These sounds are really close together to begin with, but in English, we don't actually use either of those sounds in word-initial position like the example recording, and so unless you speak a language that distinguishes these sounds in this context, they are going to be difficult to differentiate. Our word-initial voiceless stops (p, t, k) are actually aspirated stops, that is they are produced with a strong puff of air, while our word-initial voiced stops (b, d, g) are partially unvoiced and are actually somewhere between the t and d recordings.
Hold your hand in front of your mouth and feel the difference in pressure when you pronounce the first sound of the word "tune" versus the word "dune". This will let you feel that puff of "aspiration." Next, try putting your fingers over the front of your throat, (on your layrnx or where the Adam's apple is on men), and pronounce the sounds slowly. You may be able to feel the difference when your vocal cords start to vibrate as you say the "d" sound. In native English speakers this happens shortly after the pressure is released from your tongue, while in the English "t" sound, the vibration doesn't start until the vowel does. The "d" sound in the example from the chart has the vocal cord vibrations start immediately as the pressure is being released.
> Hold your hand in front of your mouth and feel the difference in pressure when you pronounce the first sound of the word "tune" versus the word "dune". This will let you feel that puff of "aspiration."
The aspiration will be even more obvious if you try speaking into a microphone.
A lot of sounds are difficult even for a native speaker to distinguish in isolation. That's especially true for plosives, since they can't be held; you have only a moment to hear the difference.
Native speakers have the advantage in spoken conversation. They quickly understand not just the word, but the context. No native speaker would ever confuse "Give that document to Ted" with "Give that document to dead" since the latter is nonsensical. Even if you actually said "dead", most people would interpret it as "Ted" without even noticing anything odd about your pronunciation. (In fact, in a context like that between two vowels, it's entirely possible that you would keep your vocal cords buzzing and produce a "d" even if you'd meant to say "t").
Definitely. English is hardly even the worst offender there. I'm learning French, and as a non-native speaker I am utterly lost at anything close to conversational speed. The language has many homophones and near-homophones, and liaison makes word boundaries unclear without context. Get slightly lost and it's all over.
> and liaison makes word boundaries unclear without context
There's very little blame to be placed on liaison, since word boundaries are unclear in every language, including languages that e.g. don't allow syllable-final consonants. English speakers feel like they have a strong grasp of where word boundaries occur because of the orthographic space, but the space in the writing system does not coincide with word boundaries in the language; it is heavily conventionalized.
If you are a native English speaker, these renditions will sound too close together for you, because the person pronouncing them is not a native English speaker. IPA is a coarse guide to phonemes; it does not capture, for example, the difference between the English and Spanish t, which is so great that I am still struggling to do it correctly. But they are both “t” in IPA.
There's a distinction between _broad transcription_, which only cares about capturing distinctions between phonemes which change the meaning of at least one word in the transcribed language, and _narrow transcription_, which attempts to distinguish all of the fine nuances of accent and pronunciation. Most native english speakers would expect the broadly transcribed /ta/ to be narrowly transcribed as [tʰa], because we often aspirate plosives before vowels.
Obviously this is a spectrum; some transcriptions are so broad that they transcribe the english <r> as /r/ when the context is clear that we're talking about english, even though it should properly by /ɹ/. And in my narrow transcription, I didn't bother to notate vowel length, because it didn't matter for the given example.
(Note: I use <> for orthography (how it's written in the language), // for broad transcription, and, and [] for narrow transcription)
> it does not capture, for example, the difference between the English and Spanish t
Ah yeah, that's true. This is because most Spanish speakers pronounce /t/ as denti-alveolar (the tip of the tongue touches the back of the teeth) while most English speakers pronounce /t/ as purely alveolar (the tip of the tongue stops at the back of the alveolar ridge). I'm not sure why the IPA chart doesn't differentiate these specific phones, honestly. I imagine it's because although the sounds are very different cross-linguistically, maybe there aren't any languages where these phones are contrastive and thus they don't warrant separate glyphs in the IPA. Still, I'd love to see them!
That said, I think this is actually a relatively uncommon case in the IPA, because in addition to this simple chart the IPA also specifies a number of diacritics for more complex and precise transcriptions. These diacritics are often not used in broad transcriptions within a single language because most languages don't differentiate phones at this level in a contrastive manner. But in a narrow transcription, the diacritics are used as appropriate, generally to help the transcriber make a point about what is noteworthy in that transcription.
For instance, in English let's consider the "t" as you mention. We'll look at "tap" and "pat". The broad transcriptions for these words are /tæp/ and /pæt/, respectively. But the narrow transcriptions would be more like [tʰæp̚] and [pʰæt̚] (Note that broad transcriptions are phonemic and given between slashes, while narrow transcriptions are phonetic and given between brackets). What this shows is that, in English, syllable-initial voiceless stops are aspirated (indicated by the little "h"), while word-final voiceless stops have no audible release (indicated by the angle symbol, known as "corner"). So in addition to the main letter glyphs of IPA, there are tons of diacritics that help you write your transcriptions more precisely!
> I'm not sure why the IPA chart doesn't differentiate these specific phones, honestly. I imagine it's because although the sounds are very different cross-linguistically, maybe there aren't any languages where these phones are contrastive and thus they don't warrant separate glyphs in the IPA. Still, I'd love to see them!
It's because sounds vary continuously, but the IPA is by necessity discrete. (A problem that is much worse for vowels, but still comes up for consonants.) You have to collapse variation somewhere.
The IPA notably doesn't have dedicated symbols for affricates. (Sounds that consist of a stop immediately followed by a fricative in the same location, like "z" in "pizza" or "ch" in "chill".) So English "ch" is represented /tʃ/, or if you want to be really explicit there's an affrication diacritic.
Recognizing that affricates consist physically of a colocated stop and fricative was felt to be a theoretical advance. But there's a funny story -- Peter Ladefoged went to document a language somewhere (the Americas?) and was proud to use the IPA to record its sounds. He insisted on it.
He insisted on it even after discovering that the language in question made a phonemic distinction between affricated tʃ, which he represented by /tʃ/, and /t/ followed by /ʃ/ without affrication, which he was forced to represent by /t.ʃ/. This would have been much easier to understand with a more bespoke system representing the two adjacent sounds as /tʃ/ and the affricate as /č/.
Wow, that's really interesting about the affricates! Thanks for sharing! :)
I get the continuous vs discrete aspect for sure, but you'd think we'd at least have different symbols for each place of articulation! /t/ crosses four different places (dental, denti-alveolar, alveolar, post-alveolar) and the best we can do is cut that down into two groups of two places with the dental diacritic which says "some teeth contact". I think if I were to design such a transcription system from scratch, I would try to make it at least possible to express each place/manner combination, but that's just me!
I don't think the places of articulation you list are considered all that different, really. Two speakers of different languages using sounds articulated along that continuum are likely to recognize the other language's sound as being their own, but sounding a little funny. (This phenomenon is especially notable for rhotics, where different languages may realize an "r" in very different ways -- for example, Spanish and Russian have loud alveolar trills, English has a retroflex approximant, and French has a uvular trill -- but everyone broadly agrees on which sounds are R-like, despite the fact that a Spanish R has much more in common with an English D, physically, than it does with an English R.)
Looking at the example sidethread of Mandarin pinyin "q", it is a laminal palatal aspirated affricate. Its equivalent in English is a much more complex issue than the equivalent of a Spanish "t", which everyone agrees on. The "q" may be perceived as a "ts" (witness "Tsingtao beer"), which is the English sound combination most closely matching the positioning of the tongue, though not the positioning of the restriction in airflow, or it may be perceived as "ch", which is the English single sound most closely matching the place and manner of articulation. Different English speakers may even disagree on the interpretation while listening to the same speech, and the same English speaker will disagree on (or be confused about) the interpretation when listening to the same speaker produce the sound multiple times.
There are languages that distinguish retroflex stops from alveolar stops, and IPA obliges those languages with different symbols for the two places of articulation. Do you know of a language that distinguishes alveolar stops from dental stops?
> There are languages that distinguish retroflex stops from alveolar stops, and IPA obliges those languages with different symbols for the two places of articulation. Do you know of a language that distinguishes alveolar stops from dental stops?
I actually mentioned this in the top comment:
> I'm not sure why the IPA chart doesn't differentiate these specific phones, honestly. I imagine it's because although the sounds are very different cross-linguistically, maybe there aren't any languages where these phones are contrastive and thus they don't warrant separate glyphs in the IPA.
What I meant in my most recent comment was that, if I were going to create a new IPA from scratch, I would probably try to have some diacritic or distinct symbol for each place of articulation, such that any possible place/manner combination could be expressed uniquely. As it stands, the presence of distinct symbols in the IPA seems governed by whether there are examples of real-world languages in which phones are considered contrastive. This is perfectly pragmatic, but it leaves me feeling disappointed that I can't easily express something that is right there on the chart! Having <t> correspond to 3-4 places of articulation with only a diacritic to distinguish 1-2 of those is disappointing, even if it's technically sufficient for any transcription within a given language.
> I imagine it's because although the sounds are very different cross-linguistically, maybe there aren't any languages where these phones are contrastive and thus they don't warrant separate glyphs in the IPA.
I think this is a pretty spot-on observation. IPA does offer a bunch of diacritics for making more narrow transcriptions. For instance, Spanish's dental <t> is [t̪].
However, the narrower the transcription, the less applicable it is to a language in general. Things like dialectal and even individual differences start to come into play. So in general transcription will only be as narrow as necessary to achieve some point.
Interestingly enough, IPA actually does have a way of distinguishing these sounds. The Spanish t is always unaspirated [t]. But the English t can sometimes be unaspirated [t] as in "stamp" or aspirated [tʰ] as in "too"
That’s interesting, but the Spanish unaspirated t and the English one are different phonemes. The tongue is in a different position. If I forget and use the English t, my Spanish teacher stops me. The difference in sounds is quite obvious. So how, in IPA, do you spell the difference?
> but the Spanish unaspirated t and the English one are different phonemes. The tongue is in a different position.
That is not what "phoneme" means. They are different sounds, but they aren't different phonemes in either language; to be different phonemes, the same language would have to consider them different. Neither does -- in both cases, one is "/t/" and the other is "weird /t/".
Spanish <t> is dental, which requires the dental diacritic: [t̪]
However, since there is no alveolar [t] in Spanish, it will generally just be transcribed as /t/ rather than having to put the diacritic on all the time.
It's more complex. Spanish phonology dictates a denti-alveolar pronunciation of /t/, while typical English phonology (USA, England, etc.) uses purely alveolar /t/. So in Spanish, the tip of the tongue hits the back of the teeth, which doesn't happen in English. This distinction is not rendered in the IPA glyphs or any diacritic that I'm aware of.
I think it's not perfect, because (I believe) Spanish /t/ is usually denti-alveolar and not fully dental. I don't think there's a way to express that specific aspect of it, though I'm also not a linguist so I may be mistaken!
Aspiration is a separate phenomenon. English also has unaspirated plosives — they just mostly only occur in word-final positions, like the <t> in "pat", and they are not contrastive with their aspirated versions.
What I was talking about was how the Spanish /t/ has the tip of the tongue just a bit further forward, so that it touches the back of your teeth. English /t/ is, for most people, purely alveolar, so there's no teeth contact.
Agreed. But some Spanish speakers pronounce t with the tongue quite far forward, between the teeth; that’s what I meant by comparing it to an unaspirated English th. But I think we are getting into regional variations now.
It’s even more crucial with d. An English native speaker who is a beginner in Spanish will pronounce tened in a way that will be interpreted by Spanish speakers as tener.
t͡ʃ, t͡ɕ, ʈ͡ʂ all sound so close to my poor ear that I'd struggle to articulate the difference. They sound like exactly the same thing at slightly different speeds.
Hold your hand in front of your mouth and feel the difference in pressure when you pronounce the first sound of the word "tune" versus the word "dune". This will let you feel that puff of "aspiration." Next, try putting your fingers over the front of your throat, (on your layrnx or where the Adam's apple is on men), and pronounce the sounds slowly. You may be able to feel the difference when your vocal cords start to vibrate as you say the "d" sound. In native English speakers this happens shortly after the pressure is released from your tongue, while in the English "t" sound, the vibration doesn't start until the vowel does. The "d" sound in the example from the chart has the vocal cord vibrations start immediately as the pressure is being released.