When you revealed that beach, door, green, and blender were actually speech, store, screen, and splendor, I kind of had to take a minute lol. I'm used to linguistics and phonetics, but for some reason never had such a clear example demonstrated like that before. Felt like I was hearing those words for the first time once I realized that there were voiced consonants hiding about.
Thanks. You say "for some reason", but it's routine that people (including phoneticians) don't know how misleading the sacred old transcriptions can be, or else keep quiet about it because they're terrified of changing anything :)
@@marioluigi9599 well, the /d/ sound has two features: it's voiced and not aspirated (voiced consonants can't really be aspirated). The /t/ also has two features: it's voiceless and aspirated, but sometimes it becomes unaspirated, in clusters like /st-/ So to answer your questions. The first d in dad (and the last) is voiced (and not aspirated). And, a "d" is not an "unaspirated t", because an "unaspirated t" is not voiced. The main reason all this may seem confusing is because English distinguishes between both voicing and aspiration (in stops) *depending* on the environment. (which is not actually very common in other languages) For example: If an English speaker hears an "unaspirated t", they would consider it to sound closer to a /d/ than a /t/, since /d/ also lacks aspiration (aspiration distinction). But, if it follows an /s/ as in "store", they would consider that same sound to be a /t/ instead.
This is great! I'm a speech language pathologist and I get such weird looks when I teach an initial sp, st or so as s+b, s+d, and s+g, like "wait what are you teaching my kid?". But I've seen it taught wrong and then the kid ends up aspirating the latter consonant. This is easier to teach before kids have started reading, for obvious reasons.
I walked into a room where some people were sitting around chatting. One of them turned to me and said "Hey, we were just talking about you". I said "You disgust me".
I am working with an Italian singer who wants to sound less Italian in her English singing. We have been working hard for months to really hone in on how English is sung/spoken and your videos have been invaluable! I hope to have her releasing her first song very soon, and all your advice will be in every syllable of her performance, I can assure you. Thank you!
@@phonyzebra3848 Thanks for that explanation. For some reason, I couldn’t guess what “wota” was, but I should have. In California, ages ago, my 6th grade teacher from London would tack an R at the end the names that ended with an A - like how JFK called Cuba “Cuber” - the rule is “When you see an A at the end of the word, add an R where there isn’t one and drop an R if you see it at the end.”
This is fascinating. As a non-native whose native language is Spanish, I just realised I aspirate every p/t/k, even in those "exceptions" where I shouldn't.
There's videos around that explain when to aspirate those consonants. In my experience anyone who worries about their pronunciation usually is well above the norm. I have exchanged English with many Spanish speakers and usually encouraging more aspiration and explosive attack helps clearer pronunciation. I wouldn't worry about the p in Spanish as it doesn't cause confusion. You'd reduce it naturally as you focus less on sp not being esp but pronounce it as a consonant cluster. If you think about it not aspirating after an aspirated consonant helps make the cluster distinguishable.
Nothing to do with nativeness. This is grammatical literalization, and it will also happen with native speakers, in one specific condition: when they learn more English by reading than by watching pop videos. Normally a culture goes back to the written word to formalize its grammar. When you WANT to be understood, you INCLUDE the NEEDED aspiration, and that is what you do when you get frustrated, and anunciate. In English, because its so subservient to Latin and failed to invent its own alliteration, the degenerating, slurred words without aspiration don't have a symbiotic backbone going back to the written form. It's a weasely culture, explaining a lack of rigor or literacy as being "rich and storied" with all its complications. But this is not only a formality of neat expression, so as to sound pretty. It has actively made English very territorial and hostile about all it's little localisms, and this directly contributes to things like outright bullying people for an ACCENT. And not a foreign accent, but the slightest divergent "evolution" in the ways to slur words WRONG, and speaking like the people who support the wrong football team. This is the ROOT, of the sorry state of English-speaking news in this century. English doesn't prioritize BEING understood, but RELYING on others to understand THEM. This is why politics there is such a clownshow, where news constantly take statements "out of context" when they only MEANT anything IN context, because CLARITY IN SPEECH was not a priority. The only intention was to lead a rain dance of groupthink, to convince enough people that if you use enough weasel words, you can convince people to jsut not along and not properly scrutinize WHAT WAS SAID, only what party said it, and what they HAD TO be intending to say because it' is "what that party WOULD say". This has made America ILLITERATE to sarcasm while having it as their favorite past-time. You just say the SAME sentence, and IMAGINE that if the party didn't mean it, they were rolling their eyes and crossing their fingers, to mean the OPPOSITE. It is truly double-think in action. PLEASE DO keep using the aspiration. If you ARE native, DOUBLY SO, even if that makes you sound desperate instead of too cool for school. The UK and USA mooks might be happy to nod along and listen to news like it's the newest hit in mumble rap, but all the developed nations speaking expanded Latin instead of slurred English, are actually able to KEEP UP with things they need to be voting on, because they have their... aspiration. That's why they don't copy-paste Latin words with a T just to say it as D anyway: because they actually have a culture, and invented the EXACT alliteration that preserves their LANGUAGE. That's why they don't have to read a book ALOUD, like many Americans already do, trying to find the correct sound that the written word only "symbolizes". Look up US literacy rates. They actualy are FORGETTING which one is "discussed" and which is "disgust".
English is in the W. Germanic language family, it has some small Welsh influence (the odd use of I do + verb). There's Old Norse, Norman French, Latin, French, German, Spanish and Indian vocabulary. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool.
@@RobBCactive I’m not sure what you’re saying. My reading tells me “do” and “does” comes from Germanic languages. Or, are you saying their placement in sentences was influenced by Welsh? I can’t confirm or deny their influence by Welsh.
I second this, Although I was really hoping to see the 'peech' of "Speech" side-by-side with the word "Beach" as well, to see just how similar they are.
The audio samples/graphs on the computer were amazing. I finally understand what aspiration really IS. Because of how it’s written in IPA, I thought it was like a puff of air that came after.
@@Hertog_von_Berkshire That certainly would help 👍🏻. Though, one must really be careful, as to not pull off ”Artur Rehi”, who called it: ”Plosive”; saying that Estonian has no plosives, which is simply not true 😅.
Indubitably -- it's always eye-opening to see how the details play out mechanically, instead of trying to interpret through a mindset that's already been primed to see it a different way. Gonna be interesting when I get back to recording podfics and start paying more attention to my own waveforms again.
I work on the phone and I am a french native speaker but speaks mostly English on the job. I use the NATO alphabet to spell on the phone like Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta etc. The NATO word for p is Papa. You just made me understand something I never knew was there every time I would say papa, people would understand baba or bubba and would be like B as in Baby? No p like Peter. And I realized that when I over pronounce Phhaphhha people now understand. Thank you for making me a better English speaker.
And do you follow the recommendation of saying pəPAH, rather than POPə? Oh, and by the way, the NATO alphabet has two intentional misspellings, ALFA and JULIETT rather than alpha and Juliet. As a French speaker I'm sure you can see why.
I'm sbeechless! Using acoustic measurements to infer the degree to which two morphemes have become (non)integrated into a single unit somehow or to describe differences between varieties regarding this is a superidea. I guessed right in the mini quizz here, so I'll do the other quizzes as soon as I can. Thanks for sharing all this, Mr Lindsey!
You are extremely skilled. I'm only vaguely interested in language, however the almighty algorithm fed me one of your videos, and I ended up going down a rabbit hole of your videos, deeply fascinated, utterly engaged, and completely entertained. Oh, and I learned some things too. Your knowledge is amazing and your skill in using language to fully engage your listener is exquisite. Also hats off to your editor (I dont know if that's you or someone else). Thank you for taking the time to create and making it available so freely.
You know what, this video didn't convince me that e.g. "speech" is pronounced like "sbeech"... instead it convinced me that English has the same phonology as Mandarin Chinese when it comes to plosives, contrasting aspirated vs. unaspirated (both usually voiced) rather than voiced vs. unvoiced!
@@YunxiaoChu The main comment is true. Mandarin unaspirated /p/ /t/ /k/ /ts/ /ʈʂ/ /tɕ/ are not really just unaspirated, they have mild voicing too, and in fast speeches, they really tend to be voiced /b/ /d/ /g/ /dz/ /ɖʐ/ /dʑ/. Yuen Ren Chao (or Zhao Yuanren) noticed this a long time ago!
it is so refreshing and interesting to see these artefacts of English laid out, when I was younger I found it hard to spell correctly and I felt slow because of it, a lot was put down to dyslexia but I really think that the fact we spell words one way and say them differently and more so that the spelt words have clear connections with each other that don't align with different connections amongst spoken words. Also particularly in this case that the b p flip is also a visually flipped letter! It's clearer to me more than ever why I struggled, and how teachers where so wrong when they simply told me how easy getting it right was.
Mighty video as usual! Solved all my confusions about unaspiration in the 's + p, t, k' scenarios. As I see it, although the /p, t, k/ after /s/ are more aptly spelled as ‘b, d, g’, they are not fully voiced /b, d, g/. This is important to Chinese learners of English as they tend to make them ‘accented’.
I'm a non-native speaker and have never cared for my pronunciation. Only learned English through reading, listening and writing. I've never really had a good grasp of phonetics. So I was quite surprised of the sounds completely changing when you removed a specific sound in the word. It was certainly a shocker.
Dear Professor Lindsey, your profound knowledge and insightful analysis is just "sblendid". Thank you for taking your time to create such an important content. Also I’m a great devotee of the Cube Dictionary, however I’m still discovering its features!
I studied phonetics at university while learning French, German and Spanish. That was many years ago but I am still fascinated by the way foreign speakers pronounce languages. This is an amazing video that goes a very long way to explain their pronunciation and the way that native English speakers pronounce words. Having just tried pronouncing "speech" several times, I do realise I am saying "sbeech".
Oh my god this finally explains why my American friend who was trying to learn Hindi found distinguishing between aspirated and unaspirated forms of consonants (which, like, every consonant has in Hindi) so bloody difficult!
It also explains why I pronounce "disgusted" with a z sound instead of "s" - it makes the voiced g come out much easier, because I didn't realize that in "native" accents they were basically just saying c instead of g. In Indian English, we mostly use unaspirated consonants for some reason (except where we use aspirated dental t for "th" which is also an interesting quirk lol)
Eye-opening as usual. I've told my sister about these phenomena in pronunciation but she has been incredulous! Breaking apart the words digitally is useful proof.
As a native German speaker who struggles with final-obstruent devoicing being so ingrained into my brain that I find it hard to not only pronounce voiced consonants at the end of words but also often cannot even hear the difference, I find the example of discussed vs. disgust doubly interesting.
@@unvergebeneid That's what I love about German. And the method you invented for forcing the listener's to keep attention all through the whole loooong sentence - by putting the verb at the end, genius! And devious.
@@Medytacjusz technically that only happens with participles. The (conjugated) predicate of a sentence is usually always in second position in German. E.g. " Ich habe ein rotes auto" (I have a red car) the (conjugated) predicate is only in the last position in side sentences "Ich habe ein rotes auto, weil mein grünes kaputt ist" (I have a red car because my green one is) broken
@@keit99 I know, but the conjugated verb isn't always the most important to discern the meaning - in perfect and future tenses it's just an auxiliary verb containing just the grammar info, while the main meaning is carried by the word at the end (Ich habe mein Auto gewaschen). All in all, very often you have to wait till the end of sentence to get what it means. You could even say that the more complicated (and thus - longer) the sentence is, the more likely you'll be forced to wait. Beautiful.
@@Medytacjusz if you say it that way. Yes our more complicated sentences, we tend to call them schachtelsätze (boxed sentences), as they're usually a connected sequence of Individual sentences, more offen than not end with the participle in the last position or if the conjugated Verb is in fact Not the auxiliary word but the Verb carrying meaning, in one of the last positions of a sentence. So you aren't wrong about that part.
As a linguist and music producer, these things are very fascinating to me and I notice them all of the time. I also use software to analyze the patterns.
This video cleared up a lot about pronunciation in practice but also created a lot of confusion regarding phonetic spelling in my humble opinion. The reason why I write this, is because different languages have different ways of pronouncing bdg as Dr. Lindsey explained through the comparison with French. By means of writing "sbeech", I will personally naturally tend to not just unaspirate the b, but also strongly voice it, and it's going to sound nothing like the word speech in English. As a conclusion, we are trying to fit three different sounds into two symbols! Clearly displayed at 5:21. I guess this brings us into the discussion of different sets of IPA for different languages, which is a whole other discussion... (Native speaker of Dutch & West-Flemish)
As a native speaker of Romanian, I fully agree. B, d and g are strongly voiced in Romanian as well - and we would also have the tendency to voice the preceding s, like in Italian. A phonetic spelling using b, d, g for unaspirated p, t, k would make everything super-confusing. Romanian consonants are non-aspirated, but there is a marked difference between voiced and unvoiced consonants - no way would 'discussed' and 'disgust' sound the same if pronounced by a Romanian.
The NATO radio alphabet is often written as "A: Alpha, B: Bravo, C: Charlie," and so on - but officially, it's "A: Alfa" (which is a kind of grain), precisely because of this problem.
As an American English speaker, the name "Sbarro" (as in the deli chain, or the car designer) likewise does not sound like "speech" at all in my accent. Indeed the strongly voiced B pulls the S into its orbit so it comes out as something like "Szbarro" and it sounds a bit odd and obviously a foreign word.
I've only been watching Dr. Lindsey's videos for a short while, but I find his videos tend to generally get the point across but be imprecise in particular or special spots. If I were to cover this topic, I would first start with English stress then move on to t-allophony then use that as a jumping off point to talk about aspiration in unvoiced stops and affricates. It might take more than one video but it would definitely iron out the kinks.
It seems to me that for clarity, especially for non-native speakers of English, it would be better to change the transcription of “beach” to /pitʃ/, so we have “speech” = /spitʃ/, “beach” = /pitʃ/, and peach = /p’itʃ/. I think this would clear up confusion around the pronunciation, at the cost of less intuitive transliteration for native English speakers. And of course, that third sound, the voiced “b” in the French word “bas” just doesn’t happen at the start of English words - so let’s not pretend it does.
Wow, these videos are fascinating. I don't even know much about linguistics. It's always interesting to learn from someone who is a professional in their field. Good luck with everything and thank you for sharing this with us.
as a kid, learning to read english from the adults’ advice of “Sound it out” was always so tricky because a lot words don’t sound like how they are spelled and this video is such a great help in pinpointing that phenomena exactly
These videos are so interesting to me! I’m always confused in the beginning but I know if I just hang in there I’m gonna understand. You are a great educator!
I'm learning so much about the English language with your videos! As a native Spanish speaker, I fail to recognize most of these sounds, but you're making this so much more understandable! 😎
Amazing video, thank you so much. I speak American English and started having trouble in high school with spelling "significant" since I pronounce it "signifigant". The failures of transcription (because of prescriptivism, tradition, and monolinguist blinders) have always been very frustrating to me, and I'm so happy you are shedding some light for once on English as it is truly spoken and understood. I'm sure you have faced a lot of backlash for daring to question the orthodoxy and I appreciate all the care and effort you have put into visualizing and, um, auditalizing? the bare truth we all intuitively know but can't articulate except in an unproductive rant against the confounding and frankly nonsensical approach to transcription we've all grown up with. I can't abide systems that don't make logical sense. Your videos are restoring a piece of my sanity that I didn't know was lost. Also, I think I can apply your insights to Chinese. I am studying the language and it also has loss of aspiration of p/k/t in certain circumstances around word/phoneme boundaries but unless you talk to a linguist nobody will acknowledge this or they'll just gaslight you about what you're hearing when native speakers speak. (I don't say that lightly--I've seen posts on quora, not the top post but still much too high, where some self appointed expert gaslights you about the articulation of consonants in northern Mandarin, "oh you heard it wrong because of your native language has xyz, Mandarin doesn't have an abc sound".)
As a native. Sometimes we even botch sounds. Like as someone that is a southerner and eastern. Our K sometimes is a fricative in certain positions, mainly middle and last syllables.
Another outsdanding video, Geoff! I've been obsessed for some time about whether sbeakers asbirate the second /p/ in "postpone". I wouldn't exbire here, but of course others incontesdably do.
I say post-pone but I’ve definitely heard the t get lost… I’m trying to hear it in my head and I suspect we do get the p/b swap once that t isn’t in there to break up the syllables.
That's wild, I've always noticed that subtle almost over-emphasis on certain consonants by non native speakers but never realized what I was actually hearing
What a revelation! Your way of explaining pronunciation is so clear and easy to follow. This aspect of pronunciation had slipped my attention until I watched your video. Thanks for bringing it up!
Your article about this helped me hear these changes as a non-native, and now I feel like the difference is pretty obvious Thanks Geoff, you are awesome.
This makes so much sense, I'm missing almost all of my high frequency hearing range. When listening to people speak I hear all sorts of words that don't belong.
Brilliant as always - you communicate very specific information in such a clear and lively way. I always know I'm getting top-notch quality when I click on a video of yours.
I'm a Brit who's lived more than 30 years in The Netherlands and now I know why people think I have a slight foreign accent when I visit the UK. I've picked up the habit of what you call over-aspirating apparently :)
Awesome video. I ran into this when I started learning Mandarin, where (in pinyin) b/p, d/t, g/k (and also j/q, z/c, zh/ch) are all explicitly unvoiced and distinguished by aspiration. I was shocked by how little trouble this gives a native English speaker, since we learn that these pairs in English are supposedly differentiated by voicing, but actually the voicing in English is partial/inconsistent and the aspiration seems to be more important to our ears.
I am obsessed with your videos. I'm a native English speaker and every time I watch a video of yours I learn that I don't pronounce things like I thought I did.
Interesting stuff. I knew about this already, but I still learnt some new things. On a related note, living in Scotland, I have noticed that many (most?) Scottish Gaelic speakers interestingly also seem to think that their unaspirated consonants, such as the G [k] in Gaelic [ˈkaːlɪkʲ] is actually a [g], when it's just after a nasal that they become voiced. That it's written with a G may colour people's perception of it. I was trying to explain aspiration to my wife who is learning Mandarin Chinese, that while we now write Beijing rather than Peking, the B is still technically an unaspirated [p]. There is no /b d g/ in Standard Chinese. I don't think she quite got it, so the compromise explanation we settled on is it's a sound "between P and B", which, if you aim for that, usually turns out about right.
That seems more correct to me as I feel like I’m speaking these with a light aspiration on the P (I held a tissue in front of my mouth to watch for a bit of abrupt movement vs barely/delayed wafting with vowels.)
The clipping of the word start is brilliant, as well as taking a clipped pronunciation out of its context to almost imply a disdain/disgust to the tone of the woman saying 'discussed'. We all make assumptions all the time. And I love the way you're just playing with them.
My mind is blown 🤯 _Az a German English sbeaker, I thoughd I waz aware of our tendenciez to un-voice and over-asbirade, bud this iz sdill an eye opener!_ One of the reasons many eager German English speakers gravitate towards AE, because it gives you more of an opportunity to un-couple from the German pronunciation tendencies. From pronouncing the R in front of consonants to softening Ts to Ds. Those differences between AE and BE are something easy to pick up on. But somehow, the examples here are MUCH sneakier!
Fascinating! I mean, if you're already aspirating the 's', you need another vowel to aspirate the 'b'. If you haven't you should study Korean some -- they REALLY pay attention to this difference. The have a letter reserved mostly for that semi-vowel sound that English speakers make before or after nearly every damned consonant (or at least so it seems, when first you notice it). One comedian I saw said her Spanish mum always says "eh-soup" in English, but "sopa" in Spanish. I hear your example saying "eh-spanish". I've always wondered why that happens -- maybe this explains it.
These videos are helping me learn to pronounce words in languages other than English. They're also helping me speak more clearly for people who are still learning English.
As a native English speaker, one thing I really struggled with learning Italian at first was that, in Italian, if you have s+consonant, the voiced/unvoiced distinction remains in the following consonant but the pronunciation of the S changes. So for example: (/zb/) sbaglio = mistake (/sp/) spaglio = overflow My native instinct is to aspirate the s and pronounce these words the same. But that would be zzzzzzzbagliato!
I was aware about the rule that plosives after S shouldn't be aspirated, but always had trouble to apply it consistently, even if my mother tongue is Italian, which has no aspirated consonants (at least, the standard variety). Your video has made me realise that voicing is involved and also that the voiced plosives in English are different from French and Italian. I have a suggestion for the appropriate symbol to use for "discussed"/"disgust", which will avoid any confusion about fully voicing of stops affecting the preceding S. Just add the voiceless IPA diacrit and write /b̥/, /d̥/ and /g̊/. It's exactly what they are, after all: partially devoiced (lenis) consonants.
I enjoy these videos very much. I'm a native English speaker who has always had problems with spelling. If I had been thought spelling in a way, that explained why what I was hearing, and what the spellings are were different, it would have saved me many tears as a child. Hooked on Phonics was my downfall.
When I was learning this, some books I read that English should be analysed as the difference between "fortis" and "tenuis" stops rather than "voiceless" and "voiced". And one language that has this issue as well as English is... Danish. Transcription makes it intriguing. :)
i've been learning french on a language app for a while and i started learning welsh on it more recently, so when i seen the sb combo on the thumbnail that's the first thing i was thinking of
As a native speaker of a language that has [t] and [tʰ] as different phonemes (Thai), I prefer displaying aspiration instead of replacing [t] with [d]. I'd pronounce [sdɒp] differently from [stɒp] (, assuming I didn't know that native speakers can't tell them apart). It might not matter for native speakers of English because to them, they don't sound different anyway, but voicing and deaspirating are different processes for learners. If you mix the two, I won't know what to do with my throat. If I know that native speakers can't tell them apart, however, I'd probably say [stɒp] because [sdɒp] has that voiced consonant following immediately after a voiceless consonant, which is a bit harder to pronounce.
This was my gripe with the video, too; AFAIK, you _cannot_ realise [sd] without a pause, since that would be an unvoiced-voiced consonant cluster. It seems that the title/thumbnail merely uses respelling to grab the native English speaker's attention with an interesting "gotcha" moment.
@Bee Sixteen "I can say sd" I am sceptical about that. Somewhere you have to switch from unvoiced "s" to voiced "d", or insert a pause betwen them. My guess is that the "s" starts as [s] and ends as [z].
@@gerardvanwilgen9917 m and l are also voiced consonants yet the clusters [sm] and [sl] are possible. There's no reason why [sd] wouldn't be, you just aren't used to it
I'm under the impression that in many cases, Canadian English is a mix of British and American English. (With a bit of French - everyone I know (who grew up here) pronounces "foyer" as "foi-yay," for example). So the "fiftheen" / "fifdeen" example is really interesting, because I feel like I do both and switch between them depending on how formal I'm being.
Got 81% on the discust vs disgussed quiz as a native speaker, but i couldn't really tell - i was using other contextual clues just from the short recording - the emphasis on the word or the recording style - if it sounds like a meeting or presentation recording then it's more likely to be discussed than disgust
I thought I knew stuff about English pronunciation and then you come along and shatter everything with a single video... damn. I've never even thought of this aspect
This is genuinely insane, I felt like my entire life was a lie when beach, door, green and blender all had an s at the end :D I have genuinely never noticed this, because my native language doesn't have aspiration. Have to keep this in mind when I speak English in the future
This absolutely blew my mind. It's really something i have never thought about it's so unintuitive but so obvious once you notice it I love language and linguistics but this is completely new to me i thought i was pretty familiar with english phonetics...
I am a native German speaker and fluent in English as well as almost fluent in Finnish. What you say is a helpful tool for speakers of many languages to better get behind English pronunciation, but personally, since I am now (having learned Finnish, where there is no aspiration at all) capable of differentiating these sounds fairly well, find it a tad insincere to change to transcribing these sounds has sb/sd/sg respectively. Though the differences are subtle, I'd rather opt for always inclduing aspiration as a written out h, since that is, in my mind, the best approach both for otherwise monolingual learners of English as well as people who are used to both aspirated as well as unaspirated sounds in other languages.
@@noisykestrel Dankeschön! Bei mir war's halt deswegen, weil ein großer Teil meiner Familie aus Finnland kommt, ich hab halt an einem gewissen Punkt entschieden, dass ich aufholen sollte, was meine Mutter versäumt hat, mir anständig beizubringen. Ich habe eine Weile selbständig gelernt, dann habe ich entschieden, der Wehrpflicht nachzugehen (die für im Ausland lebende Finnnen optional ist) und jetzt habe ich sie gerade abgeschlossen und bin seitdem etwa B2-Niveau. Soviel zur Aufklärung. Und sonst so? Sorry, sitze gerade angetrunkenerweise anner Bushaltestelle, weiß nicht, was sonst zu antworten sei.
The one I always pick up with German speakers is "conversation": often pronounced with a voiced s ('z'). A German friend somehow always used to mangle "South Africa", although that might have just been her personal quirk. It would come out as "Thous Africa" ;)
@@daniel.lopresti yeah, you're absolutely right - since s at the start of syllables is always (unless it's a loanword or spelt with ß) voiced, that's why loads of people mess these sounds up. And the "Thous Africa" one - there'a a way more iconic version of the same mistake: "Queen Elithabess". It's even become somewhat of a cultural trope, an immediately recognisable staple of the German accent. A classic short comedy by Loriot from the 80s (or 90s, i don't remember) predominantly featured a news reporter stumbling over her words, in a very similar manner. Sadly, the people of Germany haven't learned, and even for her passing, news reporters keep messing it up. You've heard it all, Elithabeth, Elissabess, Elizabess, Elissabeth...
@@illusionlife9962 Really interesting, I'd never heard of or noticed that - despite being around Germans a lot. But it probably confirms the case I mentioned was not an isolated one or due to any speech impediment then :) We used to have fun with squirrel/eichhörnchen, which I can manage, but München is still really hard for me to get right (despite having been there several times). But It's completely understandable that most non natives would trip up on voiced/unvoiced th, except for maybe Greeks, Spaniards and Icelanders. I currently live in Belgium, and even the Flemish who speak perfect English for the most part replace th with t/d.
This is fascinating. I'm a native french speaker. When you started giving the examples I immediately went "I'm pretty sure that said *peach*, is he trying to fool us into hearing *beach* with the imagery?" and so on. Then you explained how it's very different in French and English. I had never noticed and yet I watch a LOT of content in English (mostly American English but not only, obviously given I'm here.) It's not that surprising that "discussed" and "disgust" sound so similar when out of context honestly. That's why context is so important. Even if I would maybe hear "peach" when a native says "beach" and I just have that one word isolated, I would immediately understand it as "beach" in an example sentence like "I went to the beach this weekend", because going to a *peach* makes no sense of course, and I probably wouldn't even notice or question the fact that I heard a P instead of a B. Yet another thing to make me self-conscious about my English pronounciation, I guess! (but also another thing to improve on, so thank you)
Very interesting. As a Pole learning Welsh (and already speaking Italian), I always wondered about the spelling of such words as 'ysbyty', 'sgarff' or 'ysgol'. Now it's all clear. Thank you very much.
Maybe since I'm a non-native English speaker, I hear the words with the removed S as a mix between P and B, for example, and different speakers lean closer towards one of the sounds. About half the times I heard "plender" instead of "blender". But it's actually interesting that I was taught not to aspirate after S at university. And with the words "discussed" and "disgust" I was able to understand which one was which. Your videos just make me think a lot, and I thank you immensely for that. Interesting how in German, which was my second foreign language at university, we were told about the phenomenon of voiced consonants getting devoiced (I hope I remember the terminology but feel like I'm not using the right terms) despite English technically being the more important language of the two
I could also hear a distinction. The first time, I even thought that the "beach" and "door" were pronounced very oddly. I could hear the P and T there. in the green and blender examples I couldn't hear them so clearly. Discussed and disgust are also clearly different to me.
Like RogerWilco, I heard a difference but I put it down to a regional thing. Kind of like Brits’ pronunciation of all the ‘teens sounds so odd to me. I got the example discussed/disgust backwards! I must have been using tone of voice more than actual pronunciation. I feel like I move my mouth differently for each of them. So in my mind I hear a difference. It makes me want to record myself and tear the words apart like he did.
I definitely heard at least one peach and probably one tore, with the other two examples being rather voiced. And could also distinguish between disgust and discussed. Now I can see I'm not alone, even if we are not so many. Well, the way of hearing things is at least to some extent due to phonotactics we're used to in our mother tongues.
I quizzed my kids (9 & 10) when the discussed/disgust question came up, we all had to listen to it about 10 times or so... but then it's like something "switched" or "clicked" for us, and then we all heard it much more clearly! We weren't used to listening for it, but I think it's definitely something that CAN be noticed, with a bit of practice.
Wouldn’t writing phonetically be very dependent on the speed of the conversation? Something I’ve noticed in the last couple of years is the effects of both how fast I’m talking (or self-editing while talking), and air support. It’s harder to speak with clarity when I’d try to get more information into a sentence!
Never had I seen such an interesting video on something that passes unnoticed to most of us, even to those of us who had a wonderful Phonetics teacher at university and to whom, back in the 80's, a phonetical transcription was a bit of a miracle, at least at first. You, I must say, take Phonetics to a different level, one I was not aware of. Thank you very much indeed.
As soon as I clicked on the video, I started writing two [counter-] examples of this I've noticed, but it seems you've covered them in the video! Fifteen/fifdeen (US/UK), and the Italian sb/sl/sd which you hear in words like slash, which they pronounce "zlash" (actually "ezlash", or even worse, more like "zlèsh" because of a few persistent erroneous rules that are taught in Italy - club hilariously being pronounced "cleb" because of some sort of extended hypercorrection which says that the English 'a' is more like 'ae', and 'u' is often pronouced 'a', so u -> a -> ae/e. Or at least that's my theory of how it came about). I don't know how my brain picks up all these things; I think it's just way too attuned to the tiniest details - which must be the reason for my more-than-passing fascination with linguistics! One thing I still haven't figured out, despite bringing it up with several people, is why French/Italian speakers have such a hard time pronouncing English words that start with a vowel. Ate becomes hate, even though they apparently have such difficulty pronouncing the strongly aspirated English h, but then they slip it in where it doesn't belong!
I've heard that accent of "sometimes applying the vowel conversion twice", but from a Dutch speaker when speaking English, like going one step too far on O: cop(British) --> U: cup(very British)/coop --> A: cup(American)/cop(American)/carp(British) --> [Æ or Ä]: cap(American)
@@lollllloro Interesting, not sure if I completely follow the example! I actually also speak Dutch (currently live in Brussels) but not sure if I've noticed something similar..
Omg! This blew my mind! I am a non-native speaker, yet I have always intuitively pronounced these words like a native speaker would - without the aspiration. But I never ever realised it was a thing
Despite being native English speaker and all the years studying English in school, i never realized how messed up it is until trying to help non natives while traveling. Then i came across the poem the chaos. And now this. I don't know how to help anybody with English
As a Thai, that really makes me confused because in Thai we have บ for B (always voiced sound), ป for p (never a voiced sound and always unaspirated), and พ, ผ, ภ for P (these are always aspirated). The B and the unspirated P are although very similar but clearly two distinct sounds; one voiced and the other unvoiced. So we never interchange them. I noticed that the Americans seem to pronounce their voiced sounds stronger and clearer than the British do. How do you say about that? Anyway, thanks a lot for your knowledge, Sir. Stay healthy and blessed!
Thank you. Yes, in 3-way languages like Thai it's usually one sound like French /b/, one sound that resembles both French /p/ and English /b/, and a third sound that resembles English /p/. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by stronger and clearer, but overall BrE has somewhat more aspiration than AmE because of words like "city" and "copy". The "t" in "city" is voiced (flapped) in AmE, but stays voiceless and may have aspiration in BrE. And on average the "p" in "copy" is more aspirated in BrE than in AmE. This will all be in my Aspiration 4 video, when I find time to make it!
With the store - door I finally realized how people always tell my finnish accent apart so easily. Like I know there's an accent, and have heard far stronger accents that don't resemble speaking english as much (as with strong german, russian, indian etc english accents), but I never picked up the exact details and reasons why you can tell it apart like you can even if it's much more subtle. Also the forever painful soft "r". It's either strong or just drops out, becomes almost inaudible. Which causes funny situations where in my ears my american friends basically don't even say the "r" or whatever other sound would be almost omitted, but when I have trouble pronouncing it and the syllables get just tied without that sound, they ask what I was saying because they could no longer understand. Despite to me it sounding like both dropped the letter and it was equally intelligible, they just did the drop smoother. It's also so interesting how learning japanese or russian in duolingo (it's in english obviously) is like making an additional loop where you have to first interpret the different symbols, but then you have to also interpret how an english speaker would interpret them, changing the whole romanization at times and making it difficult to do the exercises correctly despite knowing what's going on in the original language. That's also why, despite english having so much more material than any other language could for education purposes, teachers choose to teach these in finnish. Like the japanese class teacher in university was japanese and refused to use english, because she said it made no sense to learn like that. Partially because finnish people can pretty much pronounce japanese correctly from the get go as they read it, due to similar way of pronouncing things. Not that coincidentally, when I started learning russian the case was the same, it made so much more sense to learn in finnish than on duolingo's english, because not so surprisingly some words were totally familiar (that I had always thought were finnish words) and majority of the things were pronounced in a similar manner, "pronounced as written" as we tend to say. When you say that things get morphed when they get used repeatedly, a great example of that happening is in english speaking countries the time. Just last week a friend reported how at work there were two americans giving a course, and when there was a digital clock saying "half two", they thought it was broken because it was 13:30 and not 14:30 "as the clock said". English had just omitted "past" from "half past two" and thought it's ridiculously obvious the time is PAST and not halfway there. While omitting "past" completely changes the meaning of the words, but due to tradition it never occured. The same happened to the person when they arranged a time with a bank that opened at 9 am, the lady at the desk told the person to come "half nine" and the person dumbfoundedly double checked "how can I come at half nine if the bank opens at nine", to which the lady replied sort of condescendingly and tiredly "you come at nine thirty..."
I'm middle aged and never heard anyone ever use such strange language as "half nine". I've heard "15 of" and consider it ridiculous language such that I have yet to learn if its supposed to mean 15 before or after and will always just ask what they meant because so few people will say it that it is fine to avoid learning it.
As an American, that "half nine" thing takes a lot of effort to remember that is 9:30 and not 8:30. But that still doesn't trip me up as much as English "vest" for what we Americans call an "under shirt". That always takes me out of a story I'm reading, especially when they are talking about getting out of a jacket, then a shirt comes off, and someone is wearing a 'vest', I keep picturing an American "vest" or British "waistcoat"....
Oh this explains why I hear a strong ng-sound before G when a French choir sings "gaude" in Veni Veni Emmanuel. They're loading up for the strong voicing of the G-sound. Otherwise it would (in French as well as in Latin) just be a C-sound.
It would be interesting to look at whether there's an age gradient in who does and doesn't fuse. I (middle-aged Brit) fuse quite aggressively: unaspirated /t/ in "dystopia", unaspirated /k/ in "discord", unaspirated /p/ in "exponential" and so on. My sense is that younger BrE speakers are a bit more likely to unfuse those and aspirate the consonant after the /s/. The 'unfused' pronunciation that surprised me most when I heard it (this one was from an American) was "textile" with the second /t/ aspirated. The /st/ doesn't even span a morpheme boundary there AFAIK. (Not peeving, I was surprised and delighted at expanding my horizons, rather than surprised and dismayed :))
When I looked at dystopia on YouGlish, it seemed to be the younger speakers who fused, but maybe you're right. Re 'textile', the aspirated form is consistent with 'fifteen' etc., and it seems AmE does sometimes pronounce syllables after the main-stressed syllable more strongly. People can consciously or unconsciously get the morphology wrong. 'Tile' is an independent word, and the final /t/ of 'text' could be lost there, so in principle there could be a 'tex' tile' (in Scrabble?). The other day I heard a RUclipsr say 'inn[ʔ]atley' with a big glottal stop. Of course in- is a common prefix.
Can we use the narrow IPA transcriptions [ph](p with superscript h) for an aspirated stop and [p] for an unaspirated stop and simply treat [b] as an allophone of [p]? This will bring the English system more in line with those of languages in which voicing is phonemic and cause less confusion to people who are trying to learn multiple languages.
Another analysis: We have 3 voice onset time categories: 1. positive (phonation begins after release) 2. zero (simultaneous) 3. negative (phonation begins before release). In English the contrast is made between 1 and 2 and in languages like French, Italian, Greek etc. between 2 and 3. And everyone calls their bigger number voiced and their smaller one voiceless, but on 2 they overlap creating confusion.
I'm a native Chinese speaker learning English and German. Chinese consonants are mainly distinguished by aspiration, like /p/ and /pʰ/, /k/ and /kʰ/, /t/ and /tʰ/. When I was learning English at first, I thought English consonants are distinguished by the same way as Chinese, aspiration. And our English teachers told us that after "s", "p" turns into "b", "k" turns into "g", "t" turns into "d". So native Chinese speakers seem to already know what you're discussing in this video. (Ha ha, I'm joking, it's just a coincidence because voiced consonants and unaspirated voiceless consonants sound the same to native Chinese speakers.) And I also remember this conversation in the series "South Park". -Jimmy: Do you like fishsticks? -Cartman: Yeah. -Jimmy: Do you like putting fishsticks in your mouth? -Cartman: Yeah. -Jimmy: What are you, a gay fish? This shows that the "t" after "s" sounds really like "d" for native English speakers. I'm also looking forward to a change in orthography like those in Welsh language. For example "speak" to "sbeak", "sky" to "sgy", "stop" to "sdop". This will be much easier to comprehend for English learner all over the world! Oh and at last I want to tell you, Professor Lindsey, every video of yours is perfect! Thank you for bringing so much English knowledge to us!
Fascinating 😊 In Danish our very similar cognate words often have -b, where English has -p, and p's are pronounced as b"s, t's as d's and k's as g's. åben [o-ben] = open gabe [ga-be] = gape ( / yawn) læbe [lai-be] = lip håbe [ho-be] = hope landskab = landscape op [ub] = up klip(-pe) [klib-be] = to clip / a clip kryb(e) = creep stop(-pe) [s'dob-be] = stop skrige [ s'greegh-e] = shriek læk [laig] = leak stik(-ke) [s'dig-ge] = to stick ...
What a wonderful video. This was very interesting! I never realized any of this was occurring at all until I started to repeat the words over and over in my mind. Wild!
I have one question concerning phonology and transcription. Does English actually phonemically distinguish /pʰ/ and /p/, like Icelandic or Danish, for example (I read somewhere that Danish, unlike its relatives Swedish and Norwegian, has the distinction between /p/ and /b/ lying in aspiration than in voicing)? If so, maybe it would be more practical to transcribe words like pie and spy as /pʰaj/ and /spaj/.
So would we then transcribe "buy" and "abide" as /paj/ and /əpajd/? We get similar problems with Chinese, reflected in varying Romanizations like Peking v. Beijing, Mao Tse Tung v. Mao Zedong. IPA symbols are geared towards a voiced-voiceless distinction, but English really has a lenis-fortis distinction.
Oh my god, even "aspiration" is actually "asbiration"... 🤯 As a German native speaker with English as my second language, I just pondered over this "hidden rule" and found in it another reason why my English doesn't sound natural! I'd say this is just one of those things you do intuitively in your first language, like I can name the correct article for any word in German, even though I never bothered with any rules 😉 But when consciously learning a second language, I guess you tend to take the written word more at face value. Esbecially when you're trying to sbeak the Queen's English, where it seems like everything should be enunciated...
The main difference I think is that the other Germanic languages tend to keep aspiration in the root initial position even after an /s/, while English doesn't. So the Swedish word "mistag" related to "mistake", is very much pronounced with aspiration on the /t/, because it is still starting the root "tag".
i don't get it. i hear "aspiration", not asbiration, and "sport" not "sboard". just ask someone to say it with a b instead of a p and it will sound different.
I'm an English teacher and while I was teaching a Chinese student of mine a few weeks ago, she dutifully copied down the IPA for the word "sport" from a dictionary and then asked me, rather confusedly: "It's not a "sp" sound? It's a "sb" sound??" Had I not watched your video beforehand I wouldn't've had a clue that she was exactly right! As a native speaker I'd simply never noticed. Thanks for everything you do.
Fascinating. As far as phonetic symbols are concerned, I would use "P" for what is usually "B" and "P(h)" for what is usually "P". So I would write "P(h)ut", "Spijk", "petwijn" for Put, speak and between.
![Eminem - Fuel (feat. JID) [Official Lyric Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/t5H_CewqpKA/mqdefault.jpg)
Wow, this might be the best video I have ever seen on any particular topic. Congratulations!
Is that all you can say? 😂😂😂 Thank you so much! 🙏🙏🙏
@@DrGeoffLindsey 6:16 I can somehow tell them apart by the length of the S
@@DrGeoffLindsey Indonesian language is better
4:50 this is here to remember where I’m up to and on this comment cause it’s pinned.
When you revealed that beach, door, green, and blender were actually speech, store, screen, and splendor, I kind of had to take a minute lol. I'm used to linguistics and phonetics, but for some reason never had such a clear example demonstrated like that before. Felt like I was hearing those words for the first time once I realized that there were voiced consonants hiding about.
Thanks. You say "for some reason", but it's routine that people (including phoneticians) don't know how misleading the sacred old transcriptions can be, or else keep quiet about it because they're terrified of changing anything :)
they're still not voiced, but they are indeed not aspirated
@@sleepybraincells So is the first "d" in dad is not voiced, but the second one is? And both are unaspirated
@@sleepybraincells ...so the first "d" is actually an unaspirated t?
@@marioluigi9599 well, the /d/ sound has two features: it's voiced and not aspirated (voiced consonants can't really be aspirated).
The /t/ also has two features: it's voiceless and aspirated, but sometimes it becomes unaspirated, in clusters like /st-/
So to answer your questions.
The first d in dad (and the last) is voiced (and not aspirated).
And, a "d" is not an "unaspirated t", because an "unaspirated t" is not voiced.
The main reason all this may seem confusing is because English distinguishes between both voicing and aspiration (in stops) *depending* on the environment. (which is not actually very common in other languages)
For example:
If an English speaker hears an "unaspirated t", they would consider it to sound closer to a /d/ than a /t/, since /d/ also lacks aspiration (aspiration distinction).
But, if it follows an /s/ as in "store", they would consider that same sound to be a /t/ instead.
You are such an engaging speaker. This could be such a boring topic, but even my pre-teen daughter was fascinated. Thumbs up!
@Pez Sbeeger
i wonder if its weird that sometimes i say suhsh instead of such, i have a kind of australian and south british mixed accent.
Mind blown again. As a Welsh speaker it's fascinating to realise the (now) obvious reason why spectacles are sbectol etc. Thank you very much.
Thank YOU!
I always describe Welsh as a radically phonetic language, which is why the mutations are such a basic part of the language.
It was while learning Welsh that I realized how we really pronounce these things in English.
@@raizeld3294 interesting! I’ve been testing it out on my Welsh family!
This is great! I'm a speech language pathologist and I get such weird looks when I teach an initial sp, st or so as s+b, s+d, and s+g, like "wait what are you teaching my kid?". But I've seen it taught wrong and then the kid ends up aspirating the latter consonant. This is easier to teach before kids have started reading, for obvious reasons.
No. You're a _sbeech_ language _p(h)athologist_ 😄 Just kidding
I walked into a room where some people were sitting around chatting. One of them turned to me and said "Hey, we were just talking about you". I said "You disgust me".
🤣🤣🤣
@@NachsteNachdemGaming 5:47 doesnt really make anysense but
Nice story bro
what?
@@NachsteNachdemGaming "Disgust" and "discussed" are pronounced more or less the same.
I am working with an Italian singer who wants to sound less Italian in her English singing. We have been working hard for months to really hone in on how English is sung/spoken and your videos have been invaluable! I hope to have her releasing her first song very soon, and all your advice will be in every syllable of her performance, I can assure you. Thank you!
I do my best not to speak like English speakers. WTF is wota? Laura Norder. Drawring.
@@elemar5 in the US we pronounce water like wader, so you can only blame the Brits for wota, not all the rest of us English speakers
@@phonyzebra3848 I was using the word English as in the nation, not the language. And I won't blame the Brits for that as many Britons don't say wota.
@@phonyzebra3848 Thanks for that explanation. For some reason, I couldn’t guess what “wota” was, but I should have. In California, ages ago, my 6th grade teacher from London would tack an R at the end the names that ended with an A - like how JFK called Cuba “Cuber” - the rule is “When you see an A at the end of the word, add an R where there isn’t one and drop an R if you see it at the end.”
@@phonyzebra3848 that is just an accent in some areas of Britain and not representative of the whole
This is fascinating. As a non-native whose native language is Spanish, I just realised I aspirate every p/t/k, even in those "exceptions" where I shouldn't.
There's videos around that explain when to aspirate those consonants.
In my experience anyone who worries about their pronunciation usually is well above the norm.
I have exchanged English with many Spanish speakers and usually encouraging more aspiration and explosive attack helps clearer pronunciation.
I wouldn't worry about the p in Spanish as it doesn't cause confusion. You'd reduce it naturally as you focus less on sp not being esp but pronounce it as a consonant cluster.
If you think about it not aspirating after an aspirated consonant helps make the cluster distinguishable.
Eneko
If you say them fast enough some of the excessive aspiration will disappear, I think. That will require quicker English thinking.
Nothing to do with nativeness. This is grammatical literalization, and it will also happen with native speakers, in one specific condition: when they learn more English by reading than by watching pop videos.
Normally a culture goes back to the written word to formalize its grammar. When you WANT to be understood, you INCLUDE the NEEDED aspiration, and that is what you do when you get frustrated, and anunciate. In English, because its so subservient to Latin and failed to invent its own alliteration, the degenerating, slurred words without aspiration don't have a symbiotic backbone going back to the written form. It's a weasely culture, explaining a lack of rigor or literacy as being "rich and storied" with all its complications.
But this is not only a formality of neat expression, so as to sound pretty. It has actively made English very territorial and hostile about all it's little localisms, and this directly contributes to things like outright bullying people for an ACCENT. And not a foreign accent, but the slightest divergent "evolution" in the ways to slur words WRONG, and speaking like the people who support the wrong football team. This is the ROOT, of the sorry state of English-speaking news in this century.
English doesn't prioritize BEING understood, but RELYING on others to understand THEM. This is why politics there is such a clownshow, where news constantly take statements "out of context" when they only MEANT anything IN context, because CLARITY IN SPEECH was not a priority. The only intention was to lead a rain dance of groupthink, to convince enough people that if you use enough weasel words, you can convince people to jsut not along and not properly scrutinize WHAT WAS SAID, only what party said it, and what they HAD TO be intending to say because it' is "what that party WOULD say". This has made America ILLITERATE to sarcasm while having it as their favorite past-time. You just say the SAME sentence, and IMAGINE that if the party didn't mean it, they were rolling their eyes and crossing their fingers, to mean the OPPOSITE. It is truly double-think in action.
PLEASE DO keep using the aspiration. If you ARE native, DOUBLY SO, even if that makes you sound desperate instead of too cool for school. The UK and USA mooks might be happy to nod along and listen to news like it's the newest hit in mumble rap, but all the developed nations speaking expanded Latin instead of slurred English, are actually able to KEEP UP with things they need to be voting on, because they have their... aspiration. That's why they don't copy-paste Latin words with a T just to say it as D anyway: because they actually have a culture, and invented the EXACT alliteration that preserves their LANGUAGE. That's why they don't have to read a book ALOUD, like many Americans already do, trying to find the correct sound that the written word only "symbolizes". Look up US literacy rates. They actualy are FORGETTING which one is "discussed" and which is "disgust".
English is in the W. Germanic language family, it has some small Welsh influence (the odd use of I do + verb). There's Old Norse, Norman French, Latin, French, German, Spanish and Indian vocabulary.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool.
@@RobBCactive
I’m not sure what you’re saying. My reading tells me “do” and “does” comes from Germanic languages. Or, are you saying their placement in sentences was influenced by Welsh? I can’t confirm or deny their influence by Welsh.
Native English speaker here. This blew my mind! So cool. The audio clips and the example of "beach" vs "peach" was enlightening.
I second this, Although I was really hoping to see the 'peech' of "Speech" side-by-side with the word "Beach" as well, to see just how similar they are.
The audio samples/graphs on the computer were amazing. I finally understand what aspiration really IS. Because of how it’s written in IPA, I thought it was like a puff of air that came after.
Truth is, "aspiration" in this context is not self-explanatory. We need a better term.
The computer images really helped me, too.
@Donald Rivers Same here 👌🏻.
@@Hertog_von_Berkshire That certainly would help 👍🏻. Though, one must really be careful, as to not pull off ”Artur Rehi”, who called it: ”Plosive”; saying that Estonian has no plosives, which is simply not true 😅.
Indubitably -- it's always eye-opening to see how the details play out mechanically, instead of trying to interpret through a mindset that's already been primed to see it a different way.
Gonna be interesting when I get back to recording podfics and start paying more attention to my own waveforms again.
I work on the phone and I am a french native speaker but speaks mostly English on the job. I use the NATO alphabet to spell on the phone like Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta etc. The NATO word for p is Papa. You just made me understand something I never knew was there every time I would say papa, people would understand baba or bubba and would be like B as in Baby? No p like Peter. And I realized that when I over pronounce Phhaphhha people now understand.
Thank you for making me a better English speaker.
And do you follow the recommendation of saying pəPAH, rather than POPə? Oh, and by the way, the NATO alphabet has two intentional misspellings, ALFA and JULIETT rather than alpha and Juliet. As a French speaker I'm sure you can see why.
So it’s actually “pʰapʰa”
@@jeepien phəpHHAA
AT first I was like "nah he trippin".
2:30 in and im like "shiiiiiiiiit, I'm trippin"
I'm sbeechless! Using acoustic measurements to infer the degree to which two morphemes have become (non)integrated into a single unit somehow or to describe differences between varieties regarding this is a superidea. I guessed right in the mini quizz here, so I'll do the other quizzes as soon as I can. Thanks for sharing all this, Mr Lindsey!
A few corrections: acousdic, desgribe
achoostik
@@mavericktjo4548 another one: "acoustic measurements" = recordings ;)
You are extremely skilled. I'm only vaguely interested in language, however the almighty algorithm fed me one of your videos, and I ended up going down a rabbit hole of your videos, deeply fascinated, utterly engaged, and completely entertained. Oh, and I learned some things too. Your knowledge is amazing and your skill in using language to fully engage your listener is exquisite. Also hats off to your editor (I dont know if that's you or someone else). Thank you for taking the time to create and making it available so freely.
Same
> "Only vaguely interested in language"
It sounds like you've changed your mind about that. 😜
Btw, his "pink panther" video is also good.
*sgilled
Thank you so much for taking the time to write such a nice comment, and apologies for taking so long to respond. I do all the editing myself...
You know what, this video didn't convince me that e.g. "speech" is pronounced like "sbeech"... instead it convinced me that English has the same phonology as Mandarin Chinese when it comes to plosives, contrasting aspirated vs. unaspirated (both usually voiced) rather than voiced vs. unvoiced!
Huh
@@YunxiaoChu The main comment is true. Mandarin unaspirated /p/ /t/ /k/ /ts/ /ʈʂ/ /tɕ/ are not really just unaspirated, they have mild voicing too, and in fast speeches, they really tend to be voiced /b/ /d/ /g/ /dz/ /ɖʐ/ /dʑ/. Yuen Ren Chao (or Zhao Yuanren) noticed this a long time ago!
@@mottom2657 I wasn’t doubting
@@YunxiaoChu 🤩🤩🤩
it is so refreshing and interesting to see these artefacts of English laid out, when I was younger I found it hard to spell correctly and I felt slow because of it, a lot was put down to dyslexia but I really think that the fact we spell words one way and say them differently and more so that the spelt words have clear connections with each other that don't align with different connections amongst spoken words. Also particularly in this case that the b p flip is also a visually flipped letter! It's clearer to me more than ever why I struggled, and how teachers where so wrong when they simply told me how easy getting it right was.
Happy to hear that. Everyone's got different learning preferences. I really liked etymology and roots as a kid so that helped me a lot with spelling.
Mighty video as usual! Solved all my confusions about unaspiration in the 's + p, t, k' scenarios. As I see it, although the /p, t, k/ after /s/ are more aptly spelled as ‘b, d, g’, they are not fully voiced /b, d, g/. This is important to Chinese learners of English as they tend to make them ‘accented’.
I'm a non-native speaker and have never cared for my pronunciation. Only learned English through reading, listening and writing. I've never really had a good grasp of phonetics. So I was quite surprised of the sounds completely changing when you removed a specific sound in the word. It was certainly a shocker.
Dear Professor Lindsey, your profound knowledge and insightful analysis is just "sblendid". Thank you for taking your time to create such an important content. Also I’m a great devotee of the Cube Dictionary, however I’m still discovering its features!
I studied phonetics at university while learning French, German and Spanish. That was many years ago but I am still fascinated by the way foreign speakers pronounce languages. This is an amazing video that goes a very long way to explain their pronunciation and the way that native English speakers pronounce words. Having just tried pronouncing "speech" several times, I do realise I am saying "sbeech".
Rarely, you come across a book, a talk or video that imparts completely new knowledge. This is a rare thrill. This video was such an occasion for me.
You should probably read more informative books and watch better videos then
Oh my god this finally explains why my American friend who was trying to learn Hindi found distinguishing between aspirated and unaspirated forms of consonants (which, like, every consonant has in Hindi) so bloody difficult!
It also explains why I pronounce "disgusted" with a z sound instead of "s" - it makes the voiced g come out much easier, because I didn't realize that in "native" accents they were basically just saying c instead of g. In Indian English, we mostly use unaspirated consonants for some reason (except where we use aspirated dental t for "th" which is also an interesting quirk lol)
Eye-opening as usual. I've told my sister about these phenomena in pronunciation but she has been incredulous! Breaking apart the words digitally is useful proof.
I don't usually like videos. This video earned a like for me. My mind is blown and I learned something
This phonetic analysis brings learning English to a whole new level. Thank you.
As a native German speaker who struggles with final-obstruent devoicing being so ingrained into my brain that I find it hard to not only pronounce voiced consonants at the end of words but also often cannot even hear the difference, I find the example of discussed vs. disgust doubly interesting.
Oh yeah and that comment being one single sentence is probably also very German of me 😅
@@unvergebeneid That's what I love about German. And the method you invented for forcing the listener's to keep attention all through the whole loooong sentence - by putting the verb at the end, genius! And devious.
@@Medytacjusz technically that only happens with participles. The (conjugated) predicate of a sentence is usually always in second position in German. E.g. " Ich habe ein rotes auto" (I have a red car) the (conjugated) predicate is only in the last position in side sentences "Ich habe ein rotes auto, weil mein grünes kaputt ist" (I have a red car because my green one is) broken
@@keit99 I know, but the conjugated verb isn't always the most important to discern the meaning - in perfect and future tenses it's just an auxiliary verb containing just the grammar info, while the main meaning is carried by the word at the end (Ich habe mein Auto gewaschen). All in all, very often you have to wait till the end of sentence to get what it means. You could even say that the more complicated (and thus - longer) the sentence is, the more likely you'll be forced to wait. Beautiful.
@@Medytacjusz if you say it that way. Yes our more complicated sentences, we tend to call them schachtelsätze (boxed sentences), as they're usually a connected sequence of Individual sentences, more offen than not end with the participle in the last position or if the conjugated Verb is in fact Not the auxiliary word but the Verb carrying meaning, in one of the last positions of a sentence. So you aren't wrong about that part.
As a linguist and music producer, these things are very fascinating to me and I notice them all of the time. I also use software to analyze the patterns.
This video cleared up a lot about pronunciation in practice but also created a lot of confusion regarding phonetic spelling in my humble opinion. The reason why I write this, is because different languages have different ways of pronouncing bdg as Dr. Lindsey explained through the comparison with French. By means of writing "sbeech", I will personally naturally tend to not just unaspirate the b, but also strongly voice it, and it's going to sound nothing like the word speech in English. As a conclusion, we are trying to fit three different sounds into two symbols! Clearly displayed at 5:21. I guess this brings us into the discussion of different sets of IPA for different languages, which is a whole other discussion... (Native speaker of Dutch & West-Flemish)
As a native speaker of Romanian, I fully agree. B, d and g are strongly voiced in Romanian as well - and we would also have the tendency to voice the preceding s, like in Italian. A phonetic spelling using b, d, g for unaspirated p, t, k would make everything super-confusing. Romanian consonants are non-aspirated, but there is a marked difference between voiced and unvoiced consonants - no way would 'discussed' and 'disgust' sound the same if pronounced by a Romanian.
The NATO radio alphabet is often written as "A: Alpha, B: Bravo, C: Charlie," and so on - but officially, it's "A: Alfa" (which is a kind of grain), precisely because of this problem.
As an American English speaker, the name "Sbarro" (as in the deli chain, or the car designer) likewise does not sound like "speech" at all in my accent. Indeed the strongly voiced B pulls the S into its orbit so it comes out as something like "Szbarro" and it sounds a bit odd and obviously a foreign word.
I've only been watching Dr. Lindsey's videos for a short while, but I find his videos tend to generally get the point across but be imprecise in particular or special spots.
If I were to cover this topic, I would first start with English stress then move on to t-allophony then use that as a jumping off point to talk about aspiration in unvoiced stops and affricates. It might take more than one video but it would definitely iron out the kinks.
It seems to me that for clarity, especially for non-native speakers of English, it would be better to change the transcription of “beach” to /pitʃ/, so we have “speech” = /spitʃ/, “beach” = /pitʃ/, and peach = /p’itʃ/. I think this would clear up confusion around the pronunciation, at the cost of less intuitive transliteration for native English speakers. And of course, that third sound, the voiced “b” in the French word “bas” just doesn’t happen at the start of English words - so let’s not pretend it does.
Wow, these videos are fascinating. I don't even know much about linguistics. It's always interesting to learn from someone who is a professional in their field.
Good luck with everything and thank you for sharing this with us.
Every video, you have something new about English that I'd never noticed, even though I've always spoken it!
as a kid, learning to read english from the adults’ advice of “Sound it out” was always so tricky because a lot words don’t sound like how they are spelled and this video is such a great help in pinpointing that phenomena exactly
These videos are so interesting to me! I’m always confused in the beginning but I know if I just hang in there I’m gonna understand. You are a great educator!
I'm learning so much about the English language with your videos! As a native Spanish speaker, I fail to recognize most of these sounds, but you're making this so much more understandable! 😎
Amazing video, thank you so much. I speak American English and started having trouble in high school with spelling "significant" since I pronounce it "signifigant". The failures of transcription (because of prescriptivism, tradition, and monolinguist blinders) have always been very frustrating to me, and I'm so happy you are shedding some light for once on English as it is truly spoken and understood. I'm sure you have faced a lot of backlash for daring to question the orthodoxy and I appreciate all the care and effort you have put into visualizing and, um, auditalizing? the bare truth we all intuitively know but can't articulate except in an unproductive rant against the confounding and frankly nonsensical approach to transcription we've all grown up with. I can't abide systems that don't make logical sense. Your videos are restoring a piece of my sanity that I didn't know was lost. Also, I think I can apply your insights to Chinese. I am studying the language and it also has loss of aspiration of p/k/t in certain circumstances around word/phoneme boundaries but unless you talk to a linguist nobody will acknowledge this or they'll just gaslight you about what you're hearing when native speakers speak. (I don't say that lightly--I've seen posts on quora, not the top post but still much too high, where some self appointed expert gaslights you about the articulation of consonants in northern Mandarin, "oh you heard it wrong because of your native language has xyz, Mandarin doesn't have an abc sound".)
As a native. Sometimes we even botch sounds. Like as someone that is a southerner and eastern. Our K sometimes is a fricative in certain positions, mainly middle and last syllables.
Another outsdanding video, Geoff! I've been obsessed for some time about whether sbeakers asbirate the second /p/ in "postpone". I wouldn't exbire here, but of course others incontesdably do.
Thanks, Luke. I haven't checked "postpone" on YouGlish, but my hunch is that Americans have post+pʰone more than we do, like six+tʰeen.
it is post pone, but often it is posspone which usually breaks pos spone and so fortice sbone
I say post-pone but I’ve definitely heard the t get lost… I’m trying to hear it in my head and I suspect we do get the p/b swap once that t isn’t in there to break up the syllables.
That's wild, I've always noticed that subtle almost over-emphasis on certain consonants by non native speakers but never realized what I was actually hearing
I just finished 3 weeks of phonetics in my general linguistics class at uni and this video explains aspirations so well, thank you Dr Lindsey!
What a revelation! Your way of explaining pronunciation is so clear and easy to follow. This aspect of pronunciation had slipped my attention until I watched your video. Thanks for bringing it up!
Your article about this helped me hear these changes as a non-native, and now I feel like the difference is pretty obvious Thanks Geoff, you are awesome.
This makes so much sense, I'm missing almost all of my high frequency hearing range. When listening to people speak I hear all sorts of words that don't belong.
Brilliant as always - you communicate very specific information in such a clear and lively way. I always know I'm getting top-notch quality when I click on a video of yours.
I'm a Brit who's lived more than 30 years in The Netherlands and now I know why people think I have a slight foreign accent when I visit the UK. I've picked up the habit of what you call over-aspirating apparently :)
Awesome video. I ran into this when I started learning Mandarin, where (in pinyin) b/p, d/t, g/k (and also j/q, z/c, zh/ch) are all explicitly unvoiced and distinguished by aspiration. I was shocked by how little trouble this gives a native English speaker, since we learn that these pairs in English are supposedly differentiated by voicing, but actually the voicing in English is partial/inconsistent and the aspiration seems to be more important to our ears.
I am obsessed with your videos. I'm a native English speaker and every time I watch a video of yours I learn that I don't pronounce things like I thought I did.
Interesting stuff. I knew about this already, but I still learnt some new things.
On a related note, living in Scotland, I have noticed that many (most?) Scottish Gaelic speakers interestingly also seem to think that their unaspirated consonants, such as the G [k] in Gaelic [ˈkaːlɪkʲ] is actually a [g], when it's just after a nasal that they become voiced. That it's written with a G may colour people's perception of it.
I was trying to explain aspiration to my wife who is learning Mandarin Chinese, that while we now write Beijing rather than Peking, the B is still technically an unaspirated [p]. There is no /b d g/ in Standard Chinese. I don't think she quite got it, so the compromise explanation we settled on is it's a sound "between P and B", which, if you aim for that, usually turns out about right.
That seems more correct to me as I feel like I’m speaking these with a light aspiration on the P (I held a tissue in front of my mouth to watch for a bit of abrupt movement vs barely/delayed wafting with vowels.)
The clipping of the word start is brilliant, as well as taking a clipped pronunciation out of its context to almost imply a disdain/disgust to the tone of the woman saying 'discussed'. We all make assumptions all the time. And I love the way you're just playing with them.
My friend once pointed out that we pronounce "butter" like "budder" and I've never been the same since
My mind is blown 🤯
_Az a German English sbeaker, I thoughd I waz aware of our tendenciez to un-voice and over-asbirade, bud this iz sdill an eye opener!_
One of the reasons many eager German English speakers gravitate towards AE, because it gives you more of an opportunity to un-couple from the German pronunciation tendencies. From pronouncing the R in front of consonants to softening Ts to Ds. Those differences between AE and BE are something easy to pick up on. But somehow, the examples here are MUCH sneakier!
Fascinating! I mean, if you're already aspirating the 's', you need another vowel to aspirate the 'b'. If you haven't you should study Korean some -- they REALLY pay attention to this difference. The have a letter reserved mostly for that semi-vowel sound that English speakers make before or after nearly every damned consonant (or at least so it seems, when first you notice it).
One comedian I saw said her Spanish mum always says "eh-soup" in English, but "sopa" in Spanish. I hear your example saying "eh-spanish". I've always wondered why that happens -- maybe this explains it.
These videos are helping me learn to pronounce words in languages other than English. They're also helping me speak more clearly for people who are still learning English.
As a native English speaker, one thing I really struggled with learning Italian at first was that, in Italian, if you have s+consonant, the voiced/unvoiced distinction remains in the following consonant but the pronunciation of the S changes. So for example:
(/zb/) sbaglio = mistake
(/sp/) spaglio = overflow
My native instinct is to aspirate the s and pronounce these words the same. But that would be zzzzzzzbagliato!
One of the best teachers on RUclips
Thank you!
I was aware about the rule that plosives after S shouldn't be aspirated, but always had trouble to apply it consistently, even if my mother tongue is Italian, which has no aspirated consonants (at least, the standard variety). Your video has made me realise that voicing is involved and also that the voiced plosives in English are different from French and Italian. I have a suggestion for the appropriate symbol to use for "discussed"/"disgust", which will avoid any confusion about fully voicing of stops affecting the preceding S. Just add the voiceless IPA diacrit and write /b̥/, /d̥/ and /g̊/. It's exactly what they are, after all: partially devoiced (lenis) consonants.
My opinion is, just simply write /p/ and /pʰ/, /k/ and /kʰ/, /t/ and /tʰ/, just like Icelandic and Danish do.
I enjoy these videos very much. I'm a native English speaker who has always had problems with spelling. If I had been thought spelling in a way, that explained why what I was hearing, and what the spellings are were different, it would have saved me many tears as a child. Hooked on Phonics was my downfall.
When I was learning this, some books I read that English should be analysed as the difference between "fortis" and "tenuis" stops rather than "voiceless" and "voiced". And one language that has this issue as well as English is... Danish. Transcription makes it intriguing. :)
I've been a teacher of English (to non-native speakers) for a large portion of my adult life. You are amazing. Thank you.
This was so insightful, and the manipulated voice clips were really cool.
i've been learning french on a language app for a while and i started learning welsh on it more recently, so when i seen the sb combo on the thumbnail that's the first thing i was thinking of
As a native speaker of a language that has [t] and [tʰ] as different phonemes (Thai), I prefer displaying aspiration instead of replacing [t] with [d]. I'd pronounce [sdɒp] differently from [stɒp] (, assuming I didn't know that native speakers can't tell them apart). It might not matter for native speakers of English because to them, they don't sound different anyway, but voicing and deaspirating are different processes for learners. If you mix the two, I won't know what to do with my throat.
If I know that native speakers can't tell them apart, however, I'd probably say [stɒp] because [sdɒp] has that voiced consonant following immediately after a voiceless consonant, which is a bit harder to pronounce.
This was my gripe with the video, too; AFAIK, you _cannot_ realise [sd] without a pause, since that would be an unvoiced-voiced consonant cluster. It seems that the title/thumbnail merely uses respelling to grab the native English speaker's attention with an interesting "gotcha" moment.
as a native indonesian speaker that has the voiceless unaspirated and voiced but no aspirated, i do the same
@Bee Sixteen "I can say sd"
I am sceptical about that. Somewhere you have to switch from unvoiced "s" to voiced "d", or insert a pause betwen them. My guess is that the "s" starts as [s] and ends as [z].
@@gerardvanwilgen9917 m and l are also voiced consonants yet the clusters [sm] and [sl] are possible. There's no reason why [sd] wouldn't be, you just aren't used to it
@@johannesmikael6373 Or maybe [sm] and [sl] are more like [sm̥] and [sl̥].
Fascinating - and so many good reasons why the teaching of phonics in primary schools shouldn't be relied on too much.
I'm under the impression that in many cases, Canadian English is a mix of British and American English. (With a bit of French - everyone I know (who grew up here) pronounces "foyer" as "foi-yay," for example). So the "fiftheen" / "fifdeen" example is really interesting, because I feel like I do both and switch between them depending on how formal I'm being.
This video blew my mind so much that I now share it with everyone and bring it up when languages are brought up in a conversation.
Got 81% on the discust vs disgussed quiz as a native speaker, but i couldn't really tell - i was using other contextual clues just from the short recording - the emphasis on the word or the recording style - if it sounds like a meeting or presentation recording then it's more likely to be discussed than disgust
I thought I knew stuff about English pronunciation and then you come along and shatter everything with a single video... damn. I've never even thought of this aspect
This is genuinely insane, I felt like my entire life was a lie when beach, door, green and blender all had an s at the end :D I have genuinely never noticed this, because my native language doesn't have aspiration. Have to keep this in mind when I speak English in the future
hat do you mean "at the end"?
This absolutely blew my mind. It's really something i have never thought about it's so unintuitive but so obvious once you notice it
I love language and linguistics but this is completely new to me i thought i was pretty familiar with english phonetics...
I am a native German speaker and fluent in English as well as almost fluent in Finnish. What you say is a helpful tool for speakers of many languages to better get behind English pronunciation, but personally, since I am now (having learned Finnish, where there is no aspiration at all) capable of differentiating these sounds fairly well, find it a tad insincere to change to transcribing these sounds has sb/sd/sg respectively. Though the differences are subtle, I'd rather opt for always inclduing aspiration as a written out h, since that is, in my mind, the best approach both for otherwise monolingual learners of English as well as people who are used to both aspirated as well as unaspirated sounds in other languages.
Fließend Finnisch können verdient echt Respekt, die Sprache soll ja super schwer sein :D
@@noisykestrel Dankeschön! Bei mir war's halt deswegen, weil ein großer Teil meiner Familie aus Finnland kommt, ich hab halt an einem gewissen Punkt entschieden, dass ich aufholen sollte, was meine Mutter versäumt hat, mir anständig beizubringen. Ich habe eine Weile selbständig gelernt, dann habe ich entschieden, der Wehrpflicht nachzugehen (die für im Ausland lebende Finnnen optional ist) und jetzt habe ich sie gerade abgeschlossen und bin seitdem etwa B2-Niveau. Soviel zur Aufklärung. Und sonst so? Sorry, sitze gerade angetrunkenerweise anner Bushaltestelle, weiß nicht, was sonst zu antworten sei.
The one I always pick up with German speakers is "conversation": often pronounced with a voiced s ('z'). A German friend somehow always used to mangle "South Africa", although that might have just been her personal quirk. It would come out as "Thous Africa" ;)
@@daniel.lopresti yeah, you're absolutely right - since s at the start of syllables is always (unless it's a loanword or spelt with ß) voiced, that's why loads of people mess these sounds up. And the "Thous Africa" one - there'a a way more iconic version of the same mistake: "Queen Elithabess". It's even become somewhat of a cultural trope, an immediately recognisable staple of the German accent. A classic short comedy by Loriot from the 80s (or 90s, i don't remember) predominantly featured a news reporter stumbling over her words, in a very similar manner. Sadly, the people of Germany haven't learned, and even for her passing, news reporters keep messing it up. You've heard it all, Elithabeth, Elissabess, Elizabess, Elissabeth...
@@illusionlife9962 Really interesting, I'd never heard of or noticed that - despite being around Germans a lot. But it probably confirms the case I mentioned was not an isolated one or due to any speech impediment then :)
We used to have fun with squirrel/eichhörnchen, which I can manage, but München is still really hard for me to get right (despite having been there several times).
But It's completely understandable that most non natives would trip up on voiced/unvoiced th, except for maybe Greeks, Spaniards and Icelanders. I currently live in Belgium, and even the Flemish who speak perfect English for the most part replace th with t/d.
This is fascinating. I'm a native french speaker. When you started giving the examples I immediately went "I'm pretty sure that said *peach*, is he trying to fool us into hearing *beach* with the imagery?" and so on. Then you explained how it's very different in French and English. I had never noticed and yet I watch a LOT of content in English (mostly American English but not only, obviously given I'm here.)
It's not that surprising that "discussed" and "disgust" sound so similar when out of context honestly. That's why context is so important. Even if I would maybe hear "peach" when a native says "beach" and I just have that one word isolated, I would immediately understand it as "beach" in an example sentence like "I went to the beach this weekend", because going to a *peach* makes no sense of course, and I probably wouldn't even notice or question the fact that I heard a P instead of a B.
Yet another thing to make me self-conscious about my English pronounciation, I guess! (but also another thing to improve on, so thank you)
Very interesting. As a Pole learning Welsh (and already speaking Italian), I always wondered about the spelling of such words as 'ysbyty', 'sgarff' or 'ysgol'. Now it's all clear. Thank you very much.
"Ysbyty" being an example of same vowel, different sound. "Uss-buh-tee"
as a non-native english speaker, you just helped me a lot with my accent and pronounciation, thank you so much :))
Maybe since I'm a non-native English speaker, I hear the words with the removed S as a mix between P and B, for example, and different speakers lean closer towards one of the sounds. About half the times I heard "plender" instead of "blender".
But it's actually interesting that I was taught not to aspirate after S at university. And with the words "discussed" and "disgust" I was able to understand which one was which. Your videos just make me think a lot, and I thank you immensely for that.
Interesting how in German, which was my second foreign language at university, we were told about the phenomenon of voiced consonants getting devoiced (I hope I remember the terminology but feel like I'm not using the right terms) despite English technically being the more important language of the two
I could also hear a distinction.
The first time, I even thought that the "beach" and "door" were pronounced very oddly. I could hear the P and T there. in the green and blender examples I couldn't hear them so clearly.
Discussed and disgust are also clearly different to me.
Same here. Maybe because my native language clearly distinguish p t k from b d g and has no aspiration at all.
@@aarspar that's an interesting possibility, since my native language is the same in that aspect
Like RogerWilco, I heard a difference but I put it down to a regional thing. Kind of like Brits’ pronunciation of all the ‘teens sounds so odd to me.
I got the example discussed/disgust backwards! I must have been using tone of voice more than actual pronunciation. I feel like I move my mouth differently for each of them. So in my mind I hear a difference.
It makes me want to record myself and tear the words apart like he did.
I definitely heard at least one peach and probably one tore, with the other two examples being rather voiced. And could also distinguish between disgust and discussed. Now I can see I'm not alone, even if we are not so many. Well, the way of hearing things is at least to some extent due to phonotactics we're used to in our mother tongues.
I quizzed my kids (9 & 10) when the discussed/disgust question came up, we all had to listen to it about 10 times or so... but then it's like something "switched" or "clicked" for us, and then we all heard it much more clearly! We weren't used to listening for it, but I think it's definitely something that CAN be noticed, with a bit of practice.
Wouldn’t writing phonetically be very dependent on the speed of the conversation? Something I’ve noticed in the last couple of years is the effects of both how fast I’m talking (or self-editing while talking), and air support. It’s harder to speak with clarity when I’d try to get more information into a sentence!
Never had I seen such an interesting video on something that passes unnoticed to most of us, even to those of us who had a wonderful Phonetics teacher at university and to whom, back in the 80's, a phonetical transcription was a bit of a miracle, at least at first. You, I must say, take Phonetics to a different level, one I was not aware of. Thank you very much indeed.
As soon as I clicked on the video, I started writing two [counter-] examples of this I've noticed, but it seems you've covered them in the video!
Fifteen/fifdeen (US/UK), and the Italian sb/sl/sd which you hear in words like slash, which they pronounce "zlash" (actually "ezlash", or even worse, more like "zlèsh" because of a few persistent erroneous rules that are taught in Italy - club hilariously being pronounced "cleb" because of some sort of extended hypercorrection which says that the English 'a' is more like 'ae', and 'u' is often pronouced 'a', so u -> a -> ae/e. Or at least that's my theory of how it came about).
I don't know how my brain picks up all these things; I think it's just way too attuned to the tiniest details - which must be the reason for my more-than-passing fascination with linguistics!
One thing I still haven't figured out, despite bringing it up with several people, is why French/Italian speakers have such a hard time pronouncing English words that start with a vowel. Ate becomes hate, even though they apparently have such difficulty pronouncing the strongly aspirated English h, but then they slip it in where it doesn't belong!
I've heard that accent of "sometimes applying the vowel conversion twice", but from a Dutch speaker when speaking English, like going one step too far on O: cop(British) --> U: cup(very British)/coop --> A: cup(American)/cop(American)/carp(British) --> [Æ or Ä]: cap(American)
@@lollllloro Interesting, not sure if I completely follow the example! I actually also speak Dutch (currently live in Brussels) but not sure if I've noticed something similar..
Omg! This blew my mind! I am a non-native speaker, yet I have always intuitively pronounced these words like a native speaker would - without the aspiration. But I never ever realised it was a thing
Despite being native English speaker and all the years studying English in school, i never realized how messed up it is until trying to help non natives while traveling. Then i came across the poem the chaos. And now this. I don't know how to help anybody with English
As a Thai, that really makes me confused because in Thai we have บ for B (always voiced sound), ป for p (never a voiced sound and always unaspirated), and พ, ผ, ภ for P (these are always aspirated). The B and the unspirated P are although very similar but clearly two distinct sounds; one voiced and the other unvoiced. So we never interchange them.
I noticed that the Americans seem to pronounce their voiced sounds stronger and clearer than the British do.
How do you say about that?
Anyway, thanks a lot for your knowledge, Sir.
Stay healthy and blessed!
Thank you. Yes, in 3-way languages like Thai it's usually one sound like French /b/, one sound that resembles both French /p/ and English /b/, and a third sound that resembles English /p/.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by stronger and clearer, but overall BrE has somewhat more aspiration than AmE because of words like "city" and "copy". The "t" in "city" is voiced (flapped) in AmE, but stays voiceless and may have aspiration in BrE. And on average the "p" in "copy" is more aspirated in BrE than in AmE. This will all be in my Aspiration 4 video, when I find time to make it!
I would have NEVER figured it out if it wasn't for this video. Bravo!
With the store - door I finally realized how people always tell my finnish accent apart so easily. Like I know there's an accent, and have heard far stronger accents that don't resemble speaking english as much (as with strong german, russian, indian etc english accents), but I never picked up the exact details and reasons why you can tell it apart like you can even if it's much more subtle. Also the forever painful soft "r". It's either strong or just drops out, becomes almost inaudible. Which causes funny situations where in my ears my american friends basically don't even say the "r" or whatever other sound would be almost omitted, but when I have trouble pronouncing it and the syllables get just tied without that sound, they ask what I was saying because they could no longer understand. Despite to me it sounding like both dropped the letter and it was equally intelligible, they just did the drop smoother.
It's also so interesting how learning japanese or russian in duolingo (it's in english obviously) is like making an additional loop where you have to first interpret the different symbols, but then you have to also interpret how an english speaker would interpret them, changing the whole romanization at times and making it difficult to do the exercises correctly despite knowing what's going on in the original language. That's also why, despite english having so much more material than any other language could for education purposes, teachers choose to teach these in finnish. Like the japanese class teacher in university was japanese and refused to use english, because she said it made no sense to learn like that. Partially because finnish people can pretty much pronounce japanese correctly from the get go as they read it, due to similar way of pronouncing things. Not that coincidentally, when I started learning russian the case was the same, it made so much more sense to learn in finnish than on duolingo's english, because not so surprisingly some words were totally familiar (that I had always thought were finnish words) and majority of the things were pronounced in a similar manner, "pronounced as written" as we tend to say.
When you say that things get morphed when they get used repeatedly, a great example of that happening is in english speaking countries the time. Just last week a friend reported how at work there were two americans giving a course, and when there was a digital clock saying "half two", they thought it was broken because it was 13:30 and not 14:30 "as the clock said". English had just omitted "past" from "half past two" and thought it's ridiculously obvious the time is PAST and not halfway there. While omitting "past" completely changes the meaning of the words, but due to tradition it never occured. The same happened to the person when they arranged a time with a bank that opened at 9 am, the lady at the desk told the person to come "half nine" and the person dumbfoundedly double checked "how can I come at half nine if the bank opens at nine", to which the lady replied sort of condescendingly and tiredly "you come at nine thirty..."
I'm middle aged and never heard anyone ever use such strange language as "half nine". I've heard "15 of" and consider it ridiculous language such that I have yet to learn if its supposed to mean 15 before or after and will always just ask what they meant because so few people will say it that it is fine to avoid learning it.
As an American, that "half nine" thing takes a lot of effort to remember that is 9:30 and not 8:30.
But that still doesn't trip me up as much as English "vest" for what we Americans call an "under shirt". That always takes me out of a story I'm reading, especially when they are talking about getting out of a jacket, then a shirt comes off, and someone is wearing a 'vest', I keep picturing an American "vest" or British "waistcoat"....
@@s.h.6858 half nine sounds like about 4 o'clock to me. Maybe 4:30.
@@ethanlewis1453 Thank you for the laugh. I needed that. But now I'm going to see that mode of time keeping every time I read or hear the Brit.... 😀
Oh this explains why I hear a strong ng-sound before G when a French choir sings "gaude" in Veni Veni Emmanuel. They're loading up for the strong voicing of the G-sound. Otherwise it would (in French as well as in Latin) just be a C-sound.
It would be interesting to look at whether there's an age gradient in who does and doesn't fuse. I (middle-aged Brit) fuse quite aggressively: unaspirated /t/ in "dystopia", unaspirated /k/ in "discord", unaspirated /p/ in "exponential" and so on. My sense is that younger BrE speakers are a bit more likely to unfuse those and aspirate the consonant after the /s/.
The 'unfused' pronunciation that surprised me most when I heard it (this one was from an American) was "textile" with the second /t/ aspirated. The /st/ doesn't even span a morpheme boundary there AFAIK. (Not peeving, I was surprised and delighted at expanding my horizons, rather than surprised and dismayed :))
When I looked at dystopia on YouGlish, it seemed to be the younger speakers who fused, but maybe you're right.
Re 'textile', the aspirated form is consistent with 'fifteen' etc., and it seems AmE does sometimes pronounce syllables after the main-stressed syllable more strongly.
People can consciously or unconsciously get the morphology wrong. 'Tile' is an independent word, and the final /t/ of 'text' could be lost there, so in principle there could be a 'tex' tile' (in Scrabble?). The other day I heard a RUclipsr say 'inn[ʔ]atley' with a big glottal stop. Of course in- is a common prefix.
I don’t know how I got here but I found this super interesting!
Can we use the narrow IPA transcriptions [ph](p with superscript h) for an aspirated stop and [p] for an unaspirated stop and simply treat [b] as an allophone of [p]? This will bring the English system more in line with those of languages in which voicing is phonemic and cause less confusion to people who are trying to learn multiple languages.
Yes you can, though of course some people will be confused. It means 'cabin' will be /ˈkapɪn/, though the 'b' may be fully voiced between vowels.
Another analysis:
We have 3 voice onset time categories:
1. positive (phonation begins after release)
2. zero (simultaneous)
3. negative (phonation begins before release).
In English the contrast is made between 1 and 2 and in languages like French, Italian, Greek etc. between 2 and 3. And everyone calls their bigger number voiced and their smaller one voiceless, but on 2 they overlap creating confusion.
I'm a native Chinese speaker learning English and German. Chinese consonants are mainly distinguished by aspiration, like /p/ and /pʰ/, /k/ and /kʰ/, /t/ and /tʰ/. When I was learning English at first, I thought English consonants are distinguished by the same way as Chinese, aspiration. And our English teachers told us that after "s", "p" turns into "b", "k" turns into "g", "t" turns into "d". So native Chinese speakers seem to already know what you're discussing in this video. (Ha ha, I'm joking, it's just a coincidence because voiced consonants and unaspirated voiceless consonants sound the same to native Chinese speakers.)
And I also remember this conversation in the series "South Park".
-Jimmy: Do you like fishsticks?
-Cartman: Yeah.
-Jimmy: Do you like putting fishsticks in your mouth?
-Cartman: Yeah.
-Jimmy: What are you, a gay fish?
This shows that the "t" after "s" sounds really like "d" for native English speakers.
I'm also looking forward to a change in orthography like those in Welsh language. For example "speak" to "sbeak", "sky" to "sgy", "stop" to "sdop". This will be much easier to comprehend for English learner all over the world!
Oh and at last I want to tell you, Professor Lindsey, every video of yours is perfect! Thank you for bringing so much English knowledge to us!
Why learn German.
Fascinating 😊
In Danish our very similar cognate words often have -b, where English has -p, and p's are pronounced as b"s, t's as d's and k's as g's.
åben [o-ben] = open
gabe [ga-be] = gape ( / yawn)
læbe [lai-be] = lip
håbe [ho-be] = hope
landskab = landscape
op [ub] = up
klip(-pe) [klib-be] =
to clip / a clip
kryb(e) = creep
stop(-pe) [s'dob-be] = stop
skrige [ s'greegh-e] = shriek
læk [laig] = leak
stik(-ke) [s'dig-ge] = to stick
...
My English is not broked, I speak very goodly!
This is my new favorite channel! My husband is a classicist. So I’m excited to tell him about all of these things I’m learning…that he already knows 😂
My main aspirations in life are P, T and K
No need to pity K, it's a pretty popular letter.
What a wonderful video. This was very interesting! I never realized any of this was occurring at all until I started to repeat the words over and over in my mind. Wild!
I have one question concerning phonology and transcription.
Does English actually phonemically distinguish /pʰ/ and /p/, like Icelandic or Danish, for example (I read somewhere that Danish, unlike its relatives Swedish and Norwegian, has the distinction between /p/ and /b/ lying in aspiration than in voicing)?
If so, maybe it would be more practical to transcribe words like pie and spy as /pʰaj/ and /spaj/.
So would we then transcribe "buy" and "abide" as /paj/ and /əpajd/? We get similar problems with Chinese, reflected in varying Romanizations like Peking v. Beijing, Mao Tse Tung v. Mao Zedong. IPA symbols are geared towards a voiced-voiceless distinction, but English really has a lenis-fortis distinction.
Whole video was mind blowing, but the part that got me the most was seeing how many letters french doesn't pronounce.
Oh my god, even "aspiration" is actually "asbiration"... 🤯
As a German native speaker with English as my second language, I just pondered over this "hidden rule" and found in it another reason why my English doesn't sound natural!
I'd say this is just one of those things you do intuitively in your first language, like I can name the correct article for any word in German, even though I never bothered with any rules 😉 But when consciously learning a second language, I guess you tend to take the written word more at face value.
Esbecially when you're trying to sbeak the Queen's English, where it seems like everything should be enunciated...
How do you say "sport" in German? A lot of Germans and Austrians pronounce it "schboat".
The main difference I think is that the other Germanic languages tend to keep aspiration in the root initial position even after an /s/, while English doesn't. So the Swedish word "mistag" related to "mistake", is very much pronounced with aspiration on the /t/, because it is still starting the root "tag".
i don't get it. i hear "aspiration", not asbiration, and "sport" not "sboard". just ask someone to say it with a b instead of a p and it will sound different.
@@mikelward i say "schport". but in some dialects the r gets turned into "ea" or "oa"
I'm an English teacher and while I was teaching a Chinese student of mine a few weeks ago, she dutifully copied down the IPA for the word "sport" from a dictionary and then asked me, rather confusedly: "It's not a "sp" sound? It's a "sb" sound??"
Had I not watched your video beforehand I wouldn't've had a clue that she was exactly right! As a native speaker I'd simply never noticed. Thanks for everything you do.
Please tell me I’m not the only one who read the thumbnail and thought “who the heck pronounces ‘broken’ with an ‘s’ in front and no ‘r’”.
I love when random creators i know show up in your example pronunciation clips. Loved seeing Rowan Elis! Shes great
I HAVE HAD THIS QUESTION FOR FOREVER THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR EXPLAINING THIS
Mind absolutely blown, every video you posd clears up so many questions i had about english
Fascinating. As far as phonetic symbols are concerned, I would use "P" for what is usually "B" and "P(h)" for what is usually "P". So I would write "P(h)ut", "Spijk", "petwijn" for Put, speak and between.