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It is kind of convention to assign the phonemic value /p/ to the p in spin, since there is no minimal pair /p/:/b/ in this environment (words like *sbin don't exist). Now comes the fun part: In Engli …

Similarity is in the ear of the listener. When we acquire our first language, our ears and brains become trained in all the phonemic differences that are relevant for that language. When we than lear …

There are several reasons conspiring to make palindromic syllables rare in natural languages Most languages have certain restrictions on the beginning and ending consonant clusters of syllables, and …

IPA is not designed for the precise description of phones (the infinite number of "sounds" referred in the question). It is designed to describe any possible phonemic (phonemes are analogous to the di …

For the two quoted speakers of German, dialect is an explanation. Brecht is Born in Augsburg (Bavaria) in an area where r's are rolled, and Brecht used Süddeutsche Umgangssprache (Southern colloquial …

There are generally accepted estimates on how many shades of grey (far less than 50!) or how many colours the human eye can distinguish. How many different vowels can the human ear distinguish? To qu …

What is the language you transcribe? Assuming Standard (American or British) English, writer /ˈraɪtər/ and rider /ˈraɪdər/ are different and the transcription is correct. When you do a phonetic trans …

Yes, there is an algorithm and even a readily available tool for this task. The tool is the Helsinki Finite State Transducer. I have seen an application of it to historical linguistics and determining …

I have not seen all papers in phonology, but I don't think that a bidental plosive or a bidental stop (that would be technical terms for that sound) was ever described in literature. A bidental fricat …

Interjections like "ouch" are often an exception to the phonological system of a language, the words tsk and tut-tut-tut even contain clicks otherwise absent from the English phonology. Examples from …

No, it is not related to Old Norse, it is inherited from Anglo-Frisian. Old Norse supplied some words with "hard g" and "hard k" in environments where Anglo-Frisian developed palatals, e.g., all the n …

The best is to get a dictionary of the language you are interested in, in the case of your example a dictionary of English. The dictionary needs to use IPA (not all of them do, my copy of Merriam-Webs …

I am not aware of any linguistic terminology for this particular kind of conventions. However, there is some applicable terminology from software engineering, particularly from the field of localisati …

We hear proportions of frequencies, not absolute differences. In the first case, the proportion 300Hz/200Hz = 1.5; in the second case the proportion 400Hz/300Hz = 1.33. In musical terms, the first pro …

It's called analogy, and besides competition there is also competitor (already with two t's) suggesting the form to competete. Looking at the Latin original forms (competere, competo, competivi, comp …