December Days 5
Dec. 5th, 2018 10:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistmagic_at_mungos asked for "Favourite thing you learnt this year."I'm going with the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Which is funny because I really hated learning it at the time. Really. I hated almost everything about that class. But I knew it would be useful, and it is. I'm still not as good at the whole thing as I was meant to be -- we were supposed to learn it all, non-pulmonic consonants and everything -- but I'm pretty good at the sounds of English. And I'm really glad.
It's proven very useful, in everything from learning Arabic (I still can't make a very good voiceless uvular plosive, but I know that's the sound I should be going for when I see ق) to figuring out why Andrew thinks I'm repeating myself when I say words like "rum" and "room" back-to-back (pairs like these are called minimal pairs because they differ in only one feature, here the vowel).
In a lot of my social-media/in-the-pub type linguistics conversations with my friends (which happen surprisingly often now; thanks for indulging me, friends), I often find myself trying to answer questions about how people speak that would be infinitely easier if the people I was talking to knew the IPA. Especially on social media: you've got limited characters and if you want to talk about a sound you have to try to conjure a word that'll reliably have that sound in it, in the accent of the person you're talking to.
If you're interested in the IPA, I can recommend Seeing Speech where you can click on any of the symbols and see a few-second video of someone making the sound. There are MRIs in most of the videos, though you can see a stylized animation too (and sometimes an ultrasound but that's much more confusing if you don't know what you're looking at so less fun), and it's pretty great to see what weird squishy bits of your head and neck are doing to make these sounds.
My favorite IPA symbol, for those who are wondering, is ɾ. This is a sound that's in American English but not British English. I don't use it as consistently as I used to; it's one of many sounds I've sacrified it to make myself better understood and less marked (less unusual, less likely to be remarked upon by the people I'm speaking to). But I've ended up all the fonder of it and more determined to use it as a statement that it isn't "wrong," it isn't due to not knowing how to spell, or any of the other things I've been told since I moved here. Linguistics strives for non-judgmental descriptivism, it delights in change and diversity, and the rest of the world could aspire to a little more of that itself. This is what ɾ symbolizes for me these days.
Plus it has a good name: alveolar tap (because the tip of the tongue just very quickly taps a part of the mouth).
diffrentcolours and I joke that if there was a pub for linguists it should be called the Alveolar Tap.Again: please suggest a topic for me to write about in December Days if you like! Still plenty of days left.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-05 10:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-05 11:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-05 11:39 pm (UTC)I LOVE THIS POST!
Date: 2018-12-05 11:42 pm (UTC)You manage to teach enough about linguistics to make a linguistic in-joke!
Re: I LOVE THIS POST!
Date: 2018-12-05 11:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-06 01:42 am (UTC)When you have time, could you provide an example word or words that use your favorite IPA symbol?
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-06 06:38 am (UTC)People think it sounds like a d but it's not the same sound. In most languages that use it, including some other varieties of English, it makes r sounds (which is why its symbol looks sorta like an r). If you've ever seen old fashioned RP speakers described as saying "veddy" instead of "very," that's describing this ɾ sound.
But for me it's this in-between-two-vowels t sound.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-06 03:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-12-06 11:03 pm (UTC)