Search results for 'tag:Allophones tag:Consonants' matching tags 'Allophones' and 'Consonants'

Re: fair-haired

Pter — Sat, 17 May 2008 13:51:36 GMT

Thanks Kooyeen for sharing your frustration you have gone through. Basically, I understand the limitation of "broad transcription", i.e. a set of simplified symbols instead of the complete set of IPA. They are easier to read and generally won't cause any problems for native speakers. So, to begin with, you must know how a sound is actually pronounced by native speakers as a reference and generalize it when reading the transcriptions.

However, my problem in this particular case is not exactly that of a transcription issue. My problem is that the voice recording in the MW dictionary website for bet and hair are OBVIOUSLY DIFFERENT in the sound of the vowel, but both of them use the same / e / in the transcription. Different sound, same transcription.

I can accept this "different sound, same transcription" situation for consonants because they are the "same" sound in the sense that they are allophones of the same phoneme. For example, clear L vs dark L, flapped T vs non-flapped T. I have no problem with those because they don't cause any confusion to me. However, for vowels, I would say this is a big problem in the transcription system. To me the quality of the vowel for bet is different from that of hair (at least this is what I heard from the voice recordings in MW and native speakers that I met). This kind of transcription is just plain wrong! How can a dictionary use the same symbol for two different vowel sounds? ? ?

Re: "s" and "z"

Carson21 — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:25:56 GMT

I don't know what you guys are all on about with devoiced /z/. It's not a devoiced /z/, it's just /s/. In the example that someone above used, "vases"... I don't know about up North or across the pond (either one), but American Standard has that as /s/ in the medial and /z/ in the final. Well, if you pronounce the <a> like you do in "bratwurst" or "father", then the medial would become /z/.

Pter, the basic rule is this: final <s> becomes voiced to /z/ when it is final in most verbs and/or after a voiced stop (/g b d/ etc). It remains unvoiced /s/ for most nouns and adjectives. It also can voice when the closest (previous) consonant was already /s/. (Abuses, vases, faces, places)

Here's the other basic rule that will probably help you, even if at first it seems to be "maddening the unhelpful": In English, there are a million rules, and every rule has a million exceptions. English is probably as far removed from a loglang as you can get, so it helps to just accept what you learn at face value and imitate it, rather than trying to figure out "why". You can ask "why" all day and use up all the time where you could have been moving on to the next rule. Look at the general rule for each case, then apply it. You learn irregularities as you go (much like learning Spanish verbs).

The perfect example of an exception: assess. It has /s/ in the medial AND final. D'oh! Just have to remember that one.

As for how important it is that you learn the difference between /s/ and /z/... I don't think it's that big a deal. If the spelling shows <s>, then saying /s/ or /z/ won't make much of a difference if your goal is to just be understood. They're allophones, essentially. We could drop <z> from our orthography and get along just fine. However, if your goal is to sound like a native speaker, then, yes, it's quite important that you can make the distinction.

Last, if you pronounced all <s> as /s/... You might sound strange to most people in the UK and the northern United States (plus the commonwealth), but anywhere in the West, Southwest, South East, and Border states in the US, no one would think twice about it! There are a lot of people in those regions that speak English as a second language with Spanish as their first, and they tend to always use /s/ for <s> , regardless of typical conventions.

Re: agAin, friEnd, mysElf

Kooyeen — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 21:08:33 GMT

CalifJim wrote:
Rhyming friend to stand sounds peculiar to me, and somewhat Texan, perhaps. It's definitely not standard.

Thanks.
Well, I'm not an expert on accents... but did you listen to the audio clip? Would you say pronouncing "again" that way sounds southern? I think I've heard that feature from Californians, but I told you, I'm really not sure.

Btw, I read something about "phonemic and non-phonemic Ã¦ tensing" on Wikipedia... very interesting, but they only talk about the Ã¦ sound:
More widespread among speakers of the Western United States and southern Midwest is a "continuous" system. This resembles the nasal system in that /Ã¦/ is usually raised and tensed to [eÉ] before nasal consonants, but instead of a sharp divide between high tense [eÉ] before nasals and low lax [Ã¦] before other consonants, allophones of /Ã¦/ occupy a continuum of varying degrees of height and tenseness between those two extremes, with a variety of phonetic and phonological factors interacting (sometimes differently in different dialects) to determine the height and tenseness of any particular example of /Ã¦/.

Nothing about "e" as in "bed"...

diplomatical letter

Kirsche — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 08:06:33 GMT

Recently, because of my job requirements, I have to write some diplomatical letters to my business partners. For example, invitations, applogy for meeting postpone and so on. Sometime I confuse if I wrote perlite enough or If English speakers do use such sentences as I used to use in those letters ( My English is not good enough) . How can I have better skill of writting diplomatical letters? Can somebody help me?

Forum: Common English Questions and Answers - Archived Posts
Posted: May 22, 3:11 AM [GMT 1]
Post Subject: Re: How to pronounce a 't' in American English
Post author: CalifJim

Allophones of /t/, continued.

Other symbols that will be used in a chart to follow:
V'        stressed vowel      a vowel relatively more stressed
                                              syllable of the word
'V      unstressed vowel   a vowel relatively less stressed
                                               syllable of the word
V        any vowel             any vowel, whether stressed or not
   L        syllabic L              as in the final syllable of "little", "curdle"
                                            (always unstressed)
   N       syllabic N              as in the final syllable of "satin", "carton"
                                            (always unstressed)
   /        "or"
   b#     beginning of a word
   e#     end of a word
   C      consonant               any (other) consonant
                                           not mentioned in a list
                                          (down the left side or
                                           across the top of the chart)

To be continued.
CJ

Re: vowel length distinction before voiced or unv. consonants

Marvin A. — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 03:25:55 GMT

I don't think it's called intonation. It's allophonic vowel length: vowel phonemes are realized as longer vowel allophones before voiced consonant phonemes in the coda of a syllable. This is found in all dialects of American English. Some American dialects have some phonemic vowel distinctions as well, but this is less common. Australian English has a distinctive phonemic vowel length: pairs such as ferry/fairy; hut/heart; and bid/beard are distinguished solely by vowel length.

Re: How do you pronounce "emoticon"?

Marvin A. — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 16:45:48 GMT

>> whereas the General American pronunciation is /I'moudiKa:n/. d = flapped /t/<<

Interesting. I would say it with a [ t ] rather than an alveolar flap. I think it's one of those words in which the /t/ is pronounced as spelt. Perhaps because it is such an uncommon word, or maybe the stress. For example, I would say "atom" as [ æ4@m ] , but "atomic" as [ @tOmIk_} ] . Since I think of the word emoticon to be composed of not "emotion" and "icon", but rather "emote" + "icon", I would be unlikely to flap the t. Also, I most definitely wouldn't use [ I ] , as the first vowel, if by [ I ] you mean a lax vowel. I would use [ i ] , or perhaps [ @ ] , but never a lax [ I ] . Also, General American doesn't even have the [ a ] vowel. [ a ] is used for speakers with the California vowel shift that are saying /æ/, and for people with the Northern cities vowel shift saying /A/. Also, you marked in vowel length: /a:/. In North American dialects, unlike British English dialects, vowel length is determined by the consonants following the vowel, and is not an intrinsic property of the vowel itself: e.g. [ a ] and [ a: ] are allophones of the same vowel, and would not affect the meaning, so since you are using / / notation, you can't mark in the vowel length.

Re: /a:/ & /o/

Marvin A. — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 20:26:03 GMT

I'm not quite sure I understand your symbols. For one thing, North American English doesn't really distinguish vowel length, vowel phonemes are realized as long vowel allophones before voiced consonant phonemes in the coda of a syllable. Secondly, [ o ] is used in words such as "hope" or "vote", in dialects that have monophthongized [ oU ]. [ a ] is used in NCVS shifted dialects.

In the Western US, and Western and Central Canada, arm, father, hot, cot, rock, dawn, and caught are all pronounced with [ A ]. People with the Canadian shift or the California shift, pronounce them all with [ O ] .

There are some people that lack the cot-caught merger, and thus pronounce "cot" as [ kAt ] and "caught" as [ kOt ]
Some people from the Northern Midwest pronounce "cot" as [ kat ] and "caught" as [ kAt ] .

The bother-father merger is almost universal in North American English, except in Northeastern New England, such as the Boston accent, and New York and New Jersey English.

If you're aiming for a Western accent, you can simply pronounce all of them with [ A ] . (The Western accent is considered one of the least accented varieties of North American English.)

[ O ] is the open-mid back rounded vowel
[ A ] is the open back unrounded vowel
[ a ] is the open front unrounded vowel

Re: Sv: Re: Which pronunciation to model your speech on

MichalS — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 11:15:57 GMT

In my opinion, foreign students are taught the pronunciation of words according to the their first entry in the Pronunciation Dictionary (John Wells' Pronunciation Dictionary or Daniel Johns' English Pronouncing Dictionary - these two hold a good reputation in the field). I believe that the first entries for words in the dictionaries are the forms which are most popular among people in the United Kingdom and are not necessarily the ones you find in RP pronunciation. That is to say, foreign students are rather taught the standard UK accent, which by no means should be confused with RP accent, as Nona The Brit mentioned.

However, I do agree with your earlier statement that Polish people are hardly ever understood when they are using their mother tongue's phonemes (or better allophones as CallifJim rightly noticed) in English speech. I happen to be an English student at one of the Polish universities and know how terrible it is when a Pole has problems with distinguishing English and Polish consonants and vowels. The truth is that there is not a single vowel in Polish exactly the same like a vowel in English so the differences must be perceived and learned if one wants to sound English. As far as consonants are concerned, we don't aspirate them at all, so here's another very important issue if you aim not only at being understood but speaking English correctly. Let alone th-sounds, which are absent in European languages. If one can't pronounce them the way they should be, it often comes out as /s/ or /f/, which sounds horrible for anyone speaking English!

However, very often foreign students are exposed to American variety as well. This is mainly due to US movies which greatly outnumber British ones. They got me, for example, pronouncing American alveolar tap instead of a gentle /t/ sound (in certain contexts of course) and also vowel [a:] where British variety has short o. Anyway, I don't mind much as long as my teachers are cool with that. <img src="/emoticons/emotion-1.gif" alt="Smile [:)]" />

Re: How to pronounce a 't' in American English

CalifJim — Mon, 22 May 2006 02:11:08 GMT

How to pronounce a 't' in American English

CalifJim — Mon, 22 May 2006 01:51:41 GMT

Allophones of /t/ in Standard American English

I find these symbols the easiest to use without access to an IPA font. They also have the advantage that you can place them right into an English word to illustrate where they are used. (t'omato, stat'istics, wi.tness, bottom, mat'ress).

Symbol     Name                            Description
    t'          aspirated t            t with an audible escape of air
                                              The more aspirated the t,
                                                the more the sound
                                                approaches "ch"

   .t        stopped t;             onset of t only without the final
            (unreleased t)                                escape of air
                      Often accompanied by a glottal stop -
                                               a sort of tightening in the throat

    t        tapped t                a voiced consonant; similar to
                                                the flapped r of Spanish or Italian

    t        neutral t                not aspirated, stopped, nor tapped

If you want to get down to even narrower phonetic transcriptions, you can, but I don't think this would be useful to anyone but a specialist.

To be continued.
CJ