Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily

[Jipí]

Why did you have uvu...l...ect... your uvula cut out, btw? IIRC you mentioned it, but I forgot it.

[Io]

There was some growth on it, papilloma, it had been there for years and never bothered me but when the doc noticed it he said to get rid of it and I didn't think much of the consequences. Moral of the story: never trust your doctor.

[Astraios]

Ah, okay. That sucks.

[----]

If I lost my uvula I would feel terrible. There are so many cool sounds back there!

[Jipí]

I'd have to get used to pronouncing /r/ as [ɾ] and /[+back]x/ as [x~h] in German, instead of [ʁ] and [x~χ] :O I think now I can understand why you posted that article about that Korean learning girl who had her tongue's frenulum cut to be able to pronounce a bunch of alveolars properly, with the comment that you wish this was possible for your uvula.

[Boşkoventi]

Nor can I work out how to pronounce initial plosives WITHOUT aspiration.

I can produce an unaspirated [k] easily, even in connected speech, but plain [p] and [t] are very hard for me.

They sound like /b/ and /d/ to me, if that helps

I refuse to believe a native English speaker can have such a big trouble with those, now Austrians are awful with them, but at least they have an excuse.

Why? English /p t k/ are usually aspirated, at least syllable-initially, and /b d g/ are weakly voiced at best.* And really, the distinction has been moving toward aspiration rather than voicing for some time. I've learned to pronounce plain [p t k], but it's definitely not natural.

* Actually, that applies to all of my 'voiced' sounds. I'm not sure what the actual difference is between, say, my /s/ and /z/.

[Io]

>I'd have to get used to pronouncing /r/ as [ɾ] and

Not necessarily: http://ireylo.free.fr/1Untitled.wma

Because, Boşkoventi, I don't hear the supposed devoicing of English /b/, I'd surely recognise an unaspirated /p/ if I hear it.

[finlay]

I had difficulty yesterday hearing the difference between my Spanish students' pronunciations of P and B – they were supposed to write one or the other for an exercise so it was kind of important that I was able to tell the difference when they gave their answers. There was another Spanish speaker a few months ago who kept saying "down" instead of "town", essentially, because he wasn't aspirating the T. It does make a big difference. I've heard it suggested that we only hang on to the notion of /p/ rather than /b/ in words like 'spin' through orthographic convention, although in this case the point is moot because the distinction between /p/ and /b/ is neutralised after /s/. And I think that while [pʰ] versus [p] is useful for teaching the idea of an allophone, it's not necessarily accurate and can lead to confusion later on.

[Jipí]

Not necessarily: http://ireylo.free.fr/1Untitled.wma

Interesting.

[Io]

Spanish people really aren't the best choice if you want to hear a /b/. Austrians have puzzled me many times with their devoicing of English voiced stops, I've never had such a problem with English speakers and to my ears aspiration is transparent. When I hear "BBC" it doesn't sound anywhere close to [pi: pi: si:], really.

>Interesting.

Could you please elaborate? Also, there is a bit of my uvula left so if I gather some saliva back in the throat I can produce something of a [X], it's not a proper [X] but there is enough rasp.

[Jipí]

Well, I thought with your uvula (mostly) cut out there wouldn't be anything there anymore to form a constriction so as to produce a uvular fricative or other uvular consonants, besides maybe [ɰ].

[Ser]

Spanish people really aren't the best choice if you want to hear a /b/.

Hmm? English /b/ (which is obvious, because they'd have an accent), or Spanish /b/ (but we do have [‎b]!, ask any Spanish speaker to pronounce ámbar to you)?

When I hear "BBC" it doesn't sound anywhere close to [pi: pi: si:], really.

I can't find the post in question right now, but one user here once gave a really good explanation of the phenomenon. Basically, there's not a strict distinction of either unvoiced aspiration vs. unvoiced non-aspiration, or voiced sonority vs. unvoiced sonority, but rather it's an interaction of various facts.

A phrase-initial "/b/" can be [p] or [‎b], and is distinguished from "/p/" solely on aspiration, /p/ in phrase-initial position would be [p_h]. So "bee" in isolation would be [pi:] or [bi:], but "pee" would be [p_hi:]. However, in intervocalic position where the /b, p/ goes before a stressed consonant, /b/ is [‎b] and /p/ is [p_h], combining an interaction of both voice and aspiration: "slow bee" [bi:], "slow pee" [p_hi:].

In acronyms of three letters pronounced with their names, all the letters usually have some stress (the middle one may have secondary or primary, IMHO), so in isolation you would get ["pi: "bi: "si:] or ["bi: "bi: "si:], though the exact first phone when change if it isn't in isolation.

Basically, transcribing them /p/ vs. /b/ is a matter of convention, but the phonemes interact in different ways beyond voice (which may not even include voice, as with the isolated "bee/pee" example, hell, in syllable-coda position they even go along vowel length in many North American dialects: "jab" [dZ{:b] vs. "jap" [dZ{p]).

The exact graphemes used to represent phonemes are usually just that, conventions, often representing the "most common" realizations of just fitting some particular linguists' aesthetics (as it's the case with Standard French "/E~, O~/", which are normally [{~, o~] actually, but "E, O" are chosen on the basis of symmetry, see further discussion in Douglas Walker's The Pronunciation of Canadian French (1994), in the Survey of Standard French Phonology which is basically the same as European Standard French).

[Timmytiptoe]

I suck at pronouncing [r]. My normal /r/ tends to be uvular, and when I attempt to make it alveolar, something like [trs] comes out. It might be because I'm pronouncing it too far towards dental, but otherwise I can't get it to trill.

On the other hand, [K] was easier than expected to pronounce.

[Io]

so then why then why doesn't English 'bin' sound to me like bulgarian [pin]? or 'don' as bg [tOn] just because the vowel is a bit different and the context? I honestly doubt it.

Does the following sound more like "bin" or "pin" to a native English speaker: http://ireylo.free.fr/where.wma
I made the vowel more English but I kept the unaspirated 'p' as in Bulgarian.

[Eyowa]

I hear that as /b/.

[Io]

ok, but to me it's definitely a [p] as requires more effort to produce, there is probably some voicing of the 'p' when it's followed by a vowel, but for there is more constraint in the throat and it's released with more spat than [p], my conclusion is that it's the English speakers who are messed up.

Are English 'prat' and Bulgarian 'brat' (brother in BG) supposed to sound the same? Here is with both English and Bulgarian pronunciation, ideally we should probably compare native English 'prat' with a [ɾ] to Bulgarian. http://ireylo.free.fr/prat1.wma

[finlay]

Your Bulgarian ones sound the same to me, except if I turn on the phonetician's ear and listen in more detail. The first one sounds like "bin" in English, although it's maybe "more" voiceless than it would normally be in that position and I can tell that it's [p] rather than .

BBC is either [pibisiː] or [bibisiː] for me in isolation.

If we take it in terms of voice onset time (VOT) compared to stop release moment and construct a scale from pre-voiced (negative VOT) to strongly aspirated (positive VOT), I remember a psycholinguistics lecture where the guy demonstrated that the rough cutoff between English fortis and lenis stops is somewhere round 0.2s – at this point we couldn't tell which it was, but even a little bit away and it was 'obviously' /b/ or 'obviously' /p/. The exact point varies between POAs – I can't remember which of /ptk/ was the strongest-aspirated though.

[Io]

Yeah, I thought myself too that Bulgarian prat and brat sound almost indistinguishable.

[Boşkoventi]

Does the following sound more like "bin" or "pin" to a native English speaker: http://ireylo.free.fr/where.wma
I made the vowel more English but I kept the unaspirated 'p' as in Bulgarian.

Honestly, it sounded like "bin" to me. "Pin" would have to have [p_h].

so then why then why doesn't English 'bin' sound to me like bulgarian [pin]? or 'don' as bg [tOn] just because the vowel is a bit different and the context? I honestly doubt it.

Because English /b/ isn't simply [p]. Its voicing is weak, or intermittent. In any given utterance, /b/ might be realized as [p], or , or something in between. And as Serafin tried to explain, the issue is not so much a total lack of voicing, but that voicing is not the only/primary distinguishing feature. The average English speaker will generally hear both [p] and as /b/.

(There's also variation in voice onset time to consider. Even two sounds, from different languages, that are supposedly the same may not actually be the same. I'd be curious if, for example, Chinese /p/ sounds like your /p/.)

However, context also makes a difference. If you had said, "Where is my [pEns5=]?", it would clearly be "pencil", and would just sound a little odd. And there's a lady where I work who is Czech, and does not aspirate plosives. She has a slight accent, but I'm able to understand her just fine, as I'm able to "translate" her [p b] to my [p_h b~p].

Are English 'prat' and Bulgarian 'brat' (brother in BG) supposed to sound the same?

Do you mean English "brat"? Cause "prat" would clearly have [p_h].

Here is with both English and Bulgarian pronunciation, ideally we should probably compare native English 'prat' with a [ɾ] to Bulgarian. http://ireylo.free.fr/ptar1.wma

File not found.

[Bob Johnson]

http://ireylo.free.fr/prat1.wma

FTFY

The "bin" one sounds like an over-emphasized /b/ -- as in overly fortis. Over-fortified?
The "prat" one, the Bulgarian pair sound almost identical.

[Boşkoventi]

Here is with both English and Bulgarian pronunciation, ideally we should probably compare native English 'prat' with a [ɾ] to Bulgarian. http://ireylo.free.fr/ptar1.wma

File not found.

And .. now it's working. I can sorta hear the distinction between the Bulgarian words, but it's not clear.

[Io]

>And as Serafin tried to explain, the issue is not so much a total lack of voicing, but that voicing is not the only/primary distinguishing feature.

Yes, that's right and I understood him, my point was that to me as a non-native speaker the other distinguishing feature—aspiration—doesn't matter, using your example I certainly wouldn't react to hearing [pEns5=].

>Because English /b/ isn't simply [p] (...)

OK, point taken

Initially when I read Finlay's message ("They sound like /b/ and /d/ to me, if that helps") I thought that supposedly English speakers have the same trouble with voiced stops as other speakers where full devoicing seeps to happen, like the Austrians I've already mentioned a million times. Jmcd can probably remember how hopeless it was trying to explain to my friend the difference between 'junk' and 'chunk', in English he also constantly flips [z] and [s], and another friend no matter how loud and clear I pronounced a word with a couldn't figure out if it was a b or a p until I said to him "like in Bavaria".

>The "bin" one sounds like an over-emphasized /b/ -- as in overly fortis. Over-fortified?

But I'm saying "where is my pin", how can a [p] sound like an over-emphasised /b/! :S

(Rhetorical question, I've already got the answers)

It's still odd though realising English speakers could interpret [p] from foreign words as /b/ instead of /p/.

>Do you mean English "brat"? Cause "prat" would clearly have [p_h].

No, I really did mean English 'prat' actually there seems to be a natural aspiration involved there, when I listened to my first take I thought my English 'prat' was surprisingly aspirated. Before recording I thought it would be the opposite and the p would lose its aspiration in this position.

[Ser]

>And as Serafin tried to explain, the issue is not so much a total lack of voicing, but that voicing is not the only/primary distinguishing feature.

That's not quite what I said, I meant to say that the features used to distinguish /b/ from /p/ vary depending on the phonological context. Voicing is indeed the only feature that distinguishes them when they precede an unstressed vowel in non-word-initial position in many dialects for example. E.g. "rapid" ["r\{.pI:d], "rabid" ["r\{.bI:d]. I didn't say anything about any feature being "primary" either, it's the opposite, I'd argue there isn't any.

so then why then why doesn't English 'bin' sound to me like bulgarian [pin]? or 'don' as bg [tOn] just because the vowel is a bit different and the context? I honestly doubt it.

In what exact context though (as I explained in my post above)? In isolation I'd totally expect that, but is it the same when a native says "a bin" (because that'd be [@."bI~n]).

I mean, you said yourself that "BBC" doesn't sound like [pi:pi:si:] to you after all.

It's still odd though realising English speakers could interpret [p] from foreign words as /b/ instead of /p/.

It's not odd at all if you consider how English allophones work in many dialects. In phrase-initial position it's natural if they have a hard time distinguishing [‎b] from [p], but maybe not so much if it precedes an unstressed vowel in a non-word-initial position (at least for speakers who don't aspirate their /t/ in this positions, like here in Vancouver, cuz there's many who do (I remember hearing a recording from a speaker from Winnipeg in particular who did, interesting stuff)).

[Simmalti]

Does the following sound more like "bin" or "pin" to a native English speaker: http://ireylo.free.fr/where.wma

To me this is definitely a /p/. In Maltese, the voicing of /b/ would start while your mouth is still closed

[Jipí]

FWIW, I'm not sure whether it's <pin> or <bin>, but due to the lack of aspiration I'd tend towards <bin>. In the other recording, it's <prat> and <brat> both times, in that order, but it sounds almost alike.