They made almost no attempt to put it in layman’s terms, which means as an explanation it is not very helpful unless you already know enough about the topic to not need to ask about it in the first place. Correct and unhelpful. But I guess they were busy.
What would be a good place to start with IPA? Going off Wikipedia’s pages on the matter is like Force’s comment, well-intentioned but not a great intro as you flit back & forth across the tables making sense of it.
I also vaguely remember a similar experience with physical dictionaries, which I think tend to have some kind of IPA (or related) pronunciation guide in them. It’s been awhile since I’ve used one though, hence the foggy memory, and some online dictionaries seem to have given up on showing IPA pronunciation guides.
then you can just look at transcriptions in a language you speak, and/or look at the chart and try to pronounce some of the sounds (good luck for that one lmao). a good place to look/ask is r/asklinguistics, r/linguistics, r/conlangs on reddit, they’re pretty active
one thing i should clarify now is the convention you usually see for notation using the IPA – there’s a difference between /broad/ transcription and [narrow] transcription.
you see, the IPA can be used in many different ways – it can be used phonemically, or phonetically, or sometimes in other ways.
Phonetically means the symbols represent phones. Phones are distinct sounds, they are a specific way of articulating/pronouncing/using your articulators (articulators being the things you use to pronounce stuff, e.g. your tongue or lips or vocal cords). Usually you will represent more phonetic transcription using brackets [ ] (narrow transcription).
Phonemically means the symbols represent phonemes. Usually more phonemic transcriptions are represented with slashes / / (broad transcription). Phonemes are sounds that carry meaning in a language – i.e., a phoneme is something that if you replace with another phoneme, speakers perceive that as a different word. A phoneme is generally made up of multiple phones, called allophones, all of which are different phonetically but the speaker of the language perceives them as the same thing – in fact the thing I described in this thread is a great example of that!
“Dragon” in English is made up of six phonemes, /ˈdræ.gən/ – /d/ the “d” sound in English, /r/ (also written /ɹ/) the “r” sound in English, /æ/ the “a” sound in “cat” or “ask” in English, /g/ the “g” sound, /ə/ the schwa sound/reduced vowel as in the “a” in “about” or the “u” in “medium”, /n/ the “n” sound. /ˈ/ means the following syllable has primary stress (in English that would usually mean pronouncing it with fortis – louder/more tense, and with a higher pitch than the rest of the syllables). /./ is a syllable boundary, it demarcates the end of the previous syllable and the beginning of the next syllable. /ˌ/ would be secondary stress. Often times the primary stress symbol is omitted if it’s in the first syllable.
When you write /dræ.gən/, that’s kind of a “template” made of phonemes that are good for describing a wide variety of dialects’ sounds – it’d be very cumbersome to try to write an extremely narrow, phonetic transcription of dozens of dialects’ pronunciations every time you want to describe a word; using broad transcription, you can then leave it to the reader to further break it down into more specific, precise transcriptions whenever they care about a specific dialect.
So let’s break it down – in my dialect, /r/ is pronounced as a post-alevolar approximant – that is, pronouncing with a continuous flow of air with the tongue behind the alveolar ridge (the bump on the roof of your mouth behind your teeth) and not touching the roof of the mouth as to not cause as much obstruction. This would be transcribed as [ɹ̠] or [ɹ˗], the symbol for the alveolar approximant plus the diacritic for retraction (pronouncing further behind in the mouth). A lot of the times, the /r/ sound in a lot of dialects may be transcribed as [ɻ] – retroflex, generally meaning post-alveolar/pre-palatal with a tongue curled upwards, or even [ɹ̈] which uses the “centralized” diacritic to represent “bunched r” which is post-alveolar/pre-palatal and has the sides of the tongue spread out towards the molars and a strange-looking orientation/curl of the tongue called “bunching” (a sound found in very few languages, I believe only English and Dutch, and which is the realization in my dialect). You can use more symbols to be even more precise, e.g. add [ʷ] (labialized) or [ᶹ] (labiovelarized) since English /ɹ/ is often pronounced with labial constriction (constriction/tenseness using both lips) or labiovelar constriction (using the bottom lip and upper teeth).
So right off the bat, you can change it to [dɹ̠æ.ɡən]. The /d/ forms a consonant cluster with the /r/, which means it’s pronounced with no vowels or pauses in between them – since the [ɹ̠] is post-alveolar, it influences consonants in the proximity which have a nearby/relatively close place of articulation to shift towards / assimilate to its place of articulation. In a lot of dialects, this causes /dɹ̠/ to simply become [d̠ɹ̠], with both of them being post-alveolar. But in my speech, it goes even further and the /d/ affricates into [d̠͡ʒ] called the voiced post-alveolar affricate which is the “j” sound. Often a change like this is called “palatalization” because the consonant shifts towards a palatal pronunciation (palatal referring to the hard palate, the place of articulation of /j/ the palatal approximant which is the “y” sound in English), in this case becoming pre-palatal [dʒ]. But you shan’t confuse this with the other use of “palatalized/palatalization”, which is when a sound is pronounced with partial constriction at the (hard) palate, often transcribed with superscript /ʲ/ following the consonant (e.g. /kʲ/), although often times a palatalized consonant does shift towards a palatal pronunciation.
So then we have [d̠͡ʒɹ̠æ.ɡən]. Lastly, in my dialect /ə/ in certain contexts behind consonants often becomes [ɪ] – a near-close near-front vowel, similar to the “i” in “bit” or “industry” – or [ɪ̈] sometimes called “schwi” which is similar but more centralized.
So finally we have [d̠͡ʒɹ̠æ.ɡɪ̈n] or even more specifically [ˈd̠͡ʒɹ̠ᶹæ.ɡɪ̈n]. That would be an accurate way to phonetically transcribe how I say “dragon”.
Some speakers may take reducing the /ə/ even further and delete it entirely, instead pronouncing the last syllable as [gn̩] – the line under the “n” meaning it’s syllabic, which means that it’s the nucleus of the syllable (the nucleus being the center of/only necessary part of the syllable, where a vowel would usually be), pronouncing the second syllable with no vowel. Then, you might see even more change with speakers assimilating the “n” to the place of articulation of the “g”, making it a velar (pronounced at the velum, also called the soft palate) nasal, which would make the last syllable [gŋ̍].
And you would perceive all this as the word “dragon”, even if you pronounce it differently than I do. That’s the beauty of language. You might use different phones in the same context as me, but at the end of the day they’re the allophones of the same phonemes.
Now you may ask, how the hell do linguists type this stuff conveniently? The answer is, they don’t, it can be a pain in the ass to find a tool to conveniently type for linguistics because there’s just so many symbols, often times you use something like an online IPA typing tool or google gboard on android.
Whoa! Thanks a ton for the additional breakdown and links! Saved this post and am still reading over it, and wanted to give you a quick reply letting you know I’ve seen it, appreciate it, and am in fact reading it all.
I understood it, after I googled a lot of what they said. And I’m not trying to give them shit, they made an effort to be helpful, it just wasn’t really.
I mean the quality of an explanation is a matter of opinion. I already admitted it was a technically correct explanation, but I stand by my opinion. You can disagree but have failed to convince me to think otherwise.
Do you honestly see zero value in finding information, that when you couldn’t understand, you ended up educating yourself about, finally learning something new?
Far from useless, and certainly many people here did understand straight away, as well.
You are being rude and unpleasant, as well as missing the point of what I am saying. Learning is literally my favorite thing to do with my free time and “finally learning something new?” Is a condescending way to ask what you asked.
Apparently you have never taken a badly taught class or anything similar and you simply have no concept of what it is I’m trying to talk about. Teaching in a complete way that is understood and isn’t excessively verbose takes skill, time, and effort. Their comment wasn’t wrong but it was not high quality teaching. It was obviously confusing for many people who commented and upvoted about it, and barring anything else, that is enough evidence to show the explanation is imperfect.
I don’t want to talk about this anymore and I have no more desire to give you any more of my time in particular.
Just because I don’t agree with your opinion doesn’t make me rude or unpleasant. I suppose my first comment may appear rude if you are not familiar with the joke. Also, if you wish to stop engaging with a person, then consider not replying at length, and then doing what’s pretty much putting your fingers in your ears. I’ll give my piece regardless, as this is not a private forum and I’m allowed to write. Feel free to block me though.
Firstly: you calling a well written post as pretty much useless (not helpful) was rude from my pov. And one that’s filed under a thread, on a shitposting board of all places. For one reason or another, you saw no value in a post, but 50 others did. International Phonetic Alphabet is familiar to most non-native English speakers, so maybe the discrepancy comes from native speakers being confused, and rest of the world not? Idk, but I found your negativity towards the very informative comment weird, and the accusation that it was not explained in layman’s terms weird (because that’s what his last paragraph was). There’s only so far you can dumb things down, some effort and base knowledge from the student is required.
Hot take: Perhaps you were simply that one kid in a huge class that didn’t get what this teacher told? Comparing a random comment in a Lemmy to someone doing a job they are being paid to do is downright weird, as if they were somehow required to hit the same level of professionality. I kind of figure that we might hail from countries with very different schooling systems. Where I’m from,. students are expected to work, Tom understand, so that the information sticks better as you were more engaged, rather than getting perfectly chewed up info to begin with.
They made almost no attempt to put it in layman’s terms, which means as an explanation it is not very helpful unless you already know enough about the topic to not need to ask about it in the first place. Correct and unhelpful. But I guess they were busy.
Schools need to teach IPA. It’s basically a universal language. (Lol plz dont hit me)
What would be a good place to start with IPA? Going off Wikipedia’s pages on the matter is like Force’s comment, well-intentioned but not a great intro as you flit back & forth across the tables making sense of it.
I also vaguely remember a similar experience with physical dictionaries, which I think tend to have some kind of IPA (or related) pronunciation guide in them. It’s been awhile since I’ve used one though, hence the foggy memory, and some online dictionaries seem to have given up on showing IPA pronunciation guides.
this small 3-part video series is a good place to start:
part 1: https://youtu.be/xMEFr7ghMTg?si=08I3vCSiwQC4Iuve part 2: https://youtu.be/J3IO5K5ZGB4?si=u2SaJx6gv45tsI1V part 3: https://youtu.be/jkfSA4_DCfs?si=JlMkiv75njWzbG5k
then you can just look at transcriptions in a language you speak, and/or look at the chart and try to pronounce some of the sounds (good luck for that one lmao). a good place to look/ask is r/asklinguistics, r/linguistics, r/conlangs on reddit, they’re pretty active
one thing i should clarify now is the convention you usually see for notation using the IPA – there’s a difference between /broad/ transcription and [narrow] transcription.
you see, the IPA can be used in many different ways – it can be used phonemically, or phonetically, or sometimes in other ways.
Phonetically means the symbols represent phones. Phones are distinct sounds, they are a specific way of articulating/pronouncing/using your articulators (articulators being the things you use to pronounce stuff, e.g. your tongue or lips or vocal cords). Usually you will represent more phonetic transcription using brackets [ ] (narrow transcription).
Phonemically means the symbols represent phonemes. Usually more phonemic transcriptions are represented with slashes / / (broad transcription). Phonemes are sounds that carry meaning in a language – i.e., a phoneme is something that if you replace with another phoneme, speakers perceive that as a different word. A phoneme is generally made up of multiple phones, called allophones, all of which are different phonetically but the speaker of the language perceives them as the same thing – in fact the thing I described in this thread is a great example of that!
“Dragon” in English is made up of six phonemes, /ˈdræ.gən/ – /d/ the “d” sound in English, /r/ (also written /ɹ/) the “r” sound in English, /æ/ the “a” sound in “cat” or “ask” in English, /g/ the “g” sound, /ə/ the schwa sound/reduced vowel as in the “a” in “about” or the “u” in “medium”, /n/ the “n” sound. /ˈ/ means the following syllable has primary stress (in English that would usually mean pronouncing it with fortis – louder/more tense, and with a higher pitch than the rest of the syllables). /./ is a syllable boundary, it demarcates the end of the previous syllable and the beginning of the next syllable. /ˌ/ would be secondary stress. Often times the primary stress symbol is omitted if it’s in the first syllable.
When you write /dræ.gən/, that’s kind of a “template” made of phonemes that are good for describing a wide variety of dialects’ sounds – it’d be very cumbersome to try to write an extremely narrow, phonetic transcription of dozens of dialects’ pronunciations every time you want to describe a word; using broad transcription, you can then leave it to the reader to further break it down into more specific, precise transcriptions whenever they care about a specific dialect.
So let’s break it down – in my dialect, /r/ is pronounced as a post-alevolar approximant – that is, pronouncing with a continuous flow of air with the tongue behind the alveolar ridge (the bump on the roof of your mouth behind your teeth) and not touching the roof of the mouth as to not cause as much obstruction. This would be transcribed as [ɹ̠] or [ɹ˗], the symbol for the alveolar approximant plus the diacritic for retraction (pronouncing further behind in the mouth). A lot of the times, the /r/ sound in a lot of dialects may be transcribed as [ɻ] – retroflex, generally meaning post-alveolar/pre-palatal with a tongue curled upwards, or even [ɹ̈] which uses the “centralized” diacritic to represent “bunched r” which is post-alveolar/pre-palatal and has the sides of the tongue spread out towards the molars and a strange-looking orientation/curl of the tongue called “bunching” (a sound found in very few languages, I believe only English and Dutch, and which is the realization in my dialect). You can use more symbols to be even more precise, e.g. add [ʷ] (labialized) or [ᶹ] (labiovelarized) since English /ɹ/ is often pronounced with labial constriction (constriction/tenseness using both lips) or labiovelar constriction (using the bottom lip and upper teeth).
So right off the bat, you can change it to [dɹ̠æ.ɡən]. The /d/ forms a consonant cluster with the /r/, which means it’s pronounced with no vowels or pauses in between them – since the [ɹ̠] is post-alveolar, it influences consonants in the proximity which have a nearby/relatively close place of articulation to shift towards / assimilate to its place of articulation. In a lot of dialects, this causes /dɹ̠/ to simply become [d̠ɹ̠], with both of them being post-alveolar. But in my speech, it goes even further and the /d/ affricates into [d̠͡ʒ] called the voiced post-alveolar affricate which is the “j” sound. Often a change like this is called “palatalization” because the consonant shifts towards a palatal pronunciation (palatal referring to the hard palate, the place of articulation of /j/ the palatal approximant which is the “y” sound in English), in this case becoming pre-palatal [dʒ]. But you shan’t confuse this with the other use of “palatalized/palatalization”, which is when a sound is pronounced with partial constriction at the (hard) palate, often transcribed with superscript /ʲ/ following the consonant (e.g. /kʲ/), although often times a palatalized consonant does shift towards a palatal pronunciation.
So then we have [d̠͡ʒɹ̠æ.ɡən]. Lastly, in my dialect /ə/ in certain contexts behind consonants often becomes [ɪ] – a near-close near-front vowel, similar to the “i” in “bit” or “industry” – or [ɪ̈] sometimes called “schwi” which is similar but more centralized.
So finally we have [d̠͡ʒɹ̠æ.ɡɪ̈n] or even more specifically [ˈd̠͡ʒɹ̠ᶹæ.ɡɪ̈n]. That would be an accurate way to phonetically transcribe how I say “dragon”.
Some speakers may take reducing the /ə/ even further and delete it entirely, instead pronouncing the last syllable as [gn̩] – the line under the “n” meaning it’s syllabic, which means that it’s the nucleus of the syllable (the nucleus being the center of/only necessary part of the syllable, where a vowel would usually be), pronouncing the second syllable with no vowel. Then, you might see even more change with speakers assimilating the “n” to the place of articulation of the “g”, making it a velar (pronounced at the velum, also called the soft palate) nasal, which would make the last syllable [gŋ̍].
And you would perceive all this as the word “dragon”, even if you pronounce it differently than I do. That’s the beauty of language. You might use different phones in the same context as me, but at the end of the day they’re the allophones of the same phonemes.
Now you may ask, how the hell do linguists type this stuff conveniently? The answer is, they don’t, it can be a pain in the ass to find a tool to conveniently type for linguistics because there’s just so many symbols, often times you use something like an online IPA typing tool or google gboard on android.
Whoa! Thanks a ton for the additional breakdown and links! Saved this post and am still reading over it, and wanted to give you a quick reply letting you know I’ve seen it, appreciate it, and am in fact reading it all.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/xMEFr7ghMTg?si=08I3vCSiwQC4Iuve
https://piped.video/J3IO5K5ZGB4?si=u2SaJx6gv45tsI1V
https://piped.video/jkfSA4_DCfs?si=JlMkiv75njWzbG5k
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I guess I sounded angrier than intended or something. I just didn’t want @[email protected] to feel stupid.
He can explain it to you, but he can’t understand it for you. /s
I understood it, after I googled a lot of what they said. And I’m not trying to give them shit, they made an effort to be helpful, it just wasn’t really.
But it was. And educated you as well. Win-win.
I mean the quality of an explanation is a matter of opinion. I already admitted it was a technically correct explanation, but I stand by my opinion. You can disagree but have failed to convince me to think otherwise.
Do you honestly see zero value in finding information, that when you couldn’t understand, you ended up educating yourself about, finally learning something new?
Far from useless, and certainly many people here did understand straight away, as well.
You are being rude and unpleasant, as well as missing the point of what I am saying. Learning is literally my favorite thing to do with my free time and “finally learning something new?” Is a condescending way to ask what you asked.
Apparently you have never taken a badly taught class or anything similar and you simply have no concept of what it is I’m trying to talk about. Teaching in a complete way that is understood and isn’t excessively verbose takes skill, time, and effort. Their comment wasn’t wrong but it was not high quality teaching. It was obviously confusing for many people who commented and upvoted about it, and barring anything else, that is enough evidence to show the explanation is imperfect.
I don’t want to talk about this anymore and I have no more desire to give you any more of my time in particular.
Just because I don’t agree with your opinion doesn’t make me rude or unpleasant. I suppose my first comment may appear rude if you are not familiar with the joke. Also, if you wish to stop engaging with a person, then consider not replying at length, and then doing what’s pretty much putting your fingers in your ears. I’ll give my piece regardless, as this is not a private forum and I’m allowed to write. Feel free to block me though.
Firstly: you calling a well written post as pretty much useless (not helpful) was rude from my pov. And one that’s filed under a thread, on a shitposting board of all places. For one reason or another, you saw no value in a post, but 50 others did. International Phonetic Alphabet is familiar to most non-native English speakers, so maybe the discrepancy comes from native speakers being confused, and rest of the world not? Idk, but I found your negativity towards the very informative comment weird, and the accusation that it was not explained in layman’s terms weird (because that’s what his last paragraph was). There’s only so far you can dumb things down, some effort and base knowledge from the student is required.
Hot take: Perhaps you were simply that one kid in a huge class that didn’t get what this teacher told? Comparing a random comment in a Lemmy to someone doing a job they are being paid to do is downright weird, as if they were somehow required to hit the same level of professionality. I kind of figure that we might hail from countries with very different schooling systems. Where I’m from,. students are expected to work, Tom understand, so that the information sticks better as you were more engaged, rather than getting perfectly chewed up info to begin with.