
How to read the international phonetic alphabet - fanf2
https://hollymath.dreamwidth.org/999852.html
======
combatentropy
I had a friend who was very thorough and insisted on pronouncing the g at the
end of -ing words. I took college linguistics and remember this table. I tried
to explain to her that "ng" may be spelled as two letters but, like sh and ch,
is really a single consonant, and linguists give it its own name (the velar
nasal) and its own singular symbol (ŋ).

Sometimes we clip the g, and say goin'. Then there is the standard way to say
it, goiŋ. Then there is the way she was saying it, goiŋ-guh.

I find it fascinating that languages have different sets of sounds. For
example, in English p and b are two different letters, and pat and bat are two
different words. But other languages don't distinguish them, and their
speakers really wouldn't notice a difference if you said pat or bat. On the
other hand, I don't hear the difference between p at the beginning of word,
like pat, and p at the end of a word, like stop. But one is "aspirated" and
one isn't, and in some languages they are different letters, so pat and pʰat
could be two different words. The only difference is a puff of air following
one and not the other.

They say in the babble of babies you can hear all the consonants of the world,
but as we take on our mother tongue we lose the ability to hear or say many of
them.

~~~
stan_rogers
There are English dialects where the "g" sound is present - especially in the
Northwest of England (think Mancunian, like Brian Cox, or Liverpudlian, like
the Beatles in full-Scouse, lovable mop-tops mode). It's also prevalent among
Yiddish-influenced speakers in the US (although that's mostly died out now).

~~~
wirrbel
It even makes sense, because you do pronounce the g in words like "finger", it
just becomes silent at the end of the word.

In German "ng" is always without a distinct g-sound (like German "Finger", or
its n and g like "Ungeheuer")

~~~
petecox
Wikipedia calls it 'ng coalescence'.

"This means that the words finger and singer do not rhyme in most modern
varieties of English, although they did in Middle English."

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Engl...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_consonant_clusters#NG-
coalescence)

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ivan_ah
This is part 3 of a 3 blog post series:

Part 1:
[https://hollymath.dreamwidth.org/981594.html](https://hollymath.dreamwidth.org/981594.html)
(has nice intro; good place to start)

Part 2:
[https://hollymath.dreamwidth.org/983513.html](https://hollymath.dreamwidth.org/983513.html)

Part 3:
[https://hollymath.dreamwidth.org/999852.html](https://hollymath.dreamwidth.org/999852.html)
(the link posted)

------
msravi
Reading about the IPA invariably brings to mind what we have in Sanskrit, the
language, and Devanagari, the script.

[https://www.britannica.com/topic/Devanagari](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Devanagari)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari#Consonants](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari#Consonants)

The consonants are neatly divided into five categories, depending upon where
the tongue touches the roof of the mouth/teeth/lips (back to front) - guttural
(k as in kite, g as in go), palatal (ch as in chair, j as in jug), retroflex
(t as in tap, d as in dog), dental (th as in thin, dh as in them), and labial
(p as in pet, b as in bear).

Each of these also have an aspirated version, and there's a nasal at the end -
so 5 in each category times 5 categories = 25 main consonants.

Then there are the vowels, semi-vowels, and spirants as different categories
by themselves, each of which can be systematically tacked on to each of the
consonants.

This systematic categorization of sounds and writing forms is amazing for a
language that was developed a few thousand years ago.

There are of course some sounds that are not part of the system, like x, z and
f. Some vowels too - like the a in bad, but all in all, the amount of thought
put into the system is amazing.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
The sounds "not a part of the system" are not native to Sanskrit, so they were
added in with diacritics. And they're mostly done pretty sensibly: फ़ fa is फ
pha with a dot, etc.

~~~
singularity2001
my unproven pet Theory is that Sanskrit still had the F sound but it was lost
and re-interpreted as “i”:

पि

This theory is motivated by the observation that words with पि have an (
inclination towards) F in other branches of Indo-European (Also just the left-
hand side of पि without the 'P' which cannot be pasted due to Unicode
restrictions)

Eg

[https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/पितृ#Sanskrit](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/पितृ#Sanskrit)
fpita’=father

fp Here could have been a merged consonant, similar to PF in German: But in
other cases just a pure F

------
jinushaun
Accidentally learning IPA because I needed social studies credits in
university is probably one of the best things that has happened in my life.
It’s so useful to know how to correctly pronounce a word, instead of reading
poor English approximations.

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seventytwo
Interesting that there aren’t alphabets and spellings based on these
fundamental phonemes. Couldn’t things be simplified quite a bit by doing this?

~~~
lottin
Not necessarily because pronunciation varies substantially across dialects and
often also according to prosodic stress and phonetic context. For instance,
the word "what" can be pronounced as /wɒt/ /wɒʔ/ /hwɒt/ /wʌt/ /hwʌt/ /wɑːt/
/hwɑːt/ and a few more...

~~~
WorldMaker
Drifts also occur in time as well as space. Chaucer's early Middle English or
Shakespeare's later Middle English are still mostly readable to a modern
English reader, but a lot of the pronunciations have shifted almost entirely.
There's a sort of archival benefit to the divorce between writing and
pronunciation, the slower pace in which written forms drift versus spoken
forms. (Which would also seem to hint why it's somewhat of a natural language
outcome of speech being somewhat more ephemeral and prone to drifting than
written text that outlasts it in libraries and schools.)

------
zerop
I am wondering that neurons in artificial neural networks might be learning
it.. those trained model of voice AI solutions using artificial neural
networks.... Is it possible to reverse engineer ANN model to check when it's
firing neurons in the middle layers of the network.. not a Ann expert....

------
riffraff
But this is not the whole list, is it?

I learned from Larry Wall of ʘ which is a bilabial affricate clic, used in
some African languages.

It's the smack of a kiss, which is kinda cool.

~~~
yorwba
Yes, the table in the article only shows the pulmonic consonants (those that
involve air flow from the lungs). For the full chart, see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart)

------
mdgrech23
When I first started my career a senior dev told me a funny story about 2
competing standards for some obscure technology. There was no clear winner and
the community couldn't decide what did so what did they do? They created a new
standard no one used.

~~~
gizmo686
Is there _any_ competing standard to the IPA?

~~~
kragen
English-language dictionaries and the reading textbooks I used in elementary
school in the US in the 1980s use a different standard. A much worse one. And
in ASCII-only media, there is X-SAMPA. eSpeak uses a variant of X-SAMPA;
recent versions support IPA too, but only for output, and the conversion is
lossy. Mandarin phonetics are often written with bopomofo, especially in
elementary school, and Japanese people often use kana for writing down
pronunciations—universally for elementary-school kids learning kanji, but
sometimes even in contexts so inappropriate it's self-sabotage, like learning
English pronunciation. And of course many languages have sufficiently
systematic orthography that you don't need a separate convention for
indicating pronunciation, except for linguists investigating dialect variation
or foreign-language students.

But these are really marginal cases. The IPA is where it's at.

~~~
frenchy
> English-language dictionaries and the reading textbooks I used in elementary
> school in the US in the 1980s use a different standard.

Perhaps I'm being too nit-picky, but that's actually more just like an
alternate English alphabet than it is a phonetic alphabet. The goal of a
phonetic alhpabet is to map symbols any sound that is distinguishable in any
language, not simply the ones that are distinguishable in English.

X-SAMPA is a lot more like the IPA. It's basically an incomplete encoding of
IPA in ASCII. It's a little hack to get around the insufficiencies of inputing
characters into computer devices.

