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Learn the Phonetic Alphabet (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/memes@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 2 months ago (5 children)

"means they are one consonant" is the perspective of the language's speakers, not of the actual sounds they are making. The former is a subjective matter, the latter is essentially objective. Whether speakers believe they are saying one consonant or two, a "ts" affricate always consists of stopping the air with the the tongue behind the teeth (the t) and then releasing it with a lot of turbulence with the tongue still behind the teeth (the s). Those sounds are physically distinct, even if speakers think of them as comprising a single logical unit.

This is also consistent with there being a slightly differently pronounced sequence comprising a t and an s sound which is not analysed as a single consonant! Both are two physical sounds.

In my language most native speakers don't realise that diphthongs are made of two vowel sounds, but they still are :)

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    I mean you have to draw the line somewhere, many consonants are composed of multiple articulotary parts that you have to perform seperately. Simple stops, or better called plosives, can themselves be unreleased for example which means a /t/ for example is already a closure /t̚/ and then the release of /t/(idk if theres a diacritic to mark a release cause you already need a closure to be able to release something) so a t can be analyzed as /t̚t/ which might sound stupid but with english some of these interactions are actually noticable with depending on stress and the speakers accent a final t can be many things like unreleased(/t̚/), released(/t/) or even ejective(/t'/). Of course its absurd to assume things like these are valid analyses in any but a few select languages but that once again means that how you analyze things matters a lot on the language being analyzed. Who am i to say a language doesnt contrast /t̚/ and /t/ word finally, if you try it out you can hear the difference. So yeah to wrap it up a plosive is made out of a stop and a release and so is an affricate except that the release is of a different manner, but crucially, at the same place of articulation. This doesnt mean youre wrong cause i still think its a huge problem in linguistics that we just slap some random ass discription on things without elaborating and assuming everyone follows the same conventions. I have the same problem with narrow transcriptions, they should be very accurate but ive seen some stuff narrowly transcribed in a way that wouldnt pass as a proper broad transcription. In some languages affricates function completely as a single consonant and in some languages it just doesnt me sense to make that distinction.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Thanks for this perspective :) Do you know of any languages which contrast released and unreleased stops?

    I guess a difference is that you can't really have a stop release on its own...

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    I am not sure of any but some english dialects might use i to mark word stress which could make it phonemic? Im reaching a bit here but i know i read some analysis of some english dialect doing this with ejective versus modal voiceless stops but i cant find it lol and its hard to find these studies and writeups, i usually just read them and then can never find them again. Another good candidate would be some asian, especially south and east asian language that often have required unreleased stops at the ends of words which sre required for your pronounciation to sound correct, so thats halfway there, now there just has to be one that actually contrasts them. But overall in most cases that i know of the release is simply replaced with something else, like in affricates but in some languages there are such things as oral(the normal release), fricative(those make the affricates), nasal, lateral and glottal releases. Dont ask me about glottal releases, i have no idea how those work, im not good with the glottal stuff but for lateral and nasal releases you can imagine what english does(depending on your dialect) with clusters where there is a t and an l or an n right after(idk if there are ones with n). You actually dont release those like in the word "atlantic" and yes we got em, wiktionary transcribes it as [ætˈlæɾ̃.ɪk], which once again doesnt even matter cause im sure a lot of people pronounce it that way but [æt̚ˈlæɾ̃.ɪk] would also be correct. But once again linguistics is a huge circle jerk, so never take anything seriously related to it. Theres the swedish sj sound or /ɧ/ which is a completely brainfuck but im not gonna get into it but basically they have a unique ipa symbol for a swedish sound that has like 20 ways of getting pronounced based on dialect and the sorrounding sounds, has something like 50 ways of being written(im not kidding here) and some of the most excepted ways of describing it with more narrow ipa transcriptions are humanly impossible to pronounce 💀

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah I think in English all consonant clusters would not release stops except the possible final one of the cluster?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    I mean the reason i gave the specific example i gave is because i know for a fact that thats very often laterally released but im not completely sure about other clusters cause i think they more often have a masked release which is not exactly the same. Its more like the stop is released but in a way that the next stop masks the release by already being half way through articulation. Once again nitpicking but an interesting note anyways. So yeah see how this quickly becomes a mess? This is why things are usually simplified but at the same time the people who simplified it will somehow claim that their simplification is the truth. Its a bit like physics where you have three domains of quantum physics, newtonian physics and relativity. All three are true but not at the same time. Newtonian physics is a very good tool but its an abstraction of the more complicated underlying mechanisms. But even when taking both quantum and newtonian into account you might loose sight of the bigger picture. Idk just my perspective on the matter. And this is only phonology, theres so much more fuckery in other fields as well.

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