Most Common Sounds NOT in English
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- Опубліковано 13 жов 2023
- This is a casual list of the 15 most common sounds that are not present in English, data taken from PHOIBLE...and Wikipedia because I'm an amateur
NOTE:
I realized that the alveolar trill /r/ does occur in some English dialects, and the Wikipedia page for "pronounciation of /r/ in English" lists 3 dialects where it occurs in, so it may very well not count.
Wikipedia also lists the "sinitic symbols" as alveo-palatal sounds, instead of pure palatal sounds. It's still a bit strange that this only occurs in Australia, and things from Wikipedia should be taken with a grain of salt.
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NOTE:
I realized that the alveolar trill /r/ does occur in some English dialects, and the Wikipedia page for "pronounciation of /r/ in English" lists 3 dialects where it occurs in, so it may very well not count.
Wikipedia also lists the "sinitic symbols" as alveo-palatal sounds, instead of pure palatal sounds. It's still a bit strange that this only occurs in Australia, and things from Wikipedia should be taken with a grain of salt.
So what'd be the actual 15th place
Really? I only found two
Here in Newfoundland we have some sounds that Standard English 🏴 has but we do not H is silent because of French influence we also use some words which we have and I shall give you a word and give it a guess what it means infleod
if /r/ weren't to make the cut, /ɟ/ would take 15th.
Alveolar trill does occur in American English
If only /🌋/ existed in the ipa 😔
/ɟɶː🌋əɲvt/
The fact that the IPA doesn't have the phoneme /🌋͡🇮🇩͡💀/ is so obviously eurocentric ughh
@@myspleenisbursting4825 I want to see someone pronounce this
@@Geogaddi173 me too
@@Geogaddi173the entire country anthem and then skeleton falling sfx
edit: or maybe it's the boom
I’m a Scouser and realise all these rare sounds that don’t appear in many other dialects of English might be one reason why many people don’t understand our accent.
I saw that too & thought is was funny
I was wondering where I'd heard some of these sounds before in English and yeah it's from scouse that I've heard. Geordie is honestly even harder though and my dialect is relatively nearby to them.
I can’t believe how you insulted us Krakatoans like that, although I wouldn’t expect anything else from a 🌋🌋💥💥💥
defo lah
Wow, it was weirdly validating to have you even say "Indian English" let alone consider it in your research. I feel like it's always neglected and discarded but it really is a completely legit "dialect" of English with its own quirks and features. Thank you LingoLizard!!
lol what it's one of the most distinct English dialects out there
@@patrickwienhoft7987it's also unfortunately one of the most commonly mocked
@@patrickwienhoft7987 Don't get me wrong, people are well aware of it. It's just that it's mocked very heavily to the point that people just reduce it to a funny accent rather than giving it any legitimacy. Even a lot of Indians consider Indian English the "wrong way" of speaking English and refuse to use certain phrases and pronunciations.
@@lordofdarkness4204Think of Raj from BBT being mocked for his pronunciation of mustache and things, then multiply that by ALL THE TIME
And it's slang
1:04 not until cursed conlang circus 3
I mean, maybe someone else will use it. But I tentatively have an idea for a different and extremely, deeply, truly cursed a posteriori. Do you remember the State Farm commercial with the French model...
My favorite is the sound «Ы» in Russian. (IPA: /ɨ/) It's sort of a combination of "ooh" and the "i" of "it"
and it really does, as one Russian UA-camr noted,
resemble the vocalisation one might make when being punched hard in the stomach.
Im russian, and i'd say it's like a declaration of digust aka "uegh" but more back in the throat i guess, it's super hard to explain bc it has so much to do specifically with the structure of the mouth + throat which im not too familiar with lol
My Russian teacher taught us how to say it by clenching a pencil between our teeth while saying "eee". It works!
No, it's pronounced like уй.....
I can dig it though. I actually have no problem making this sound. The main thing about ы is putting one's tongue and lips in the right place. Tongue makes a "U" (or is that "У") under the center of the upper palate, and lips are left open as for "И". Main difference is that the tongue for "И" is low in the mouth.@@ekatskatingrink
i would say when he pronounced the sound he did it kind of wrong and some general americans do use it in the word 'good'
I've noticed that native English speakers (especially from North America) often struggle to distinguish d from r in languages where the alveolar tap is the primary way to pronounce the rhotic.
Edit: They interpret an intervocalic R-sound as a D.
How very strange. D and R are nothing alike, one is clearly polosive and the other is not.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 The alveolar tap is often used where t or d would be in certain words, like bottle, in American English
I speak with a South US accent and when learning Spanish I very much struggled differentiating between d and r.
For example, in the phrase "What is it?" the 't' in 'what' is NOT an alveolar tap, but it sounds pretty close
@@SeaRobin48 I say bottle as /ba:dl/
@@Gueroizquierda "I speak with a South US accent and when learning Spanish I very much struggled differentiating between d and r." WHAAAT???
"For example, in the phrase "What is it?" the 't' in 'what' is NOT an alveolar tap, but it sounds pretty close" It does not. Then I again I speak like people in Wisconson.
Dammit, the eruption of Krakatoa is rock-related and is a sound, so it would've been perfect for this year's Cursed Conlang Circus...
How did nobody think of this???
I was waiting for the "pure" vowels /e/and /o/ that appear in many languages, especially those close to English (French, German, Dutch, Scandinavian, Italian, Portuguese,...). English speakers (except those from India) usually struggle pronouncing them correctly. Probably, they showed up in some dialects...
I'm mildly bothered whenever they appear at the end of foreign words, and English speakers feel the need to turn them into -ey/-ow. Take Japanese neko -> nekow, kitsune -> kitsuney. Or, if you want to really exaggerate the point, a fun alternative spelling is -eigh/-ough; kitsuneigh, nekough.
some scottish accents dont diphthongize those sounds
There are quite a few accents of English that have those, e.g. some Northern English accents have them for FACE and GOAT respectively.
@@KittyKatalina Honestly as an English speaker, we generally don't even realize we're doing it. Most of us can't really isolate e or o. I'd say a lot of English speakers can't even hear the difference.
@@KittyKatalina Always hear that with Spanish, not a fan
Spanish has a minimal pair between /nj/ and /ɲ/: unión (union) and uñón (big toenail). However, Spanish quinientos (500) is pronounced with /nj/ while Portuguese quinhentos is pronounced with /ɲ/.
Nh in portuguese is more widely pronounced as /j̃/ intead of /ɲ/
@@HYrBatata In Brazilian Portuguese, in Portugal it is very much the /ɲ/ sound.
@@quietcat That's why I said the most widely pronounced
Ah yes, I can imagine it causes trouble in Spanish history classes when they talk about the 'soviet big toenail'
@@quietcat Well, at least for the Portuguese content online (like news broadcast) I've heard, /j̃/ definitely happens commonly!
Maybe older people and/or from Northern Portugal still pronounce it as /ɲ/, though.
Also, I'd like to point out that the /j̃/ for "nh" is not an inovation, as Old Portuguese orthography indicates.
For example:
dēnārius -> dĩeiro -> dinheiro
pīnum -> pĩo -> pinho
nīdus -> nĩo -> ninho
mea -> mĩa -> minha
tẽía (from Latin root "tenere") -> tĩía -> tinha
Technically /ȶ/ and /c/ aren't the same phone; /ȶ/ represents an alveolo-palatal plosive while /c/ is a pure palatal plosive. However almost no language makes a distinction and often /ȶ/ is written as /c/ outside of Pama-Nyungan languages. The only languages I could find that distinguish them are Migueleño Chiquitano and Yanyuwa. Still an excellent video!
And it's funny how he said /c/ as if it where only be able to pronounced on one way as s very close thing to /kʲ/. When it also can be very close to /tʲ/.
As a person from Lincolnshire I’m super happy you wrote us down in the list of English dialects 😂, the midlands in general is often forgotten about when talking about English dialects
I’d say Janner gets more forgotten about than the midlands in terms of accents 😂 I think it’s the first time I’ve seen someone distinguish it from “westcountry”
me, a geordie: 😐
Yorkshire alone could be broken up into significantly differing dialects, but for sure there's just so many dialects in England. Most are now mixing significantly more though
@@THE_funnyalt literally one of the most well known English dialects, sad times 😞
@@marcelgrabowski8706 ye that’s true 😂 it’s very specific
No *discovered* language on Earth has the eruption of supervolcano Krakatoa as a spoken sound
Now I'm curious as to which languages (both living and dead) have the greatest variety of phonemes, as well as the language that has the least phonemes. That would be an interesting thing to compare.
A Japanese linguistics hobbyist, "minerva scientia", actually made a video of exactly that
@@jacquelineliu2641 fascinating! Looks like I'll be checking that out. Thanks!
the Caucasian languages tend to have super large consonant inventories, and so do click languages
@@me0101001000 As I suspected, YT ate my second reply with the video link. (That was why I sent the first reply separately.)
The title of the video is "発音が世界一ヤバい言語いろいろ", which roughly translates to "Various languages with craziest sounds". I guess you'll have to copy my comment on the web version and search that.
@@EosinophyllisI doubt they'll have the greatest variety of phonemes since while they do have a lot it's mostly just secondarily articulated consonants.
(11:50) When I've heard English speakers trying to say /ɲ/, they often say it as something like /ni/. I've even heard some claim "it's the sound the knight of Ni makes" when it isn't.
So instead of: es-pa-ñol (3 syllables), it becomes es-pa-ni-ol (4 syllables). Same with Polish dzień /d͡ʑɛɲ/, a single-syllable word, becoming dze-ni, two syllables.
I wouldn't go that far, but I still don't hear any difference between the sound I hear and [nj]. 11:44 It sounds close enough to me! That's [nj], not [ni]. I don't claim an extra syllable for the [j]; it's a consonant, not a vowel.
as a person from Spain I can confirm that the British and USA tourists often break the "ñ" into 2 separate sounds, /ɛs-pʰa-ni-oʊł/ sounds like the most accurate way of describing how they pronounce "español"
@@osasunaitor Does the "ñ" sound appear before a consonant or at the word's end in Spanish?
@@user-bi4eo3ys1f no it doesn't. It does in Catalan though
The "Sinitic palatals" you were mentioning are actually *alveolo* -palatal consonants.
They sound eerily similar and are pronounced almost in the same area but they are still distinct since you raise the tip of your tongue for the alveolo-palatal sounds just a little bit.
As a German, I can tell you that our (palatal) is still different from the Poles' (alveolo-palatal) and every German and Pole who pay close attention can tell those sounds apart.
i've heard the slavic alveolo palatals might even be slightly retroflex? i speak russiand and the sh-like sound definitely doesn't sound like the one in english to me
@@selladore4911 Yeah, Russian (sha) is retroflex. (scha), on the other hand, is alveolo-palatal like the Polish , but it's longer (or doubled, as some pronounce it). English is palato-alveolar (I don't know about Indian or Singaporean English, but at least in other varieties).
As a Pole I don't think our "ś" is alveolo-palatal, AFAIK it's the palatal sibilant fricative /ɕ/, and the German "ch" is the non-sibilant fricative /ç/. Either that or I just can't make and imagine the palatal sounds like those of Polish further from being alveolar than they are. While I can perfectly fine distinguish between Polish "ś" and German "ch", I can't say the same for the supposed palatal - alveolo-palatal split.
Edit: Ok, I've read a bit, and it indeed seems like they are considered alveolo-palatal, however, IMO the "sub-palatal" distinction is really only useful when those sounds are contrasted with some other palatals of the same manner of articulation (as does Irish, apparently, which twists my brain). From what I see it is very rare though, and thus alveolo-... are commonly described as just palatals. To me at least, it seems less confusing.
@@selladore4911 That's yet another thing. In Polish there's the "ś" and the "sz", those are distinct sounds, none of which sound exactly like English "sh". AFAIK the "sz" is roughly the same as the Russian "ш", and yes, that is the retroflex /ʂ/ (although in Russian it can get more complicated, it seems). The "ś" on the other hand is the (alveolo-)palatal /ɕ/. The English "sh" is the post-alveolar /ʃ/, which can be roughly described as a sound in between the "ś" and "sz".
about the U with bar... pretty certain a lot of British people realise their U's like that as well
Yeah they even included an example of a UK dialect with the sound at 4:00 without realising
I'm from the southern US and my /u/ is definitely a central vowel, if not an outright front vowel.
my native language haz /u/ & iv never heard an english speaker uze /u/ except for l vocalizing dialects. infact i think we should start transcribing the goose vowel az /ʉ:/ since l vocalizing dialects have true /u:/
As a native English speaker I couldn’t agree more. I know a lot of people who really struggle with [u] in other languages, and others who on the flipside have L-vocalisation and thus a complete [ʉː uː] distinction in pairs like TOO/TOOL
-Oddly enough /ɟ/ exists in Aussie English, and for all I know it appears to be the only major english dialect to do so.-
Turns out it does not appear, heck it actually has way less sounds than most english dialects, which is odd.
Lisening to Perun Ive never heard it.
In what context?
Interesting. How so?
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714Nice seeing another Perun enjoyer here haha
please do tell, I'm Australian and can't think of any examples.
I want make conlang that contain explosion of Krakatoa as phoneme!
Me an Indonesian:
Someone call ŋə!
@@mollof7893 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Similarly enough, [ ɲ ] being simplified to /nj/ is also how Filipino borrows "ñ" from Spanish in speech iirc
[ ɲ ] exists as a phoneme in Spanish as "ñ", but Filipino doesn't have that phone. So when we use loanwords from Spanish, we simplify [ ɲ ] into /nj/ to fit with our phonology. Overtime /nj/ ended up becoming Filipino's realization of "ñ" which spelled "ny" in loaned versions.
Examples include (SP -> FIL):
piña -> pinya "pineapple"
años -> anyos "years old" (only used in this context)
señales -> (mga) senyales "sign/s" (Filipino's plural marker is a seperate word so it is singular without it)
Edit: fixed grammar mistakes and wording
Same with (/ʎ/ -> [lj]), silla -> silya.
Pathetic.
It is more annoying when english people say that ñ and ny are the same thing
And same with ll(nh and lh in portuguese)
@@eneaganh6319I mean, "ny" is the spelling convention in English for the ñ sound. It doesn't come up very often, and probably only in loan words from Spanish (such as canyon or pinyon), but it exists. In French, the sound is spelled "gn", which interestingly enough probably means that words like "sign" were once pronounced with an ñ.
Im from Romania and im sorry to say but our slavic i is not pronounced like in the video😅 I needed to double check if we are talking about the same sound. I understand tho, a lot of non-slavic countries struggle to pronounce this vowel 👌
As much as I like the video, I will admit, he pronounced most of the non-English sounds incorrectly. /c/ being a notable one for me. But he can get a pass, since it's not native for him
Nu știam că ,,i" ar fii așa greu de zis
@@PurpleBroadcast Nu e vorba de i, e vorba de î/â.
Isn't romanian a romance language, related to italian, french, spanish, portuguese and latin?
More the East Slavic group; Ukrainian and Belarusian pronunciation of и
9:40
That math isn't necessarily correct. Unless you know that the languages with one of those phonemes definitely don't have the other, all you can say for sure is that the respective phonemes alone appear in some languages. For example, it's possible that many of the languages with /c/ also have /ȶ/. Hypothetically, let's say that all my just-now-made-up conlangs have both /c/ and /ȶ/. 100% of these conlangs have /c/, and 100% of them have /ȶ/. It would be illogical to say that 200% of my languages have either of them.,
"No language has the eruption of Krakatoa as a sound" *takes notes for next Cursed Conlang Circus*
I think that the Brits invented the term "cheeky" specifically to describe your style. Perfect blend of informative and deadpan low key hilarious. Ma meaning antidisestablishmentarianism slayed me. Thanks for the laugh! I look forward to the next one.
This video is already super informative, but I just wanna appreciate how you manage to pronounce each sound perfectly! Super impressive from the perspective of someone who is a native English speaker and can't roll their rs 😂
I grew up in the UK's Black Country which doesn't have a glottal stop, but have lived for nearly 45 years down in the South East, which does. I now say waw'er for water, and like your example, Bri'ish for British - stuff like that. So the people down South think I still sound like a Black Country lad (and immediately knock 10 points off my IQ because of it), but my friends from the place of my birth think I sound like a Southerner (and immediately knock 10 points off my IQ because of it).
You can't win!
ah yes, the eternal curse of mixing dialects - EVERYONE thinks you're foreign
I've lived up north for nearly two decades and have picked up some of the accent but people still think I'm 'posh' because I grew up in the South East 🤷
just learn a condialect so nobody can make assumptions about your intelligance based on your accent /j
VERY pleased to see that my native dialect of Scouse features heavily in the "excepted dialects" where you will hear sounds uncommon to standard English. Including gutturals K and G, the trilled and tapped R sounds (second on the lost)
We also have number 11 on this list as a soft g as well as a palatialised k sound similar to number 3 on the list.
I grew up in Seattle, which was named after Chief Seattle. He was
also called Sealth. His actual name contained a “glottllized barred lambda”. Both the tl and th sounds were attempts to notate this but it also contains an s quality. I have read that Sealsch would be closer.
Hiberno English has a range of /r/ allophones, such as the alveolar r, trill, uvular fricative, and uvular trill, (and more rarely, both a velar tap and slender r from irish).
Scottish English, older RP speakers, and speakers from South Africa would exhibit the rolling r to varying degrees.
As a Swede, I was half expecting the "long e" vowel to be on the list since anglophones stereotypically struggle with it when they learn Swedish (or other languages which have it, like Japanese). Might appear in >3 dialects though, depending on how many flavours of "oop narth" you have on your list (and it might occur in the standardized form of Indian English as well depending on how their vowels are officially pronounced, I don't know).
I think vowels don't appear here much as english dialects have a giant variativity of them, so for any stereotypically difficult vowel you can find 3 dialects that have it
Or final E like Swedish short E, which in English is realised as a diphthong. So "kitsune" becomes "kitsunei".
Well, english speakers (and lot of indo-european speakers) usually struggle with making a difference between short and long vowels, because for them it's just a stressed sound, while lot of other languages has phonemic vowel lenght. But for english speakers it's also true that they struggle with long consonants.
@@tovarishcheleonora8542 Non-rhotic dialects usually have at least one or two pairs of vowels distinguished largely or entirely by length. Contemporary English “bed” and “bared” is probably the strongest example.
@@lamudri But just because a very few dialects you can't say that english as a whole language has phonemic vowel length.
And i'm pretty sure that those dialectal vowel length features has a lot to do with where the stress is, since english is a stress-timed language, so we shouldn't call that phonetic vowel length.
I believe the alveolar trill /r/ actually does occur in dialects of AAVE, whenever there are two or more alveolar taps in a row (separated by vowel). An example of this is "what did I do" in which the alveolar taps in "did" merge to form something like "wharrido"
You can look up "what did I do" on YT to see what I mean
oh thats fascinating!
OMG I’ve been talking about this for like a year now and could not find any other readings on this. I’ve noticed it mainly in AAVE accents along the East cost and some places in the southeast/south (I only say some cause I’ve never heard this trill where I live in DFW, Texas, if you consider that south). The BEST, most APPARENT example of this in the song “Jonny Dang” by That Mexican OT where he’ll trill the alveolar taps in lines like “I’m a DirTy Bay baby from DirTy Bay with a DirTy K”, “Slide down your block, lighT iT up with flames”, or “Yoppers and choppers, lil’ bitch, I goTTa whole loTTa that”. He’ll even do this interesting thing where he’ll sometimes spit a singular alveolar tap into 2, so a word like “Cadillac” will be pronounced “CaDDillac” with an alveolar trill.
@@yngmekayes &idk why but I've never been able to find anything at all about it online either, like there's no way I'm the only one who's noticed this lol. I rember that was my first impression of the song too, I think he maybe dies it from Spanish/Mexican influence as that's a prominent sound in Spanish same for the rest of the sw
I think he mighta been exaggerating it on purpose but I've noticed myself do it a couple times on accident, prolly just from hearing it so much.
alveolar tap [ɾ] does exist as an allophone of /d/ intervocalically in some English dialect. It's basically shorter version of the trill
I’d argue /x/ doesn’t count as an English phoneme because it’s only used in Gaelic words in Ireland and Scotland (or certain other foreign words, such as Yiddish) so it’s basically foreign, whereas the glottal stop is an English phoneme because it’s used in native English words.
Это ошибка, "x" используется в славянских языках, а вот в остальных она звучит глубже и более хрипло (заглавная "X"), как французская глухая "R".
It is used in Scouse
@@PATRICKSMITH1 Scouse = English with the High German Consonant Shift
I think "night" is pronounced as it is spelled in a lot of non Gaelic parts of Scotland.
@@Allan_son I’ve never been to Scotland and I do wonder if Scots is as pervasive as Schwyzerdütsch or is dying out in favor of standard English.
Great video, would have loved examples of the sounds in context like a full word!
Finally acknowledged the retroflexed stops of South Asian English. Thanks for that! Even though, the dental ones you tried to say were still alveolar!
This guy is nerding out so hard and I’m all here for it 🙏😭
Language nerds assemble
I’m a wannabe but I can’t even pronounce everything in my own first language English 😭
How the heck will I pronounce ø?
What puzzles me most about phonemes English speakers struggle with are consonant clusters that easily roll off the tongue in closely related languages, namely 'kn', which makes 'Knut' a two-syllable name in English, and has silenced every k in a word containing the cluster. According to Loïc the English also struggle wit 'pn' (and therefore have silenced the p in 'pneumatic'), and I have noticed the same problem with 'pf'
Hence how King Cnut became King Canute in English. Either way he couldn't stop the tide!
What's interesting to me is that words like 'knife' and 'know' used to have that 'kn' sound but lost it. I remember learning Chaucer in the original pronunciation and it includes the line 'a knight there was...' pronounced 'kn-i-ch-t' (but fast), with the 'ch' similar to the Scots 'ch' in 'loch'.
@@yippee8570 That Chaucer knight still clearly shows the relation to German "Knecht" (Subordinate, today only used for a farmhand). Same pronunciation, except for the 'i'.
@@HotelPapa100 English aspirates its stops, which is why if we try to pronounce the first two consonants in knight, gnome, pterodactyl, pneumonia, psoriasis, Dvorak, and biological names like ctenophora, cnideria and bdellum, we add an extra syllable, but we usually give up and make the first letter silent. For some reason I have no problem with tsar or the Slavic given name Ksenija (=Xenia).
@@sydhenderson6753 Yes, but many other languages do that as well, but treat these clusters as their own phonemes, where the stop for once is not aspirated.
Turkish word can't begin from consonant cluster, they add the wovel "İ" or "ı" into the first position. So Greek Σμύρνη turned to Turkish İzmir.
Russian word can begin from consonant cluster up to 4 sounds, swear word from up to 6 sounds.
"кнут", "пнут", "мнут", "ткнут", "льнут", "жнут" /knut, pnut, mnut, tknut, l'nut, zhnut/ are six different words (noun “whip” and 5 verbs in 3rd person, plural number, present or future tense).
How about a video detailing which exact consonants and vowels are exclusive to which dialects of English?
I don't know how widespread it is, but here in Michigan (at least for a lot of people I know) glottal stops are common instead of a T sound after a vowel at the end of words like in the sentence I just made up "Aunt Pat got a Detroit plate off that internet website" which by my count may have as many as 13 glottal stops if the right person said it although realistically due to slurring/blending words together the total would be lower.
At timestamp 9:42 you can't add 418 languages to 313 languages unless you assume that zero have both. I don't know languages, but I know some math.
They're two ways of writing the same sound, it's impossible for a language to have both
why not
@@flyingduck91 I'll give an analogy:
Let's say 50% of a class is men and 15% of that same class is left-handed. You can't then say 65% of the class has one of those attributes because some could be both.
Very interesting video! As regards Ireland, I will say that there are a variety of different accents within Hiberno-English alone, and as far as I know most of us (at least in the west of Ireland, where I’m from) actually pronounce ‘lough’ (spelt with a ‘ugh’, in English, not ‘Loch’ as in Scottish English) with an unvoiced velar plosive! So ‘lough’ is generally /lɑk/ if we are speaking English, *unless* we are making a deliberate effort to perform a sort of code switch by using the Irish Gaelic sound (i.e. the voiceless velar fricative)
I’d also say that where I’m from, I believe that we do use the dental non-sibilant fricatives θ and ð, (or else maybe I just can’t hear the difference between these and the alveolar plosives?!) and we tend to associate use of dental plosives to pronounce ‘th’ with Dublin-area accents in particular. Perhaps Munster accents have more of a tendency to use t̪ (?)
The more I think about it, actually, the more I think that the dental plosive vs fricative pronunciation in Ireland is a sociolect division than a geographical dialect division. Admittedly I do still struggle with phrases that call for several dental fricatives in a row, such as the classic ‘thirty-three and a third’ 😂
It's actually really interesting to me because I'm bilingual, having been brought up speaking polish (which has a phonemic [ɲ]) and hiberno-english where english is now my L1. My idiolect was never fully realised for whatever reason, it sounded neither polish nor irish until recently where I've been making an active effort to sound more irish. Anyway, I realised that [ɲ] (not [nj]) is in free variation with [n] for my idiolect, so I pronounce /new/ and /knew/ as [ɲu:] and sometimes may realise it as [nu:]
My native language, French, has the palatal nasal too, however, I've always pronounced it as a cluster [nj] and never perceived it as a distinct single sound, in fact for most of my life I didn't know it was supposed to be one nasal consonant. Apparently it's rather common for younger speakers to pronounce it that way, but even my dad says it like that too.
@@FairyCRat I don't know about all dialects of French, but in my dialect (Québécois from the region of Montréal), I'd say /ɲ/ is generally realized as [nj] in onset position, like in "agneau" [anjo], and [ŋ] in coda position, like in "montagne" [mɔ̃taŋ]. I assume this is probably similar in at least some other dialects of French.
@@Mercure250 The velar nasal [ŋ] is definitely absent from European French in that context, we would probably say [mɔ̃tanj] or [mɔ̃taɲ]. The only time we use it is as an allophone of [n] before [k] or [g], a common exemple is words that end in -ing (English loanwords or French neologisms), that suffix is usually realized [iŋg].
@@FairyCRat To be fair, I think there is probably variation between [ɲ] and [ŋ] here, and it just happens to be [ŋ] in my idiolect. I just can't really imagine anyone saying [nj] in coda position in my dialect.
I'd swear I've heard [ɲu:] or at least [nju:] of off a BBC broadcast before
Really good video, well made!
You're a pretty new youtuber, so it's understandable, but 0:54 was kind of a dick move to headphone users.
1. I’ve been doing youtube since 2016 on a different channel.
2. anime pfp
...Well then you have no excuse.
Amazing vid.
Was kinda surprising to see raw tones here.. nice inclusion.
That middle tone "ma", though
Oddly, I discovered I use a retroflex 'r' in some words, such as robot. It doesn't sound particularly different to my ear. I think this is true for many other retroflex consonants since we're not used to distinguishing them from the non-retroflex versions.
Isn't #1 also the gn sound in filet mignon?
I want to point out how you consistently write with a lowercase letter at the start of each text unless it's required to be uppercase ("I", "English"). So when I then see you write "Español", I can only see it as a mistake. Spanish like most languages just write names of languages in lowercase like most nouns.
I would say that the vowel [y] should get an honourable mention, very few English speakers are able to get it right without years of practice.
Although Scottish English comes close with their pronunciation of U, like the way they say "you"
Yeah but if you look at the wiki page for the near-close near-front rounded vowel /ʏ/ it lists not 1, not 2, not 3, not 4 but *6* English dialects that have it (Estuary, Rural white Southern American, West Country, New Zealand, Ulster, and Multicultural London), disqualifying it from the video, same with the close front rounded vowel /y/ with the 4 dialects of English (General South African, Multicultural London, Scouse and Ulster)
@pagan3809 Unfortunately the wiki is wrong, none of them, but perhaps the South African accented English ([y] exist in Afrikaans) get even close to the"", I think that they might fooling themselves into believing they they can say it, but they really don't. I've heard tons of Scouse, but never have they used a [y]
Also just examined Ulster dialect, and they are using [y] mistakenly, they are pronouncing it like "u" or a fast "oo" from English.
"Years" of practice? It's literally the same thing as [ɪ] except rounded. It's not that difficult.
wikipedia says /ʏ:/ occours in MLE az the goose vowel
@@flyingduck91 notice it's this wovel: [y]
Very odd that in a video on pronunciation, the speaker repeatedly mispronounces "pronunciation". 🤦
Very cool video, would be nice to see languages weighted by population since many of them have very few native speakers.
y (the French or Dutch U, the German and Turkish Ü), is a sound that, in my experience, English speakers find extremely difficult. I always try to explain it as NEW minus the N but even then... 😂
Tell them that it is /i/ ("ee") but with your lips closed
@@David280GG any sound with lips closed it just /m/ though afaik
@@wildstarfish3786 i mean not completly closed, but closer like when pronuncing /u/
@@David280GGThe word you’re looking for is “rounded”.
It's just a fun exercise, I know, I know, I know!
But in the whole attempt to "scientificise" the process: it can be in any three dialects of English (or only one of two specific dialects), it seems to me you just kick the definitional problem into counting "dialects". Geordie, the speech of one city (and reasonably discrete from the surrounding accents) is one dialect, but "Scottish English" is also one entry in that list, all of the various English dialects in Scotland, as indeed is Indian English!
All you're really measuring is the massive variance in that specificity of those labels, surely?
What about the voiced retroflex fricative, the "zh" sound you find in Slavic languages and Mandarin Chinese? That doesn't appear in English either, unless I'm mistaken.
Edit: upon closer inspection, yeah it doesn't appear on English, but it's not a "most common sound" either, only appearing in 3% of languages, really only Chinese and Russian
In polish too I guess, it's not fully settled, but there're papers discussing the development of retroflex sibilants in polish and russian.
Doesn't it appear in French? In Russian "ж" is quite often found within words, that were borrowed from French: камуфляж, этаж, жалюзи, etc.
"zh" sound appears also in Portugese ("j") and in English ("s" in "visual", "usual", "decision").
@@user-bi4eo3ys1f It'd be Voiced postalveolar fricative instead of Voiced retroflex fricative
@@varsovianspy2992 And you can distinguish them when listening?
In general English across the Anglosphere, the word ‘pronounciation’ does NOT exist.
The correct spelling and pronunciation only contains two instances of ‘o’. One in the first syllable and one in the final syllable.
Therefore, the second syllable is ‘nun’ not ‘noun’.
Water is a nun, not noun
if you're interested, i've actually made a table that has every maximal phonetic consonants that english has (in all dialects (that i can find)) a long time ago!
The i with a cross doesss exist in English and only in one word. "THIS". its actually quite interesting cos a lot of times languages have new sounds or altered pronunciation rules for really short and commonly used words.
the icelandic pronunciation of the double L is also a very unique sound
sounds like classical nahuatl tl
From what I've searched up the "ll" in icelandic is pronounced as the alveolar lateral affricate /t͡ɬ/, it used in for example Cherokee, Ladin, Nahuatl and appears in loans words in Mexican Spanish
@@pagan3809 i like that. one of my favorite sounds. it's like a cute hissing cat when i heard it.
Your /γ/ (gamma in Greek) sounds really good and natural. I'm impressed
Does any variant of English have /y/ in its vowel inventory, or the short version of that phoneme? It is a bit difficult for Amis (and tends to be shifted to /i/ or its shorter variant by natives of my paternal grandsire's Land, so I have heard or read). I had read some blessed where that some speakers of English pronounce "go" as /gœu/.
Apparently "Multicultural London English" has both [y] and [ʏ].
Scouse? That very characteristically has a notably fronted GOOSE vowel.
In addition to Southeastern English dialects other comments have mentioned, Californians also have a tendency to front GOOSE as far as /y/. Hence the stereotypical fronted Californian "Diiiwwd...." for "Dude"
Also, in addition to being an allophone of /t/ in some dialects, my dialect, Judeo-English, does use it in some Yiddish and Hebrew loanwords.
Are tones phones tho?..
"And unfortunately, no spoken langauge on earth has the eruption of Krakatoa as a sound" Wise words
As a Zimbabwean, thank you for acknowledging our language, Shona.
Fun fact for anyone interested an alveolar trill, and taps are really common in new york accents specifically those from the bronx and brooklyn. I dont know whether its from the spanish influence but its really common to hear what did i do as "wharrrrrr I do", better "berrrr", and lots of words that start with "th" and are followed by an R will have an alveolar for the Rs for example, three, throw, threw, etc and lots of other words that have double Ts like butter, better,batter, you might hear the Two ts be rolled like an R
2:41 After pausing the video and while reading thorugh this wikipedia article(to figure out what the hell is this sound and it is pronounced) I realized that I actually use this sound in English in my accent. I was reading out loud(well I don't remember every IPA phone and phoneme, especially obscure ones like this one), and when I read "...either the tip or the blade of the tongue _at the_ upper teeth..." I produced a sound that is, and I'm pretty sure, 99.97% of what is being described. When repeated, I consistently recreated it without any trouble.
(For a little context, I am a native Ukrainian, thus technically English is my third language, but really it's the second)
Also, while reading my comment again I realized that I would use this sound once more (in the _"what the hell is this sound"_ part), and in this very sentence once more - _"realized that"_
I guess it occurs (in my accent) at the boundary between two words when one word end with /d/ or /t/ and the next starts with /ð/
11:02 loved that ña with all my heart
i absolutely use /c/ in my dialect of english. and wikipedia lists a version of it as straight up occuring in english (and gives example of the word “keen”). im confused why that isnt at least mentioned here.
If I'm stuck trying to cram the word "disastrous" into the normal flow of speech, about 50% of the time the i disappears and you get a nice single-consonant dza syllable. Does that count as having that in English? :P
...Also does the palatal nasal not exist in onion?
combining percentages to bring something to 3rd place would only apply if no two languages shared them, which i guess was pretty much the case but not explicitly stating that has led to me boosting your algorithm, so take that nerd
9:43
couldn't there be overlap between the symbols? So the minimum number is 14%, and the maximum is 24%
I think palatals in Australian languages are actually different to palatals in other languages articulation wise
What about words like "new"? Is it not pronounced with the palatal nasal? I've always said it like that, and even when hearing it, I can't tell any difference.
Hello, I am here because this is now my new rabbit hole
aight when nguh makes the next cursed conlang circus mine will have a phoneme that is audio of the 1883 eruption of krakatoa
the irony of pronouncing pronunciation as "pronounciation" lol
Even writing it on screen that way... : (((
A denOunciation is fully in order.
stop being all prescriptivist, you care to much about keeping something that constantly changes the same & yore doomed to failiure
0:37 - you can't just take the Toki Pona inventory and assert that those are *the* "common sounds languages gravitate towards". Toki Pona adds [e] and [o] which are actually less common than [b] and [ŋ]. And then "below" those in the PHOIBLE ranking there are two further phonemes found in more than half of all languages - [g] and [h].
I think it would make more sense to make such a video about phonemes, not phones, for two reasons:
1. As you said yourself, you're not getting anywhere if you include any allophonic variation found in at least three dialects, and you had to use loopholes like "technically nasal vowels don't exist as English allophones due to some particularities of Wikipedia" when in reality a lot of American accents nasalize pretty much every vowel that precedes a nasal consonant.
2. If you want to achieve some practical results, such as better contrastive awareness in language learning, it makes sense to limit this to phonemes, too, since native speakers often have very little phonological awareness of allophones so even if they can produce the phone they don't necessarily have better access to a target language that uses the same sound phonemically.
thank you for the volcano earrape
As a slav, "Hahahaha funny Slavic i sound" was funny description
No it wasnt. what in kirilik is marked with ы is a hard i.
Just as a note, the term is "pronunciation" 2:22
thank you!
I'm pretty sure that if an english speaker attempted to pronounce "español" they wouldn't aspirate the P as voiceless stops in english are usually unaspirated after /s/
That would be true if they were in the same syllable, but it's es.pan.jol not e.span.jol. Short vowels cannot occur syllable-finally.
I know, but I added the aspiration for comedic effect
I'm pretty that English actually just doesn't have voiced plosives at all and that [p] and [pʰ] are only allophones after a [s] or similar sound. It's just that we normally write [p] as /b/ and [pʰ] as /p/.
Record any word that starts with an "unvoiced plosive" and edit out the aspiration, or any word that starts with "s" followed by a "unvoiced plosive" and edit out the [s]. Dr. Geoff Lindsey has a few great videos on this topic, and many more about other misunderstood aspects of English.
@@angeldude101My native language has [p] and while English /b/ may not be as heavily voiced as a true [b] it is DEFINITELY not [p] however I do agree on the fact that voicing is not the main distinguishing feature between /p/ and /b/.
@@angeldude101English does very much have voiced plosives, just as allophones of the unaspirated series when between voiced sounds, like I'd pronounce "bubble" as [ˈpabu], or "a bubble" as [ə ˈbabu]
but I agree, for some reason people like to pretend the main distinction between these phonemes is voicedness where in reality it's more to do with aspiration of glottal reinforcement.
some dialects though do more strongly voice their /b d dʒ g/ while not as strongly aspirating /p t tʃ k/ so it's not a universal truth. The reason the current symbols are in use in broad transcription has to do with covering a certain allophonic range of these phonemes, however I very often see narrow transcription showing these sounds as always voiced which does annoy me
Good video but it would've been nice if you repeated the sounds a few times or said them a bit slower. Would also be nice if you played some audio of native speakers using those sounds!
Wait, tones are not sounds by themselves
Also obviously the [c] symbol must be related to [k] and the [ȶ] symbol is derived from [t], [kʲ] and [tʲ] are different sounds
[ʉ] is surprisingly common in the US as it's a common realization of /u/ in western american english.
Contemporary RP also uses it as standard, to me /u/ is such a foreign sound!
The alveolar trill wins first place in my heart. The 3rd and 1st place sounds as you noted sound like kj and nj, which even if that is not a correct interpretation does mean they don't sound *strange* to native English ears. meanwhile the trilled r contrasts very heavily against english phonology for those not used to it.
A lot of these could technically be considered as also a part of French, but I don't blame the association for missing that, since French pronunciation is something that I've been doing for about 7 years now (since middle school) and I still suck at it.
I have a friend who’s learning French and who told me her biggest struggle is the vowels, and I was very confused until I realized there’s 17 of them (being Slavic she’s used to like six)
@@jmanig76 Including diphthongs that doesn't sound far-off. It's pretty bad, though it's not like normal people will be confused if you have a bit of an accent.
@@jmanig76 Depends on the accent, in France there's fewer than in Québec for example, but yeah, just in Parisian French, there's [i], [y], [u], [e], [ø], [o], [ɛ], [œ], [ɔ], [a], [ɛ̃], [ɑ̃], [õ], and arguably [ə]. There are some mergers in there, from a phonological perspective, but even if, say, /e/ and /ɛ/ are merged in certain regions, the sounds [e] and [ɛ] still exist, they're just in complementary distribution (usually, [e] in open syllables, and [ɛ] in closed syllables). So they still count, and that means there are 13 or 14 vowel sounds in Parisian French.
17 is a conservative number and assumes the existence of [ɑ], [œ̃], and [ɛː], which are generally merged with [a], [ɛ̃], and [ɛ] respectively in at least Northern France (I think Southern France still has /œ̃/ as a phoneme). The dialects I know that kept those have a much larger vowel inventory, phonetically. In Québec, phonologically, we have pretty much 16 or 17 vowels (depending on whether or not we consider schwa a distinct phoneme from /œ/), but phonetically, there's a whole zoo of weird diphthongs, especially with the influence of the rhotic in coda at the end of words ("soeur" and "seul" are DEFINITELY NOT the same vowel in my dialect, phonetically). We also have [ɪ], [ʏ], and [ʊ] as allophones of /i/, /y/, and /u/ in closed syllables. So there's easily more than 20 vowel sounds in Québec French in total, maybe even not that far from 30 just because of the rhotic shenanigans.
In Belgium, while it's not as phonetically insane as Québec, they do have a larger phonemic inventory than us, as they have the same phonemes as us, but also, they lengthen a vowel at the end of a word if it's followed by "e" in writing, making it basically the only place where there is a distinction between masculine and feminine for words that end with a vowel in their masculine form, introducing phonemes like /eː/ and /iː/ for example.
I'm gonna have to one-up that obvious phone joke next time I talk about phonology, eh?
your pronunciation of /ɣ/ wasn't actually /ɣ/, you pronounced it as a /ʁ/
Edit: and I'm pretty sure the word "new" is pronounced with a /ɲ/ at the start in most dialects.
no, it's pronounced with [ɲ], not /ɲ/. The phoneme is the same /n/
my pronounciation of new is [ȵju]
Yes, exactly! I've noticed this mistake by many people, including those who recorded the sound in interactive IPA charts. I don't get why, it's actually quite easy to do. Simply pronounce /g/, then hold the sound a bit longer, and finally make only the "aftersound" without stopping the airflow in the beginning
@@F_A_F123 No, it's absolutely not the same phoneme. As I've already told you, in my dialect, /nʊː/ means nothing, whereas /ɲʊː/ does have a meaning. Just because There are no pairs of words distinguished by these two sounds (as far as I can think of, anyway), doesn't mean that they're the same phoneme. To give an example: there are no pairs of words that are distinguished solely by the pair /ŋ/ and /ɦ/, but that doesn't make them the same phoneme. /ŋænd/ means nothing and neither does ŋ /wɪɦ/. It'd be foolish to consider them the same phoneme, just as it would be to consider /ɲ/ and /n/ the same phoneme within this particular set of dialects that we're talking about.
@@mymo_in_Bb I already answered to you, I didn't know such dialects existed
In Romanian we have the striked i (î/â), as well as r and the flipped f.
Time to someone to build a conlang that has the eruption of Krakatoa as a phone
Interesting to see
/c/ in some American languages may actually be [tʃ], such as in Biloxi, some grammarians just decide to transcribe the affricate with /c/ instead of /tʃ/ for some reason
3:46
scottish people: 😄
russian people: 💀
😂😂😂
10:22 the last one isn’t actually an r-sound, but more like that sound represented by the gamma letter, often simply transcribed as "gh".
It is very much rhotic. It's the French R.
Simply because a sound is rhotic, doesn't mean it'll always be r-like. Alveolar tap is just /t/ in many English dialects. Similarly, that sound is gh-ish for certain languages while still being a rhotic.
Depends on the language. In French and German it's rhotic, in Arabic it's not.
Thanks for the always enjoyable content. However, since this is a channel focused on languages, please keep in mind that the word is "pronunciation", not *pronounciation. This error appears frequently in the voiceovers, and occasionally even in the printed titles. Just a helpful suggestion (I hope).
hey, some people pronounce it that way
preskrptivizm!!!
@@flyingduck91 I wasn't condemning, I was offering what I hope was helpful critique. As I said, this is a language-focused channel. I presume some viewers do not speak English as a native language, and so I was trying to point out a pronunciation issue that could then be addressed. I apologize for offending anyone.
It’s a channel focused on *linguistics, not languages. Prescriptivism isn’t too well-liked by most people into the former.
[ɲ] sound exists in some words lille onion, union, componion, bunion, etc.
Great video and all. Sorry to nitpick, but I think the word is "pronunciation" (with nun)
Still, great video! Thanks!
9:29 is this c418 reference?
lol😂
Are you asian american? I ask you this for a very specific reason since you're a linguist. I'm asking because I've noticed asian americans tend to have a very unique (but also very very subtle) accent/way of talking. I would just chalk it down to that, but I've also noticed a lot of asian americans DONT have this twinge. It seems most common in people of chinese decent. I am wondering though, maybe I am picking out the wrong characteristic which links this accent apart. I have noticed a handful of non asian americans which have the same twang, but only like one or two.
I'm specifically asking you also, because I can hear the twang in your voice. I am less curious about what group of peple have it, but rather what sounds is in it which makes it stand out to me? I really like how it sounds, so I would love to know what sounds are making it happen (unless the whole thing is just in my head...)
If you have time, please listen to the following youtubers who I think have the twang: "J perm", "Carrykh", and of course yourself. (I can give more examples if you like, but I'd have to think hard about it, these are just the ones that came off the top of my mind since they're the people I know the voices of best).
You can't really wholesale put the special sinitic symbols as palatal because they are used for alveolo-palatal consonants. This is a consonants that is pronounced further forward in the mouth than the palatal and further back than an alveolar.
While for the purposes of this video that usage might be wrong I've yet to see alveolo-palatals contrast with palatals so technically they could be considered the same phoneme.
Why do poeple have trouble distinguishing /x/-/χ/ and /ɣ/-/ʁ/?
Probably because everyone pronounces uvular fricatives as fricative trills so they learn the to differentiate between uvulars and velars based on whether it's trilled or not.
What's more annoying is people pronouncing χ as ʀ̊
I hate it so much
@@myspleenisbursting4825Most actually say [ʀ̝̊].
@@myspleenisbursting4825 that's why one of my playlists said "goodbye, wales!" in the title.