Search results for 'tag:Difference between tag:Consonants' matching tags 'Difference between' and 'Consonants'

Re: How do you pronounce words like 'resources' and 'prices'?

MissMandy — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:11:57 GMT

I think you're right on, Kooyeen. And thanks for the reply. I am a stickler in my pronunciation classes that students learn to say the -s (and -ed) endings correctly. Even though I do this, I know that native English speaking Americans rarely say that voiced endings as perfectly voiced, yet it doesn't sound like the unvoiced counterpart sound (s sound and t sound, for these endings).

I knew we said the vowel differently depending on the consonant that follows, but I didn't realize it was also changing the perception of the consonant as well. I think I will also pay attention to how my students are producing the vowels before the final consonant sound.

Back to the original question, it must be correct, then, to point out that the schwa sound in the final syllable of "prices" and "resources" needs to be prominent enough to make the final z sound be perceived as a z sound, even if it ends up being unvoiced. Otherwise, it will sound like an s sound, which native English speakers can tell the difference between. It wouldn't cause a miscommunication to say it as an s sound, it is just telling of a foreign accent.

~Miss Mandy

Re: How do you pronounce words like 'resources' and 'prices'?

Kooyeen — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:23:20 GMT

Hi again,
well, I don't know, but I heard (and I realized it must be so) that even if the z-sound is devoiced, the vowel length remains the same, as if the following sound was voiced, and was still a z-sound. By vowel length I mean the difference between:

God = Stressed syllable ending with a voiced consonant has a long vowel.
Got = Stressed syllable ending with an unvoiced consonant has a short vowel.

The vowel in GOD and GOT is the same, but its length is different. In GOD, which ends with a voiced consonant, the vowel is kind of sustained, it seems longer.
That's the difference I was talking about.

Guy, Eye = Long vowel.
Eyes, ends with unvoiced sound = Short vowel,
Guys, with voiced z = Long vowel.
Guys, with devoiced z = Long vowel anyway, despite the z is devoiced and might sound like an s.

I am not sure that's clear, remember it's just my opinion. And I am not even a native speaker, LOL.

Re: Mimicking an actor's accent

Kooyeen — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:27:59 GMT

Hi,
yes, I remember you asked about him. I'm not an expert at all, but I can tell you my opinion, as a learner.
I agree it's a good accent for those who are interested in British English. I don't find any annoying features in his accent (=features I don't like). It doesn't sound posh to me, his intonation seems to be normal and not exaggerated like in annoying posh accents.

3:54 - That is strange, yes. <-- Tapped T in "that is". I don't know how many accents have this feature and to what extent because I don't really know enough about British English.
3:57 - Yeah, that's a little weird <-- Glottal stops in "little". But they are not everywhere... either he's changing hir accent while he speaks, or those glottal stops are only found in certain special cases in his accent.
He doesn't release final T's. - Notice the difference between his final consonants and the hosts' ones, especially the woman's (the hosts sound like they overpronounce final consonants to me, since I'm mainly used to American English).

Just my non-native opinion, though. I don't know how difficult it is for a learner to pick up such an accent, because I don't know how widespread those kinds of accents are in the UK and in the media in general. Good luck.

Re: W is a vowel

Forbes — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:53:28 GMT

It is unwise to rely on the etymology of a word to discern its meaning, or, if it has a range of meanings, to insist that the "original" meaning is somehow "more correct" . Words mean what they mean. In any discussion of the meaning of a word it is often instructive to look at its etymology as a starting point, but once you have done that you have to move on.

The problem with defining a consonant as a sound that cannot stand on its own is that you then need to go on and ask: "If it cannot stand on its own what does it have to go with?" and the answer to that will be "a vowel". So you then ask: "What is a vowel?" If your answer to that is "any sound that is not a consonant" we end up with consonant being defined in terms of vowels and vowels in terms of consonants, which is not very helpful. That means you need to define one or the other in its own terms and without reference to the other.

If we decide we shall start with defining a vowel, a reasonable enough definition is one that says it is a sound that is made without any obstruction of the vocal tract. When we have done that we have to decide what sounds in the language we are looking at are vowels. When it comes to the sound /w/ we may have some difficulty in deciding. The tricky bit is (because at school we were taught that the vowels are a e i o u) that at the back of our mind is the idea that /w/ ought to be a consonant and it is difficult to overcome it. This partly arises out the failure to distinguish between the sound /w/ and the symbol <w>. If the difficulties can be overcome, it is not totally unreasonable to come to the conclusion that /w/ is nothing but a short /u/. The articulation of /w/ does not seem to involve any obstruction of the vocal tract. If we move on and look at the contexts in which /w/ is found it is not unreasonable to conclude that it is never articulated on its own, or, as you put it "you cannot pronounce W without attaching a vowel to it." However (forgetting for a moment that we have not yet defined consonant) that does not justify us calling /w/ a consonant if we agree that its articulation does not involve any obstruction of the vocal tract. It is perhaps more apt to call /w/ a non-syllabic vowel - our definition of vowel does not imply that it must be capable of forming a syllable.

If we decide to start with defining a consonant as a sound that involves some obstruction of the vocal tract, I think we are going to come to the same difficulty when we get to /w/. [It would be tedious to set the process out as in the previous paragraph.]

The fact that in the IPA there are separate symbols /u/ and /w/ says something. I am not quite sure what it says, but the possibilities are:

1. There is a qualitative difference between the two

2. There is a quantitative difference between the two and it is useful to be able to indicate when the sound is syllabic and when it is not

3. The whole thing is confusion

It may be noted that any two phoneticians may disagree about whether a particular utterance should be transcribed using /u/ or /w/. To an extent the convention for a particular language may depend on whether that language has a separate symbol for /w/.

The fact that many languages have the sound /w/ but have no symbol <w> to represent it (instead using <u>) also says something. It says that the way that any language is written (if written with an alphabet) involves a prior analysis of its sounds. When we come to look at the language afresh we must not be unduly influenced by that prior analysis.

The questions raised by this thread arise partly because written English employs an alphabet. Apart from the fact that that leads to a confusion between sound and symbol, in an alphabetic system language is analysed into phonemes. That is fine as it means that only a relatively few symbols need to be employed and the success of alphabetic systems throughout the world speaks for itself. However, the analysis of speech into phonemes is artificial (though it does not seem so because of the way we write!) and the natural division of continuous speech is the syllable.

Re: "a" or "an" before a consonant acronym

Anonymous — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 09:26:41 GMT

I suppose any hard and fast rule is not warranted. Consider that others argued that acronym and abbreviation are not the same thing:

"There is a difference between acronyms and abbreviations. An acronym is usually formed by taking the first initials of a phrase or compounded-word and using those initials to form a word that stands for something. Thus NATO, which we pronounce NATOH, is an acronym for North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and LASER (which we pronounce "lazer"), is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. FBI, then, is not really an acronym for the Federal Bureau of Investigation; it is an abbreviation. AIDS is an acronym; HIV is an abbreviation. URL is an abbreviation for Uniform Resource Locator (World Wide Web address), but many people pronounce it as "Earl," making it a true acronym, and others insist on pronouncing it as three separate letters, "U * R * L," thus making it an abbreviation. The jury is still out. (I vote for Uncle Earl.)

It appears that there are no hard and fast rules for using periods in either acronyms or abbreviations. More and more, newspapers and journals seem to drop the periods: NAACP, NCAA, etc. Consistency, obviously, is important."

Consider also that the article "the" would be pronounced differently as in "da" and "de" when it precedes different words. We do not spell "the" differently however. It would seem logical to use 'a' in writing except in the most obvious sitaution and leave how it should be pronounced to the reader depending on how s/he chooses to pronounce the word (be it acronym or abbreviation) that follows.

Some questions to ask

Belly — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:02:03 GMT

I want to ask 2 questions about pronunciation first:

1) Do Americans say /use-d/ or /use-t/ in used to?

2) I saw Ann Cook wrote this in American Accent course:

If the first consonant is voiced, the next one will be as well. If the first one is unvoiced, the second one will sound unvoiced, no matter what you do.

Then she gave out examples:

After a voiced sound: He had to do it /he hae (d) d' du(w)'t/

After an unvoiced sound: he got to do it / he ga(t)d' du(w)'t/

a)(note that the words in bracket (d) (t) (w) are small and stand upper to others, I wonder whether we pronounced them)

b) How do those examples support the cause she gave, but I've seen no reason why. After t( unvoiced), we still pronounce: 'd, and so does after (d), so what's the difference?

3)What is the difference between rate and incidence?

4) "Lifting bar bell helps your pectorals expand" or ""Lifting bar bells helps your pectorals expand"

Long instead of short vowels

Kooyeen — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:23:25 GMT

Hi,
I learned (and recognized) that in certain words (stressed syllables, in reality), the vowel is longer and on two steps of intonation when the syllable coda is voiced, otherwise it's short. In other words, I am just talking about the difference you can hear between GOT and GOD, for example. The second, "god", ends in a voiced consonant, and the AW vowel is longer, on two steps.

Now, I've always thought that "rule" had several exceptions. In fact, it seems to me I often hear long vowels when short vowels are expected. I tend to use long vowels in "this" and sometimes in "but", when followed by a pause, and that make it sound almost like "bud"... "I know I was wrong, bud... I think you were wrong too".

Now, what do you think about long vowels instead of short ones, when the syllable ends in an unvoiced sound? Here is an example, where COP is pronounced with a long vowel, or at least so it seems to me. If I didn't hear the final P clearly, I would probably take it to be COB. No need to watch all the video... The first sentence she says is the example:
Hi! Today we're gonna be talking about the difference between COP and CUP...

Re: Phonetic differences between English and Spanish

Colombo — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 09:22:06 GMT

The previous post is mistaking the /z/ sound with that at the beginning of "think" - sorry, I don't know how I can write that phonetic symbol here (in Spanish the written letter "z" is pronounced as that sound in "think", at least in the areas the previous poster has stated, but it has nothing to do with the sound /z/, which for us sounds as /s/). We always pronounce the letter "s" in the same way, with no difference between /s/ and /z/ (although many Latin American friends have told me that in Spain we pronounce an "s" sound much stronger than in America).

Until some years ago there were different sounds for /b/ and /v/ in Spanish, but now only a few people use them, and it's considered archaic and incorrect as far as I know (we only use the sound /b/ now). In Spanish the letter "h" is silent, so when we must aspirate it (like in "house") we tend to exaggerate it, and say it almost as our "j" (a sound I'm unable to explain!) Another thing that helps spot a Spaniard speaking English is the difficulty in pronouncing words like "Spain" without saying an "e" before the "s". There are other consonant sounds that do exist in English but not in Spanish, like "sh" (which is not difficult) or the "j" in "joy", but I'd say the main difficulty for a Spaniard speaking English are vowels, owing to our tendency to use only five vowel sounds, as Novalee said. All of this said, there are Spaniards who speak other language apart from Spanish who use more vowels. I'm thinking here about the Catalan. In Catalan, "a", "i" and "u" are the same as in Spanish, but there are two different "e" and "o" sounds, and another vowel just between "a" and "e", so there are eight vowel sounds, which makes a Catalan speaking English less hard than, say, a Castillian.

Novalee, are those books and links you talked about also useful for us Spaniards trying to make English sound as such? If so, I'd be very interested in you telling us more about them!

Re: Petal and Pedal - Difference?

Learner100 — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:18:38 GMT

Is was wondering if there is any difference between 'better' and 'bed or...' in American English. At least previously I thought that the vowel preceding the letter 'd' is longer in 'bed or', since it is followed by a voiced consonant in any English dialect. After these replies to the original post I am in doubt however. Could someone tell me if these sound the same too?

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.