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cosmolinguistPart Two
Part Three
moem's comment to the post I wrote yesterday got me thinking. After asking how something is pronounced, it went "I'm worried that you will only be able to reply in those characters that I can't read, the ones that indicate how words sound... I don't even know what they are called."
I wanted to reply not just to explain the pronunciation but to answer the question of what those characters are called, and maybe give a little basic info. So I googled "International Phonetic Alphabet" and...I was surprised not to find anything useful. Everything seems to be just the charts, with at most a little history but I don't expect anyone cares what year the IPA was invented or whose idea it was. And the charts aren't much use if you don't know how to read them.
I find it really frustrating that I was exposed for years in high school to, say, the periodic table -- I had to memorize the first twenty elements, I can recognize a bunch of the symbols still, I know the chart's organization tells you stuff about electron shells and similarities between elements' properties, I knew what atomic number and atomic weight are -- and, no shade but...I can't recall it having been useful to me since. Whereas I long for a wider knowledge of the IPA every time people talk about accents, or about unfamiliar words, or even how unfamiliar a familiar word can sound sometimes.
I can imagine a high-school level linguistics knowledge, but it doesn't really exist. There's this frustrating gap: practically nothing's out there between the level of (often uninformed and bigoted) rants about personal langauge peeves and undergrad-level linguistics. Sure there are some cool podcasts and twitter accounts and stuff (that's how I ended up inspired to do a lingulistics degree, after all!) but I think there's a lot of potential for more interested-layperson level stuff, and I thought a good place to start might be by talking about how to read the IPA chart. I promise it's way easier than a periodic table.
How to Read the International Phonetic Alphabet
(I'm only going to do pulmonic consonants and vowels. Pulmonic consonants include all the ones in English and many others.)
So, here's the chart.
(If you're wondering why it says "(revised to 2005)," a new symbol was added then! So this is still a living document, a work in progress. I think that's cool.)
I think one of the first things that jumps out at you is that some of the cells are empty, and some of those are grayed out. The ones that are grayed out are deemed physically impossible -- human vocal tracts just cannot make sounds at those intersections. This will make more sense soon. The ones that are just blank are sounds that are theoretically possible but that do not seem to be used in any languages of the world that linguists know about so far. (Phonetics (the P in IPA) is about speech sounds, not just "any noise somebody might make," so it has to be part of a language to count.)
So there are three things you need to know about a pulmonic consonant (I'll just call them consonants after this) to know which sound it is. They sort of help you triangulate it on the table. They are place of articulation, manner of articulation and voicing.
You might have noticed that along the bottom of the table it tells us that if there are two symobls in the same cell on this table, the right one is voiced (the opposite of voiced is voiceless, which is what the left one is). Voicing is about whether or not your vocal cords vibrate when you're making a sound. We can feel and hear this happening: if you put your fingers lightly on the front of your neck and make a "sssss" sound, your fingers shouldn't feel anything. Change it to a "zzzz" sound and you should be able to feel the vibration happening in your voice box (which linguists call your vocal folds). You can try it with other pairs here that you recognize as English letters: /f/ and /v/, /t/ and /d/, etc. This difference in voicing is really important; you can probably imagine pairs of words that are different from each other only in whether one sound is voiced or voiceless: fat and vat, bus and buzz (this example does not apply to Lancashire, where they're both buzz!) till and dill.
Voicing is a nice simple binary (for our purposes!). The other two have many more options.
Across the top of the chart, we have place of articulation. Consonants are (mostly!) made by having some degree of constriction in your vocal tract. The mouth is more open for vowels (try saying "aahh ey, ee, oh, ooo" etc and you'll see your mouth stays pretty open and your tongue isn't really touching anything) but consonants are different. Your lips and tongue (and some other things, but mostly tongue really) have to be in really particular places in your mouth to make consonants.
The labels across the top are arranged in order...so if you imagine a person standing in front of you facing to your left, these labels will go from the front of their vocal tract to to the back. This will make more sense as we go along.
The first spot, the first place that we can articulate a speech sound, is the bilabial, which means "two lips" so it's sounds made by your two lips. You can see our familiar /p/ and /b/ right there making the sounds English speakers associate with those letters (the symbols between slashes here are always going to be IPA symbols which may or may not bear any resemblence to how we're used to reading them in English, but I'll try to use examples that are easy). Next is labiodental, which means "lip and teeth," so this is where you put your bottom lip against your top teeth, and you can probably spot the familiar examples here are /f/ and /v/ and think about how you make those.
After this, the tongue is understood to be one of the parts of vocal tract used to make the sound, so the name of the place of articulation is just whatever the other thing is. So, "dental" (meaning teeth of course) is just "your tongue touching your teeth" and English does have sounds like that but here we encounter unfamiliar symbols, /θ/ and /ð/. You might like to try putting your tongue right up against the back of your front teeth and try the voiceless and voiced versions of this and see if you can guess what happens... but also I'll tell you that these are the two sounds that are both spelled "th" in English. As always, the voiceless version is on the left, so /θ/ is (in standard English) the first sound in "thing" and the voiced /ð/ is the first sound in "then."
English doesn't (any more) have single letters for these sounds (the ð is actually an Old English letter and it did indicate that same sound originally, but it fell out of use about a thousand years ago) and the IPA always has a single symbol for a single sound, which is why these symbols are not familiar to English speakers.
If you move your tongue just back from where you put it for /θ/ and /ð/, you'll feel a sort of bump just behind your front teeth. This is called the alveolar ridge, and it's where you put the tip of your tongue for our next kind of consonant, alveolar. Familiar English ones here are /t/, /d/, /s/ and /z/. Lots of sounds happen here, but you should be able to get an idea for what this place of articulation feels like from them.
The post-alveolar consonants look weird again, but they're familiar to you. /ʃ/ is often spelled "sh" (though not always, and not everything spelled "sh" sounds like this!), it's the sound at the beginning of "she." /ʒ/ is a sound we only tend to get in the middle or at the end of English words, like "beige" or "casual." We sometimes say it in the beginning of French names like Jean.
Your tongue doesn't move much at all between /s/ and /ʃ/, so this is a common lisp. We actually need to be incredibly precise with our tongue movements, and have a mouth that's just the right shape, for this kind of distinction to work. This is why children who are still learning how their bodies work, people with fine motor control issues, and people with unusually-shaped mouths might lisp. And the rest of us might say /ʃ/ when we mean /s/ if we're drunk, very tired, ill, etc., because that very precise control is hampered by such things.
Speaking of being very tired, it's getting late, I can't write this all at once and probably no one wants to read it all at once, so I'll stop here for today.
Part Three
moem's comment to the post I wrote yesterday got me thinking. After asking how something is pronounced, it went "I'm worried that you will only be able to reply in those characters that I can't read, the ones that indicate how words sound... I don't even know what they are called."I wanted to reply not just to explain the pronunciation but to answer the question of what those characters are called, and maybe give a little basic info. So I googled "International Phonetic Alphabet" and...I was surprised not to find anything useful. Everything seems to be just the charts, with at most a little history but I don't expect anyone cares what year the IPA was invented or whose idea it was. And the charts aren't much use if you don't know how to read them.
I find it really frustrating that I was exposed for years in high school to, say, the periodic table -- I had to memorize the first twenty elements, I can recognize a bunch of the symbols still, I know the chart's organization tells you stuff about electron shells and similarities between elements' properties, I knew what atomic number and atomic weight are -- and, no shade but...I can't recall it having been useful to me since. Whereas I long for a wider knowledge of the IPA every time people talk about accents, or about unfamiliar words, or even how unfamiliar a familiar word can sound sometimes.
I can imagine a high-school level linguistics knowledge, but it doesn't really exist. There's this frustrating gap: practically nothing's out there between the level of (often uninformed and bigoted) rants about personal langauge peeves and undergrad-level linguistics. Sure there are some cool podcasts and twitter accounts and stuff (that's how I ended up inspired to do a lingulistics degree, after all!) but I think there's a lot of potential for more interested-layperson level stuff, and I thought a good place to start might be by talking about how to read the IPA chart. I promise it's way easier than a periodic table.
How to Read the International Phonetic Alphabet
(I'm only going to do pulmonic consonants and vowels. Pulmonic consonants include all the ones in English and many others.)
So, here's the chart.
(If you're wondering why it says "(revised to 2005)," a new symbol was added then! So this is still a living document, a work in progress. I think that's cool.)
I think one of the first things that jumps out at you is that some of the cells are empty, and some of those are grayed out. The ones that are grayed out are deemed physically impossible -- human vocal tracts just cannot make sounds at those intersections. This will make more sense soon. The ones that are just blank are sounds that are theoretically possible but that do not seem to be used in any languages of the world that linguists know about so far. (Phonetics (the P in IPA) is about speech sounds, not just "any noise somebody might make," so it has to be part of a language to count.)
So there are three things you need to know about a pulmonic consonant (I'll just call them consonants after this) to know which sound it is. They sort of help you triangulate it on the table. They are place of articulation, manner of articulation and voicing.
You might have noticed that along the bottom of the table it tells us that if there are two symobls in the same cell on this table, the right one is voiced (the opposite of voiced is voiceless, which is what the left one is). Voicing is about whether or not your vocal cords vibrate when you're making a sound. We can feel and hear this happening: if you put your fingers lightly on the front of your neck and make a "sssss" sound, your fingers shouldn't feel anything. Change it to a "zzzz" sound and you should be able to feel the vibration happening in your voice box (which linguists call your vocal folds). You can try it with other pairs here that you recognize as English letters: /f/ and /v/, /t/ and /d/, etc. This difference in voicing is really important; you can probably imagine pairs of words that are different from each other only in whether one sound is voiced or voiceless: fat and vat, bus and buzz (this example does not apply to Lancashire, where they're both buzz!) till and dill.
Voicing is a nice simple binary (for our purposes!). The other two have many more options.
Across the top of the chart, we have place of articulation. Consonants are (mostly!) made by having some degree of constriction in your vocal tract. The mouth is more open for vowels (try saying "aahh ey, ee, oh, ooo" etc and you'll see your mouth stays pretty open and your tongue isn't really touching anything) but consonants are different. Your lips and tongue (and some other things, but mostly tongue really) have to be in really particular places in your mouth to make consonants.
The labels across the top are arranged in order...so if you imagine a person standing in front of you facing to your left, these labels will go from the front of their vocal tract to to the back. This will make more sense as we go along.
The first spot, the first place that we can articulate a speech sound, is the bilabial, which means "two lips" so it's sounds made by your two lips. You can see our familiar /p/ and /b/ right there making the sounds English speakers associate with those letters (the symbols between slashes here are always going to be IPA symbols which may or may not bear any resemblence to how we're used to reading them in English, but I'll try to use examples that are easy). Next is labiodental, which means "lip and teeth," so this is where you put your bottom lip against your top teeth, and you can probably spot the familiar examples here are /f/ and /v/ and think about how you make those.
After this, the tongue is understood to be one of the parts of vocal tract used to make the sound, so the name of the place of articulation is just whatever the other thing is. So, "dental" (meaning teeth of course) is just "your tongue touching your teeth" and English does have sounds like that but here we encounter unfamiliar symbols, /θ/ and /ð/. You might like to try putting your tongue right up against the back of your front teeth and try the voiceless and voiced versions of this and see if you can guess what happens... but also I'll tell you that these are the two sounds that are both spelled "th" in English. As always, the voiceless version is on the left, so /θ/ is (in standard English) the first sound in "thing" and the voiced /ð/ is the first sound in "then."
English doesn't (any more) have single letters for these sounds (the ð is actually an Old English letter and it did indicate that same sound originally, but it fell out of use about a thousand years ago) and the IPA always has a single symbol for a single sound, which is why these symbols are not familiar to English speakers.
If you move your tongue just back from where you put it for /θ/ and /ð/, you'll feel a sort of bump just behind your front teeth. This is called the alveolar ridge, and it's where you put the tip of your tongue for our next kind of consonant, alveolar. Familiar English ones here are /t/, /d/, /s/ and /z/. Lots of sounds happen here, but you should be able to get an idea for what this place of articulation feels like from them.
The post-alveolar consonants look weird again, but they're familiar to you. /ʃ/ is often spelled "sh" (though not always, and not everything spelled "sh" sounds like this!), it's the sound at the beginning of "she." /ʒ/ is a sound we only tend to get in the middle or at the end of English words, like "beige" or "casual." We sometimes say it in the beginning of French names like Jean.
Your tongue doesn't move much at all between /s/ and /ʃ/, so this is a common lisp. We actually need to be incredibly precise with our tongue movements, and have a mouth that's just the right shape, for this kind of distinction to work. This is why children who are still learning how their bodies work, people with fine motor control issues, and people with unusually-shaped mouths might lisp. And the rest of us might say /ʃ/ when we mean /s/ if we're drunk, very tired, ill, etc., because that very precise control is hampered by such things.
Speaking of being very tired, it's getting late, I can't write this all at once and probably no one wants to read it all at once, so I'll stop here for today.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-17 10:08 pm (UTC)So, thank you.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-17 11:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-17 10:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-17 11:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-18 01:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-19 09:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-18 05:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-18 07:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-18 07:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-18 08:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-18 08:38 am (UTC)The ʃ is called esh and the ʒ is called ezh. Again, these just contain the sounds that the symbols make.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-18 01:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-18 07:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-18 07:21 am (UTC)Weirdly, my friend R did a Linguistics degree based on my explanation when she came and asked me what Linguistics was. Maybe I should have taken my own advice and studied it properly myself. Nowadays though, M and I talk about this stuff a lot but he knows much more than I do because he has a degree in Anglo Saxon, Norse and Celtic.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-18 08:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-19 09:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-18 03:46 pm (UTC)Plus, you seem to be really good at explaining stuff.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-19 09:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-18 08:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-19 09:34 am (UTC)But then I remember the order of classes of stars thanks to "oh boy a fine guy kissed me" which I do think is the worst mnemonic I know but it still works! (And it means I can't remember the new classes they've added in the nineteen years since I took astronomy.)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-04-22 07:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-05-01 10:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-23 12:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-07-05 04:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-07-05 04:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-07-05 04:55 pm (UTC)