...
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2answers
1k views
When should I use /ə/ or /ɪ/ and why does it seem like they're not used correctly?
So I'm trying to learn the vowel sounds of the IPA, and I'm looking at the words "temerity" and "moment" in AmE. What is especially confusing is that first word, where wiktionary lists the ...
3
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1answer
163 views
How these close sounds are distinguished in native language
This is not a comprehensive list but just a few snippets from languages that have a few consonants that sound pretty much the same to me. I wanted to ask how I can learn to hear the difference between ...
0
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1answer
45 views
Audio library for all IPA vowels and consonants
Wikipedia has a pretty good intro to the IPA sounds, even some of the "click" sounds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio
https://en....
