Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

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TaylorS
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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by TaylorS »

I have trouble with [K] and pharyngeals I also have trouble with the Indic voiced aspirates. unvoiced unaspirated vs. voiced also gives me problems

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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by sirdanilot »

Voiced aspirates don't exist, so it isn't really surprising that you can't pronounce them. The definition of aspiration is Delayed Voice Onset Time, as in, there's a delay between the consonant and the moment you start vibrating your vocal cords to make the next vowel. Since a is already voiced, you can't delay your voice onset time. This is why it should be called 'breathy voice', and not 'aspirated'.

Try to say [p_h a], but with a voiceless [a] (as in, whispered). You can't. There's no boundary between your 'aspirated' consonant and the voiceless vowel. Luckily, voiceless vowels are very rare (only in some african languages) so the problem doesn't occur as far as I know.

Why the term 'voiced aspirate' is so common amongst indo-europeanalists, eludes me. Probably up there with their 'laryngeals' and 'spirantization'.

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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by Astraios »

sirdanilot wrote:Luckily, voiceless vowels are very rare (only in some african languages) so the problem doesn't occur as far as I know.
And Cheyenne.

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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by CaesarVincens »

And some East Asian languages, IIRC.

I think "voiced aspirate" is used because it draws a quick comparison between true aspirates and breathy voiced stops.

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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by Matt »

Astraios wrote:
sirdanilot wrote:Luckily, voiceless vowels are very rare (only in some african languages) so the problem doesn't occur as far as I know.
And Cheyenne.
And Cayuga, and Tohono O'odham. Probably more. In Cayuga they're not phonemic, though.
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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by Nortaneous »

So voiceless vowels are phonemic in O'odham? I thought they weren't phonemic in any natlang.
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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by Matt »

Nortaneous wrote:So voiceless vowels are phonemic in O'odham? I thought they weren't phonemic in any natlang.
I don't know, but I'd be surprised if they were phonemic. In Cayuga, though, I'm sure that they're not.

(That was rather poorly worded on my part).
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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by tezcatlip0ca »

Did I just do a voiceless dentialveolar sibilant implosive fricative? :o
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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by svld »

sirdanilot wrote:Try to say [p_h a], but with a voiceless [a] (as in, whispered).
http://vocaroo.com/?media=vwz5bm2XW27IOwF52
/ba pa p_ha/

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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by Xonen »

Matt wrote:
Astraios wrote:
sirdanilot wrote:Luckily, voiceless vowels are very rare (only in some african languages) so the problem doesn't occur as far as I know.
And Cheyenne.
And Cayuga, and Tohono O'odham. Probably more.
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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by Radius Solis »

Nortaneous wrote:I thought they weren't phonemic in any natlang.
To the best of my knowledge this is correct.

The closest example I know of to contrastive voiceless vowels is Comanche, which still does not have them - at the underlying level - but has sometimes been analyzed with them as phonemes, because at first glance there seem to be phonetic minimal pairs for them. It's been years since I had to return that Comanche grammar to the library now, but doing my best to remember the situation, it's that there's an archiphoneme H which is realized as devoicing if it comes after a vowel, but as aspiration if it comes after a stop. Or maybe it's the one that causes spirantization of stops? I can't remember now. IIRC there's actually three or four archiphonemes in the language which are realized only by their effects on other things, which sometimes caused Comanche to be treated as having far more contrastive consonants than it really does under the hood.


Tohono O'odham devoices final short vowels in some circumstances, which may not be completely rule-governed. I don't know the full rules for it but I do recall that it sometimes happens even after voiced consonants. It's almost as though the final short vowels are treated as codas and subjected to coda devoicing, in a way. I've never been clear on the details, and I can't speak for Akimel O'odham at all.

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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by Bob Johnson »

In Japanese, /i u/ have voiceless allophones when in low-pitch syllables and when not adjacent to a voiced consonant. (And frankly, you can just say the word as if the voiceless vowel isn't there: [de̞ɕta] isn't much different from [de̞ɕi̥ta]) If you say the normal vowel, you'll just sound funny.

(okay pronouncing a voiced /i/ there specifically would sound very funny)

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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by spats »

hito wrote:In Japanese, /i u/ have voiceless allophones when in low-pitch syllables and when not adjacent to a voiced consonant. (And frankly, you can just say the word as if the voiceless vowel isn't there: [de̞ɕta] isn't much different from [de̞ɕi̥ta]) If you say the normal vowel, you'll just sound funny.

(okay pronouncing a voiced /i/ there specifically would sound very funny)
I thought pronouncing normally-devoiced vowels was considered especially "feminine", and so there must be some women/girls who do it. Which is interesting in itself because my understanding is that women tend to have less conservative speech patterns and therefore should be expected to be on the leading edge of a sound change, but I guess this is a special case.

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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by finlay »

It's nowhere near as simple as women do this and men do that, for any language. But what I've learnt is that women engage in more overt prestige (levelling to the standard/posh dialect) and men engage in more covert prestige (retention/innovation of local forms) – both involve change and both potentially involve older forms. It kinda depends what you mean by conservative, too.

and argh the specific marking of a lowered [e] is annoying me in your transcription! it's irrelevant! just use [e] unless you're comparing exact vowel chart positions with another language!

There's a kid in my class who always pronounces the voiceless vowels, and it's making me think he hasn't been taught properly and giving me a bad impression of the teaching. Well, ok, it's that and the fact that my teacher is a bit useless.

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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by Bob Johnson »

spats wrote:I thought pronouncing normally-devoiced vowels was considered especially "feminine", and so there must be some women/girls who do it. Which is interesting in itself because my understanding is that women tend to have less conservative speech patterns and therefore should be expected to be on the leading edge of a sound change, but I guess this is a special case.
You mean the sort of super-cutesy stuff you might hear in anime? Sure, but that sounds funny.

If you mean to suggest a "{u,i} → ∅ / [-voice]_[-voice]" sound change, I don't think that's where it's going; it's only allophonic at this point, and I have reason to believe it's fairly old. There might be a newer sound change that's reversing it, though.

... but on something slightly more related to the discussion, Oogami's /s̩/ and /f̩/ could be called voiceless i and u respectively, or they at least derived from voiceless i and u.
finlay wrote:and argh the specific marking of a lowered [e] is annoying me in your transcription! it's irrelevant! just use [e] unless you're comparing exact vowel chart positions with another language!
I hear that word with my /ɛ/ and wrote [ɛ] at first, but that's not it either. Neither is it exactly free variation between [e] and [ɛ], it's pretty much in the middle.

(And what, you want I should write [si] instead of [ɕi] unless I'm comparing it with another language's [s]? I doubt it)
finlay wrote:There's a kid in my class who always pronounces the voiceless vowels, and it's making me think he hasn't been taught properly and giving me a bad impression of the teaching.
Myself, I don't have a good source for the (prestige-dialect or otherwise) pitch contours, so I probably mess them up with words I've only seen in writing; it's part of the gaijin-speak stereotype :(

Edit: augh I'm derailing the thread again

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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by finlay »

No! Look, i'm just getting sick of pointing it out, that it's part of the IPA guidelines to use the simplest symbol. In this case, just use [e]. It's not cardinal [e], but nothing that you find in natural languages is an exact cardinal vowel.

(They do this with RP, incidentally, using [e] instead of [ɛ] in transcriptions. It really isn't [e] at all. But it doesn't matter.)

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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by sirdanilot »

(And what, you want I should write [si] instead of [ɕi] unless I'm comparing it with another language's [s]? I doubt it)
Technically, you would be correct in doing so as that's a sufficient phonemic representation. But even in phonology one should not lose sight of articulation; if I say [desi̥ta] to a Japanese native, they probably won't understand, while they will if I say [deɕi̥ta]. In contrast, with the /e/ there is more freedom in how it's realized.

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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by Travis B. »

finlay wrote:No! Look, i'm just getting sick of pointing it out, that it's part of the IPA guidelines to use the simplest symbol. In this case, just use [e]. It's not cardinal [e], but nothing that you find in natural languages is an exact cardinal vowel.

(They do this with RP, incidentally, using [e] instead of [ɛ] in transcriptions. It really isn't [e] at all. But it doesn't matter.)
You know, it is really annoying when you badger people to transcribe things precisely as you see fit, you know. I would have rather just seen the diacritics there than seeing the thread be turned into "but but but you're suppooooosed to transcribe things such-and-such way"...
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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by bulbaquil »

sirdanilot wrote:
(And what, you want I should write [si] instead of [ɕi] unless I'm comparing it with another language's [s]? I doubt it)
Technically, you would be correct in doing so as that's a sufficient phonemic representation. But even in phonology one should not lose sight of articulation; if I say [desi̥ta] to a Japanese native, they probably won't understand, while they will if I say [deɕi̥ta]. In contrast, with the /e/ there is more freedom in how it's realized.
If you say [desi̥ta], I wouldn't be surprised if it was interpreted as デスタ.
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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by Nortaneous »

Radius Solis wrote:[The closest example I know of to contrastive voiceless vowels is Comanche, which still does not have them - at the underlying level - but has sometimes been analyzed with them as phonemes, because at first glance there seem to be phonetic minimal pairs for them. It's been years since I had to return that Comanche grammar to the library now, but doing my best to remember the situation, it's that there's an archiphoneme H which is realized as devoicing if it comes after a vowel, but as aspiration if it comes after a stop. Or maybe it's the one that causes spirantization of stops? I can't remember now. IIRC there's actually three or four archiphonemes in the language which are realized only by their effects on other things, which sometimes caused Comanche to be treated as having far more contrastive consonants than it really does under the hood.
...bah, why do I get the feeling that Tharu just got ANADEW'd?
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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by Qwynegold »

sirdanilot wrote:Suddenly, I got it: some kind of retroflex ejective that does not sound fricativised, but more like a plopping sound.

I don't think this is a speech sound anywhere. Here is a recording of it.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/tz5u1p
OMG it sounds similar to a speech sound I use in one conlang. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but I transcribe it as /t`_>/.
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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by tezcatlip0ca »

It's just a retroflex affricate. Nothing more than that.
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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by sirdanilot »

Canepari wrote:It's just a retroflex affricate. Nothing more than that.
Uh, where do you hear anything fricative-like? In any case, I am not doing an affricate. I can also do a glottalized retroflex affricate, but it doesn't sound similar to what I'm doing here.

Here is an analysis of the sound. As you see, there's a clear gap between the consonant and the vowel, pointing towards nothing being fricative.

Image

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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by Cedh »

That's quite clearly a retroflex ejective.

(The second, postvocalic instance is additionally preglottalised, so I'd transcribe the full sound file as IPA [ʈ’aː ɑʔʈ’aː] / XSAMPA [t`_>a: A?t`_>a:].)

Non-affricated retroflex ejectives are extremely rare in natlangs, but that's probably just because languages with ejectives and languages with retroflex stops mostly happen to be spoken in very different geographical regions.

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Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

Post by finlay »

sirdanilot wrote:
Canepari wrote:It's just a retroflex affricate. Nothing more than that.
Uh, where do you hear anything fricative-like? In any case, I am not doing an affricate. I can also do a glottalized retroflex affricate, but it doesn't sound similar to what I'm doing here.

Here is an analysis of the sound. As you see, there's a clear gap between the consonant and the vowel, pointing towards nothing being fricative.

[img]http://img37.picoodle.com/i53r/sirdanilot/180q_f0d_ua4ot.jpg[/img
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