[leephillips]

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?

[thaumasiotes]

> 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/".

[leephillips]

Thanks for the correction. I’m not a linguist (obviously). Just teaching and learning a foreign language.

[jgwil2]

There are a bunch of subscripts/superscripts that describe the exact place of articulation but are omitted in most contexts. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...

[jdmichal]

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.