Questions tagged [phonetics]
The study of the production and perception of sounds or "phones".
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How are /ɪ/ and /ʌ/ realised in the Nottingham (East Midlands) accent? [migrated]
I've got a sample of a few words pronounced by a Nottingham accent representative: https://youtu.be/2fCSeDEZeVU
My ear is far from perfect and this is why I'd like to ask for your help in this ...
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Formant measurements errors in Praat
I am trying to measure formant trajectories in /lV/ sequences.
I started by extracting values at 11 temporal points, but I am getting a lot of incorrect values, as if Praat is struggling to recognize ...
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L-epenthesis/allophony in unexplained circumstances in American English
I've been having trouble articulating this question, so I'm sorry if it's poorly worded.
I'm a teenage English speaker from Chicago. I've recently noticed a seemingly odd allophonic possibility in ...
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The difference between the phonemes /p/ and /b/ in Japanese
Is there any difference between the phonemes /p/ and /b/ in Japanese ?
In English, they are pretty distinguishable.
E.g: 'Bat' and 'pat'
In Japanese, however, I get lost trying to tell which is which.
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A better rule for Canadian Raising
I'm a teenager from Chicago with a pretty standard contemporary Midwestern/General American accent (not distinctly Chicago). I'm interested in the phonetic phenomenon of Canadian Raising, in which ...
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What is the term for the duration ratio between the vowel and the coda?
A syllable consists of three parts: The onset, the nucleus (which is usually a vowel), and the coda. The onset and the coda are optional, or may come in consonant clusters, but for the purpose of this ...
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Is there any free API that can translate from French to IPA? [duplicate]
I have invented a language that actually is just French but each phoneme is replaced by another one. So to build an application that can translate from French to that language, I need the phonetics of ...
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What are near-minimal pairs
What are near-minimal pairs? How are they different from minimal pairs?
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Stress, spirantization and other changes in the word "okay"
I'm a teenager from the Midwest. In the English language, many words have significant variance in their range of possible pronunciations. Some words may sound different from speaker to speaker in ...
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Child language acquisition as an explanation for American rounding of the /r/ sound
The English phoneme typically represented by the letter ⟨r⟩ represents a confusing and complicated mess of allophonic realizations, some of which are highly disparate and some of which vary only ...
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Why are intervocalic coronal plosives apparently so unstable in English?
There are a plethora of words in the English language in which the phonemes /t/ and /d/ appear between two vowels, whether they be in adjacent syllables in the same word or in different words as a ...
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Do other languages have correspondences like English's No-Nope and Yeah-Yep?
In the English language, as in others, there are a variety of interjection words. Among these are some comprising an open syllable, like yeah and no. Others end in stop consonants, like yep (or yup) ...
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Is the rarity of dental sounds explained by babies not immediately having teeth?
Dental consonants, which involve the corona of the tongue contacting the teeth (typically the upper teeth) are known to be rare throughout the world’s languages. More specifically, phonemic ...
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Can someone explain the ambiguity of the vowel [ø] and null segment [∅]?
Typically the IPA avoids using the same glyph in different scales to represent similar ideas however it seems to me that the representation of the Close-mid Front Rounded Vowel [ø] and the null marker ...
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Why are the coronal approximants so different from the others?
I’m aware that there has been some criticism of the IPA’s classification of approximants, as well as debate over the merit of the term itself. However, my understanding is that approximants are the ...
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What's the difference between primary and secondary stresses?
I've heard that secondary stress is more weaker than primary stress but aside from that is there any noticeable difference the two kinds of stresses?
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How is Donald Duck's voice produced, if not by buccal speech?
The Disney character Donald Duck is well known for his nigh unintelligible voice, which was originated by actor Clarence Nash in the 1930s. I have always heard this manner of speaking described as ...
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Variable tongue position for /ʃ/ and /tʃ/
I am a phonetics layman so I may be using some terms incorrectly. Please do correct me.
According to the IPA chart, /t/ allows multiple tongue positions.
And indeed, whether the tip of my tongue is ...
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What's the phonological explanation of Turkish speakers pronouncing "r" as "sh" at the end of the word?
I'm a native Turkish speaker and I recently started noticing people around me pronounce "r" as "sh", sometimes [ʒ], when it's at the end of a word. So it's like,
Hayır -> Hayış
...
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Is there a tool that provides lists of words that contain the sound denoted by an inputted phonetic symbol?
For example, if I set this tool for English, then type /ʌ/ in the search box, it should return a list of English words that contain that sound.
TIA
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Could some European languages get phonemic vowel length in future?
Could some European languages get phonemic vowel length in future? I don't like that so few languages in Europe have that. Which would cause phonemic long vowels?
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The Letter C in Scottish Gaelic
Why does the letter C have 6 pronunciations in Scottish Gaelic? Why is the letter C so confusing and ambiguous in the Gaelic language?
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What is the most efficient set of languages needed to easily become proficient in any language?
I’m not familiar with the terminology to ask this question properly, so I’ll do my best in laymen’s terms.
I’m a native English speaker, so I find certain elements of other languages particularly ...
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Trilled R between a vowel and a consonant
Take the Finnish word Terve /tɛrʋɛ/ as an example, how to pronounce the R which comes after a vowel and is followed by a consonant? I have listened to some samples but they just sound like a tapped R, ...
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Is the Turkish /n/ dental apical or dental laminal?
According to Wikipedia the Turkish /n/ is dental, but it doesn't specify whether it's produced by the tip or the blade of the tongue.
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How does Rhymezone identify near rhymes?
Does it identify near rhymes by phonemes that are close to each other? What are they? If so, did they used an open-source database with IPA transcriptions?
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is schwa a phoneme in English?
or is it simply an unstressed allophone of unstressed lax vowels? I'm curious because I've heard some people claim that [ə] is not a phoneme and it is just a reduced allophone of all the unstressed ...
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How Does Gibberish Differ between Languages?
Gibberish spoken by English-speakers, despite being intended to sound unruly, clearly has rules. I'm not a linguist, and can't find a great deal of research into this, but here's a paper linking the &...
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Voiceless Schwa after a plosive consonant
Take American English as an example, what is the difference in sounding between [pʰə̥ˈtʰeɪ̯ɾoʊ̯] and [pʰˈtʰeɪ̯ɾoʊ̯]?
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Difference between Cantonese /gw/ and Mandarin /gu/?
As a native speaker of both languages, Cantonese /gw/ like in 過gwo3 and Mandarin /gu/ like in 过guo4 sounds the same, but I've checked that the Cantonese one is [kʷɔː] while the Mandarin one is [kwo], ...
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Does any language have Final-Obstruent voicing?
Some languages such as Georgian for example have final-obstruent devoicing and voiced /b,d,ɡ/ become devoiced to [pʰ,tʰ,kʰ] before voiceless consonants and before a pause, for example the word "...
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Pronunciation of D sound in British English
I could be wrong about this, but the D sound in British English (RP) sounds a little different from the American counterpart. Often when I hear the words "Lady", "Ready", "...
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Are there any examples in any language of words beginning with the sound [θð]?
While I have some difficulty pronouncing a hypothetical word ending with [θð], it seems perfectly possible to have such a sound at the beginning or in the middle of a word.
Is the sound [θð] ever used ...
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Why does /ɑ/ sounds so similar to [ɔ]?
For example, the /ɑ/ in the audio examples on this site and in this recording of the GenAm pronunciation of the word "cot" sounds very [ɔ]-like to my ears.
my native Georgian language has /ɑ/...
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Unaspirated plosives vs their voiced counterparts
I am having some trouble distinguishing ''aspiration'' from ''voice'' for plosives.
Now I know ''aspiration'' and ''voice'' sound like completely different concepts but let's take /p/ for example. /p(...
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Types of transliteration and/or translation
There are cases where abbreviations or proper names like brands get transliterated/translated differently. This question is asking whether there are linguistic names for these phenomena, e.g.
The ...
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How to distinguish between hiatus and a diphthong?
Recently I've been thinking about the difference hiatus and diphthongs.
in my native language there are no phonemic diphthongs but phonetic diphthongs do occur e.g "კაი" ("okay") /...
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What's the difference between a single-contact alveolar trill and alveolar flap/tap
is there any difference between the two? is it even possible to produce an alveolar trill with a single vibration of the tongue?
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is this sound [ɫ]?
here.
my native language (Georgian) is said to have velarized [ɫ] and plain [l] as the allophones of the /l/ phoneme, [ɫ] appears before back vowels /ɑ ɔ u/ and [l] appears before front vowels /i ɛ/.
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Is the laryngeal fricative the same as the glottal fricative /h/?
This page glottal fricative /h/ alternates between calling it a glottal fricative and a laryngeal fricative.
Is the reason for it that laryngeally the only option to phonate is to exercise the glottis?...
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what kind of an /l/ sound is this?
here.
some speakers of my native language use this /l/ sound instead of more common [ɫ~l] colloquially it is referred to as "soft l" and is transcribed as "ლь" which is a ...
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why pronunciations of cardinal vowel No.4 [a] are so different?
The cardinal vowel No.4 [a] pronounced by Daniel Jones and some other linguistics sounds more like /æ/ as in cat.
but this cardinal vowel pronounced in the IPA website(by 4 speakers) sounds more like ...
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Can a phonemically aspirated consonant have an unaspirated allophone?
in My native language, Georgian there exist a set of phonemic aspirated consonants /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ which are said to be aspirated in all positions.
though recently I noticed that when the aspirated ...
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the sound of "erre moscia" in Italian
In Italian we have the alveolar trill as a phoneme, but not all native speakers (me, for example) can do it: some people have what we call an "Erre Moscia" meaning we can't properly do the ...
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How is F0 determined?
I was reading Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology (Authors and page numbers will be added when I get my iPad back). And I am learning the concept of 'F0' for the first time.
So according to this ...
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can a sibilant consonant like /s/ and /ʃ/ cause centralization of a following vowel?
As a native speaker of Georgian I recently noticed that in my idiolect the sibilants like /ʃ/ /s/ can make vowels /i/ and /ɑ/ sound more 'centralized', for example: /ʃiʃi/, "fear". and /...
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Is it possible for an ejective consonant to be realized as a non-ejective consonant allophonically?
In my native language, Georgian, there's a phoneme transcribed as /qʼ/ in IPA which is most of the time realized as some kind of a fricative or an affricate, like [χʼ] or [q͡χʼ].
Recently however, I ...
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Pronunciation of г in Old Novgorodian
Pskov dialects are transitional between Belarusian and Russian, so this makes me think that <г> was pronounced as /ɣ/, but I have also read that Old Novgorodian has had an impact on Northern ...
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Are long vowel-less consonant clusters in Georgian actually vowel-less phonetically?
As some of you may already know, in Georgian language there exist a huge strings of consonant clusters which are said to be pronounced without an intervining vowel, like for example /brdɣvnis/ and /...
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Is a gesture a movement of a single articulator or of all articulators of a segment?
In researching the term '(articulatory) gesture', it seems to me that the meaning is something like 'movement of a single articulator for a single segment'. Ergo, e.g. a sound with secondary ...
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