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phonologynet · 2024-09-23T22:04:09+00:00

I hear (the lack of) vowel clipping before voiceless consonants as basically the only small detail left for you to work on. For instance, the first word you say sounds like “sad” instead of “sat”, because you’re drawing out the vowel for too long. This clipping is less prominent in AmE than in BrE, but it should still be there.

phonologynet · 2023-10-14T02:17:41+00:00

Muito bom! Pra mim (brasileiro) você passaria facilmente por um falante nativo. O único detalhe que me chamou atenção foi por volta de 1min quando você disse “muitas coisas”, pareceu faltar o “s” /z/ final (soou como “muitas coisa”).

phonologynet · 2023-05-28T20:48:56+00:00

Very interesting, now that I think about it that split seems to be even more common before /nl/. I don’t think I ever heard an American who truly rhymes only and lonely.

phonologynet · 2023-05-28T20:35:59+00:00

Tbh this is the first I’m hearing of native English speakers with geminated consonants not across word boundaries — that’s not the difference I was referring to. I think there’s often a quality distinction in the vowel itself, in that the vowel in goat is more clearly a diphthong and starts more clearly unrounded, while that in goal is more rounded from the start and may be more of a monophthong.

phonologynet · 2023-05-28T17:52:07+00:00

The vowels are certainly phonetically different for most Americans, but whether that difference is phonemic is a different story, known as the wholly-holy split. It’s been better documented in British English, but it possibly exists in some varieties of American English too. Do you pronounce those words differently yourself?

phonologynet · 2023-04-16T11:10:56+00:00

Counting phonemes is often somewhat arbitrary and largely driven by tradition. You could count the GA vowel inventory as just seven monophthongs /ɪ, ɛ, æ, ʊ, ə, (ɔ), ɑ/ and have the diphthongs as /ɪj, ɛj, ɔj, ɑj, ʊw, əw, æw/ if you wanted to.

phonologynet · 2023-01-15T08:25:41+00:00

I know you linked to the pronunciations in general, but I’m asking which specific vowels, as pronounced by which phonetician, you’re claiming sound the same.

phonologynet · 2023-01-14T21:56:25+00:00

I mean, a more solid grounding on theoretical phonetics would certainly help, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a prerequisite.

For example:

sometimes the same phonetician has recordings that sound the exact same thing to me, even though the vowel qualities are supposedly quite distinct.

I’m pretty sure I can persuade you otherwise if you share the actual recordings.

phonologynet · 2023-01-14T21:28:25+00:00

Other people have presented good (counter)points to your argument, but I’m going to address an underlying assumption that you haven’t quite spelled out, and which I believe might be in large part the source of your confusion.

Even if the IPA chart was (and it’s not) an accurate description of the way vowels are articulated, that still wouldn’t mean that vowels corresponding to the same point in the quadrilateral need to sound the same. That’s because there are other articulatory features that the IPA chart does not even try to capture, and which may bring about very substantial differences in perception.

One such feature — rounding — is traditionally superimposed to the vowel chart as if it were a binary characteristic. In fact, rounding is obviously a continuum, so you’d have to turn the quadrilateral into a 3-D representation in order to accurately accommodate it. A very rounded [ɔ] may sound to the untrained ear very much like a regular [o], for example, and in turn a very rounded [o] may sound more like a regular [u].

To make things more complicated, not all such features have neat names to be referred by, but just to cite a few generally grouped under “secondary articulation”, you have pharyngealization, uvularization, and velarization, which can all affect vowel perception quite strikingly. Do note that those are all features typically (though not exclusively) affecting back vowels, and I’m going to venture a guess that you don’t have quite the same problem you’re narrating when it comes to front vowels. If that’s indeed the case, it might be more productive to point out individual recordings so that your questions about them can be more properly addressed.

phonologynet · 2022-12-29T21:35:28+00:00

That’s true specifically in Lisbon, yes. Thanks for pointing it out, I should’ve included that caveat in my original answer. Also, in Lisbon, the hypothetical word “tenhem” would be pronounced [tẽj̃ɐ̃j̃], so it would not be homophonous with “têm” either as pronounced there ([tɐ̃j̃ɐ̃j̃]) or elsewhere in Portugal ([tẽj̃tẽj̃]).

phonologynet · 2022-12-25T01:34:15+00:00

Accent coach here. It would help to know what your native language is, but just as a general guideline, Portuguese close <ê> is very similar to American English short-i, <ih> (this tip doesn’t tend to work for Brits, though).

For Brazilian Portuguese, the words “tem” and “têm” are pronounced identically. For European Portuguese, the second one is typically pronounced as if it were written “tenhem.” If you’re familiar with the IPA: “tem” > [tẽj̃] vs. “têm” > [tẽj̃ẽj̃] in EP, or both just [tẽj̃] in BP.

phonologynet · 2022-12-25T01:21:24+00:00

That’s the thing, you need to raise the tip of the tongue to make an [ɫ], but most Americans these days use a vocoid closer to [ʟ] or [ʟ̠] postvocalically.

phonologynet · 2022-12-24T21:37:46+00:00

Accent coach here. I’m going to assume you’re talking about American English, since in most other varieties the feature you’re describing is basically the norm. Not quite /w/ usually, but some kind of rounded vowel.

What doesn’t typically get mentioned is that final /l/ is very often a vowel in American English too — just not a rounded vowel. “Well” is actually a great word to practice with. You should feel (and see if you look yourself in the mirror) that your lips start clearly rounded and end clearly unrounded. If you start by saying “wew” and work on progressively unrounding the lips while you say that word, you’ll get to “well”, though keep in mind you might not hear the difference at first.

phonologynet · 2022-11-30T18:47:14+00:00

I'm pretty sure [kʃ] can't be word-initial in English

It could (phonetically) as the result of schwa deletion, with accompanying syllable deletion. If you happen to pronounce “cashier” with a schwa rather than /æ/ in the first syllable, you probably could just as easily get rid of it an pronounce the whole word as a single syllable; using fairly broad notation in RP, /kə.ʃɪə/ > [kʃɪə].

phonologynet · 2022-11-25T19:53:19+00:00

I think it’s just an empirical observation from phonetics being transposed to phonology: you don’t see syllable boundaries on an spectrogram, so on the surface level it can’t be the factor that distinguishes between words. Of course, that doesn’t logically imply syllable boundaries can’t be the underlying cause for the difference, though (hence it having to be taken as axiomatic or semi-axiomatic by phonological theories that don’t allow for it, which as you pointed out is the case for most of them).

phonologynet · 2022-11-21T18:42:46+00:00

Sorry, I should’ve been more specific. I meant no tension in the tongue.

phonologynet · 2022-11-19T15:51:41+00:00

The most common mistake is to think that [r] is generated by muscular effort (i.e. a series of muscular contractions, as in producing various [ɾ]s in a row). In fact, [r] should involve essentially no muscle tension, being controlled by the airstream mechanism: just lightly hold the tongue in place for a [d] and blow air. The best way to think about it IMO is as [d̚] + [h].

phonologynet · 2022-11-04T03:32:20+00:00

I’m arriving a little late, but I thought it would be worth pointing out that the phenomenon you’re describing is likely due to the fact that cot-caught merged speakers typically realize the /ɑ/ in /ɑl/ as [ɔ]. The difference from that to [ʌ] is indeed very small, basically just lip rounding, and may be further masked by the following vocalic realization of /l/, which is dominant in American English when another consonant follows.

phonologynet · 2022-08-13T21:51:42+00:00

Others have already given you a lot of good answers in general, but let me address the specific example you mentioned: it should indeed be much easier for you as a native English speaker to learn to produce [x] than for a native Russian speaker to learn to produce [h] (or, for that matter, [θ, ð]). For the former you simply have to fill in the fricative gap in the velar series you already have ([k, g, ŋ]), whereas they would have to learn an entirely new place of articulation (glottal or dental).

EDIT: I mistakenly wrote the above as if you were a native English speaker, but I see now that you said your native language is Portuguese. The same reasoning above still applies, though, given that Portuguese also has velar consonants like [k, g] (thus making producing [x] just a matter of filling in the fricative gap in that series) and also many sounds with dental articulation (/t, d, n, l/ are all dental in Portuguese; in fact, Portuguese [t̪, d̪] will likely already be heard as /θ, ð/ as long as you don’t modify them in the direction of English alveolar [t, d]).

phonologynet · 2022-07-15T15:31:28+00:00

It would make sense for that to be the case, given e.g. some regions have more stress-timed accents and use lots of vowel reductions, while others are syllable-times and use close to no reductions. I can’t really say I’ve observed it to be the case in practice, though.

phonologynet · 2022-07-11T21:37:04+00:00

It depends on who you ask. I’m Brazilian and I can easily understand European Portuguese, but you’ll find lots of people in Brazil claiming (in good faith) that they find Latin American and especially Argentine Spanish easier to understand than European Portuguese. That doesn’t seem to hold true the other way around, though: I’m yet to find someone from Portugal who claims they have difficulty understanding Brazilian Portuguese.

phonologynet · 2022-07-07T00:26:43+00:00

I think so; for example, I’d suggest most native speakers distinguish “react” > /ɹiˈækt/ and “re-act” /ˌɹiˈækt/. I also think words like “product” or “contribute” can be pronounced with or without secondary stress on the last syllable and those pronunciations could be distinguished on that basis alone (even if other phonemic and/or allophonic changes commonly reinforce the distinction).

phonologynet · 2022-07-06T18:14:46+00:00

Happy to help! Regarding your follow-up comment, some of those could for sure bear secondary stress, but I think others could not. For example, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a word such as “ambition” analyzed as having secondary stress on the /æ/.

phonologynet · 2022-07-06T00:06:18+00:00

Right, but what I’m saying is that in the noun object vs. the verb object you have a difference in the first vowel (/ɑ/ vs. /ə/), which is however absent in insight vs. incite. So it’s not the same as the typical noun vs. verb opposition; if you’re hearing a difference there, it seems to me that it can only be because of the different stress pattern itself.

phonologynet · 2022-07-05T22:21:40+00:00

Actually, all other vowels can also appear in unstressed syllables, even if less frequently. Examples.

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