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Sounds
As you know, the English alphabet is far from being a regular and
consistent system of representing all the sounds in English. For
instance, think of the letter group ough. How many different
way can it sound like:
| Word |
Rhymes with..
(in Standard American Dialect) |
| through |
true |
| though |
go |
| cough |
off |
| thought |
not |
| tough |
stuff |
And as you can see, "ough" can produce a myriad of sounds seemingly
randomly. In addition, these endings may rhyme different in other
dialects of English as well.
Therefore linguists cannot rely on such whimsical system
to scientifically represent sounds in a language. The solution was
the creation of symbols explicitly designed to represent all sounds
that humans can produce. We call such systems "Phonetic Alphabets".
Unfortunately concensus is the last thing linguists have between
them and consequently several systems exist. The most famous one is
the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA, but the American Phonetic
Alphabet is also quite widespread. I have chosen to adhere to the
American system in this page because that's what I've been taught in.
If you are familiar with the IPA there shouldn't really be any
problems once you understand corresponding equivalent symbols in
the two systems.
The following are some of the signs of the American phonetic system.
When used for transcription, sounds are put inside square brackets, ie
[ ]. Related and similar sounds in a language often occur in
complementary distribution, that is, each of these sounds appear only
in unique situations. For example, in English, the "t" in "top"
sounds different from that in "stop". However, the "t"-sound in "stop"
(which is less powerful the the "t" in the beginning of a word) only
occurs after a "s" sound, while the "t" in "top" occurs
everywhere else, and therefore these two sounds are in complementary
distribution. We call this set of sounds a phoneme, and write it
between two slashes, ie / /.
Formally, /t/ becomes [t] after [s], and becomes [th]
everywhere else. The superscript h means that the
consonant before it is produced with a little more air.
Consonants:
Some important points:
- V+ denoted "voiced", and V- is "voiceless".
Voiceless and voiced simply mean that whether the vocal cords
vibrate while making a sound. If you put your hand on your
throat and alternate between saying "cod" and "god", you'll
notice that "god" makes your vocal cord (or larynx) vibrates
more. This is called voiced.
- [p], [t], and [k] are unaspirated. For people who know Spanish
well, they correspond to the sounds in 'pelo',
'té', and 'cosa'. Such sounds do not
occur alone in English, but mostly after the consonant [s],
such as in 'space'. Compare 'space' and 'pace', and you'll
notice how the /p/ in 'pace' is stronger.
- As just mentioned, the sounds /p/, /t/, and /k/ in English
occuring at the beginning of the word is aspirated,
meaning that more air is pushed out. In Linguistics they are
transcribed as [ph], [th], and
[kh]. You may think that is impossible to have
aspirated /b/, /t/, and /g/, but Proto-Indo-European and
Indic languages have them (like in the name of the great
Indian epic Mahabharata).
- The columns on the chart refer to points of articulation, that
is, places in your mouth where sounds are produced.
Bilabial means both of your lips come together, and the
sound comes out there (you can feel the vibration between your
lips if you try).
Labio-dental between your upper lip touches your lower
teeth. Inter-dental sounds are relatively rare in the
world, and what you do is put your tongue between your two
rows of teeth.
- Apico-alveolar means putting the tip of your blade right
behind your upper row of teeth. Apico-palatal sounds
are also called Retroflex. They are pronounced like the
Apico-aveolar except with your tongue curled back a little.
The most common example for an American English speaker is the
'r' in "road". Retroflex /d/ and /t/ occur in Indian languages
(both Indo-European and Dravidian).
- Lamino-palatals are very much like apico-palatals but
instead having the tip of your tongue as the highest point
the blade, the part behind the tip, almost touches the
roof of your mouth.
- Dorso-velar, or just velar, sounds are produced
between the back of your tongue and the back of your palate.
Its cousin, Uvular makes your uvula vibrates, like
Parisian French /r/.
- Glottal simply means your larynx.
- The categories that form the bold rows refer to the type of
articulation. Stops are sounds that are maintained
for a very short amount of time. You can't stretch no matter
how hard you try. On the other hand, Fricatives can
persists for forever. Compare between /t/ and /s/.
- Sometimes you can merge stops and fricatives to get
Affricates, which starts as a stop and turns into a
fricative. The /ch/ in English "church" is just an example
of an affricate. It starts as a /t/, and turns into a
/sh/ sound.
- Nasals are, well, nasal. They make your sinus
vibrates.
- I have no idea why Liquids are called liquids. The
voiced apico-palatal liquid /r/ occurs in American English
"red" and the voiced apico-alveolar liquid /l/ is like in
English "lock", not "table".
- The flap is the Spanish short /r/, ie in "toro". Also occurs
in Italian, Japanese, and American English in the form of
the /dd/ in "ladder" or /tt/ in "butter" said rapidly.
- Semi-vowels are really vowels that appear as the
less-powerful part of a diphthong. In other words, they
are non-syllabic vowels.
Vowels:
Even though they look like English, don't be tempted to pronounce
the symbols as if they were English letters. For instance, the symbol
[i] really sounds like the 'ee' in "reed". The symbol [e] doesn't
sound like the 'e' in 'be', but more like French 'être'.
When you say a vowel, you unconsciously change your tongue and lip
into an unique configuration characterized by three attributes:
- Unrounded vs rounded. This feature applies to your
lip. If you say [u] as like "room", you'll notice that your
lips forming a circle and you look like you're about to
kiss someone. On the other hand, if you say [i] as in
"feet" your lips are straight. That's why before you take
a picture in America you will tell the people you're about
to capture on film to say "cheese", because [i] makes the
lips look like smiling.
- High to low. You probably never noticed this, but
when you say a vowel part of your tongue will raise toward the
roof of your mouth while other parts will stay near the bottom.
The height of your tongue's peak determines the vowel you
say. The sound [i] like in "feet" forces your tongue higher up
than, say, the sound [a] as in "father".
- Front, central, and back. This same peak that I just
described above can also change in position in your mouth.
When the peak is closest to your teeth, it is in front.
Toward the throat is back. Between the two is,
obviously, central. With [i], the peak of the tongue
is a little bit behind your teeth, while with [u] the peak
of the tongue is at the back of your mouth, near where the
hard palate changes to the soft palate. If you can't picture
it, try feeling around with your finger.
- Vowels can be long or short. A long vowel is
denoted by a colon (:) after the vowel. The best example
in English of long vs short can be found in cases like "sad"
(long) and "sat" (short). Notice how the 'a' (phonetically
[æ]) sounds longer in "sad" than in "sat". So, "sad" is
transcribed as [sæ:d] while "sat" is [sæt].
Tones
In many languages of the world, tone plays an important role in
distinguishing one morpheme from another.
Notice that tone isn't the same as stress or intonation.
All of these involve changes in the pitch of the voice. Stress,
sometimes also known as accent, is the rise and fall of the pitch
throughout the syllables of a word. In English, there is usally a
highest stress in a word, like "kéyboard" or "exáct",
but also in some cases two stresses, one higher than the other, occur,
like "singularity". Intonation is the rise and fall of the pitch
throughout the words of a sentence. Notice how the statement "You are
sick" sounds different from the question "You are sick?" In the
statement, the words have more or less even pitches with respect to
each other. On the other hand, the question's pitch peaks at the
adjective "sick". Both contrasts with an interjection like "You are
sick!", which places highest pitches on "You" and "sick".
Tone is somewhat like stress in that it also is the rise and fall
of the pitch throughout a word. However, tone is used to distinguish
words that have the same sounds which may have unrelated meanings, while
stress is not. (Actually, in a few cases, stress does serve to
distinguish different meanings or version of the same word, but never
consistently as tone.)
Furthermore, the beginning pitch and the ending pitch of a tone is
central to distinguishing words. Slightly different beginning or ending
pitch means different words. On the other hand, the highest point in a
stress can be any degree of pitch above the unstressed syllables. The
difference doesn't matter as long as the stress rises above the other
syllables.
There are several ways of representing tones in Romanization. Pinyin
(for transcribing Mandarin) and Vietnamese uses diacritics. Some
phonetic transcriptions use single digit numbers. So 1 in Cantonese
is the high falling tone, 2 is the low falling tone, and so on. Neither
system directly indicates the tone.
There are two other systems that do directly illustrate the tonal
change. One uses a vertical bar to denote a scale, and horizontal or
diagonal lines to represent the change in pitch.
The best system that I have seen is a two digit number, ranging from
1 to 5. The first (leftmost) digit is the starting pitch, and the
second (rightmost) digit is the ending pitch. Together, it tells you
which pitch to start and which to end.
Since I am a native speaker of Cantonese, I'll use its tonal system
for demonstration. In traditional Cantonese, there are 9 basic tones,
but in my dialect (Hong Kong) the high rising and low rising tones have
become indistinguishable. Also, the high falling tone has become very
similar to the high-level tone (which doesn't technically exist in
Cantonese but can be found in Mandarin). I will try to reproduce all the
distinguishing details in these tones, but don't take my pronunciation
as canonical. The rest are relatively close to reality.
| Description |
Example |
Sounds |
| High falling |
[ma53] "mother" |
AU | WAV
|
| Low falling | [ma31] "sesame; hemp" |
AU | WAV |
| High rising | [ma35] ??? |
AU | WAV |
| Low rising | [ma13] "horse" |
AU | WAV |
| Mid level | [ma33] "question marker" |
AU | WAV |
| Low level | [ma11] "to scold" |
AU | WAV |
| High short | [pok55] "to hit" (quite onomatopeic) |
AU | WAV |
| Mid short | [pok44] "to struggle (restlessly)" |
AU | WAV |
| Low short | [pok22] "thin" |
AU | WAV |
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Phonetics