Use the IPA to Learn Foreign Language Pronunciations

Geoffrey Pullum has an excellent post about the International Phonetic Alphabet at Lingua Franca today. You can read it at this link.

Following are the official IPA charts for those who are curious about the difference between alphabet letters and IPA letters (symbols for sounds). An interactive IPA chart can be found here.

The study of sounds truly is fascinating.

A Rebel Schwa

I recently noticed a bumper sticker on a car that read (rebəl).

My first thought was that the car must belong to a rebel phonetician.

This phonetician obviously rebels by using parentheses instead of backslashes and by combining International Phonetic Alphabet symbols with standard English orthography (if it wasn't for the schwa I might not have even noticed).

Little did I know, there is a Christian rapper named Lecrea and (rebəl), spelled as such, is the title of one of his albums.



By the way, here is the complete phonetic transcription of the word rebel:

/rɛbəl/

Wordplay for Phoneticians

Following is a rebus-like variation of a well-known idiom. Can you guess what it is?

ull ou all the sos.

Here is a pictographic hint.

And the answer is:

Pull out all the stops.

In phonetics, a stop is a sound that is made by completely stopping and then releasing airflow in the vocal tract. The first version of the idiom in this post is written without the alphabetic letters that represent the stop sounds.

These are the sounds that the IPA classifies as stops: /p,b,t,d,k,g/.

The idiom "pull out all the stops" is defined by thefreedictionary.com as:

"to do everything you can to make something successful."

The Phrase Finder notes on the origin of the phrase include:

"The popular belief is that this phrase derives from the manner of construction of pipe organs. These instruments have stops to control the air flow through the pipes and pulling them out increases the musical volume. This seems to be the type of casual easy answer that is the hallmark of folk etymology. In this case, the popular belief isn't a fallacy but is in fact correct."

Etymologically, this idiom has more to do with phonetics than the uninitiated might picture at first glance.

Phonetic Typing Errors

The zdrankezd dhing habbenet earlier dotay.

What, exactly, is wrong with this sentence?

Here is a hint: It should read, "The strangest thing happened earlier today."

For some odd reason, I kept hitting the wrong keys while typing.

After about a half an hour, I finally noticed that the majority of my typos were the exchange of voiced for voiceless consonants and vice-versa.

Though the International Phonetic Alphabet represents sounds not letters, many of the symbols for sounds are the same as letters from the alphabet.

Because most of the counterpart phonemes are not close to each other on the keyboard, I have no explanation as to why this would have happened other than the fact that I have been reviewing the IPA with my class this week.

Picture credit to labnol.org

Differentiating Between Phonemes - Theta and Eth

While teaching my class last week I was looking for a better way to illustrate the difference between the "theta" and "eth" phonemes because they are particularly hard for some people to differentiate.

I came across a wonderful post on Notes from a Linguistic Mystic that I have excerpted below:

A Tale of Two TH’s

Say “This thistle” a few times. Now, pay very close attention to the TH sounds at the beginning of each word. Put your hand on your Adam’s Apple (or equivalent area on your neck) while you say them. After a few tries, you’ll notice that, in the words of a friend of mine, the “TH” in “This” is “more buzzy”, or, put more scientifically, voiced. This sound, the TH in “This, That, The, There, Then, Those…”, is called an Eth (pronounced with a voiced, Eth sound). In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), it has this symbol:

The TH in “thistle”, or “theater, theory, think, thought, throw, through…” is called a Theta, and is Eth’s voiceless counterpart (Theta is to Eth as T is to D). Theta’s IPA symbol is, shockingly, a theta, as shown here: Aside from voicing, there is no difference between them. The sounds are produced with the tongue in the same position, the tongue is doing the same thing for both, and all the other various phonetic phactors (I couldn’t resist) are the same. The only difference between the the Theta and the Eth is vocal fold vibration, but what a difference it makes.

-Thank you Linguistic Mystic, this is one of the pest (Oops, I meant to say 'best' but I temporarily lost my voice) examples I have seen.