James Harbeck I bet there’s an extinct language that has Pulmonic Ingressive Voiceless Lateral Fricative. Also, I Pulmonic Ingressive Voiceless Palatal Fricative. It’s now 400 and 30 8/19/2020 TUE
Idk if you're gonna see this, but I'd like to make a couple corrections. Dental Click: ǀ You used a correct description but wrong name of the click Alveolar Click: ǃ You described an apical (tip of tongue) palatal click [ ǂ̺]. The alveolar click is like your description but you do it on your alveolar ridge, not the palata Palatal Click: ǂ This is actually palatoalveolar (done with the same tongue position as [ʃ]) Ingressive [ɬ] is written: ɬ↓
Fascinating. I did not know I wanted to know this. I guess I did. My head feels a strange warmth as my neurons are making new connections. Thank you. A little late, but sincere nonetheless .
***** The bilabial lip trill places the vocal resonance in the front of the face in the sinus area. The voice is produced by the vibration of the vocal cords in the throat, but in order for the voice to have that ring and carrying power, especially for opera singers, it must resonate in the bridge of the nose area. The lip trill in warm-up exercises sends the focal point of the voice directly to that area.
I happen to be a big fan of making "weird" noises, so I was able to emulate all of these quiet well, including stringing them along with other sounds. It's a skill I am very happy to have, so I enjoyed copying along with all of the noises you made.
I loved this video! I teach Phonetics and Phonology at a brazilian university and I will certainly show it for my students to show them some of the many different and amazing sounds that languages around the world have. :) Thank you!
I will try to find the best possible way to represent a pulmonic ingressive voiceless palatal trill. A retroflex trill is symbolized in Wikipedia as [ɽ͡r], where ɽ is the symbol for a retroflex flap. If we replace the ɽ with a palatal flap symbol, we should be now representing a palatal trill. A palatal flap doesn't have a symbol, but many flaps that don't have an IPA symbol are represented as extra-short plosives (stops) since they are the same thing according to some sources. A voiceless palatal stop is [c] and the voiceless flap should be [c̆]. Now we can add a tie bar and a voiceless rolled r and we get [c̆͜r̊]. The IPA doesn't have a way to indicate ingressive airflow, but the extIPA does, and that is ↓. Thus a voiceless pulmonic ingressive palatal trill could be [c̆͜r̊↓]. In case you can't see them in this comment, there should be a tie bar (an arc) above the letters ɽr and below the symbols c̆r̊. Such an arc is used to indicate affricates and double articulations, and it doesn't matter whether you put it above or below the letters.
The thing im wondering is how tf is [ɽ͡r] a retro trill? secondly how tf are you gona pronounce [ɽ͡r]? a retro tap and immediately (or at the same time) a alveolar (not even a post alveolar) trill like wtf? its noted that Toda has a clear retroflex trill no tapping not alveolars so?
James, you said that you didn't know of any language which uses pulmonic ingressive consonants. When I lived in Finland, I was constantly amazed at how women speaking Finnish to one another never had to stop to breathe. They often spoke at top speed as they sucked in air.
I really like your sarcastic-know-it-all demeanor. That, and the bonus sound sounds like a handheld noise-maker (the kind on a stick that makes the clacking noise).
This was an extremely interesting video, thank you very much for giving those real-world examples for sounds unfamiliar to English. Have you heard Georgian ejectives before?
Christian Sven Jimmie Karlsson Yeees! It needed to make the list! I have no idea what the fancy word for it is called. I use it A LOT. Not many sounds are made on inhaling so this is rather odd for others. For me, totally normal. LOL.
Islam Benfifi Yes, there is a beer commercial making fun of how much the sound is used in northern Sweden. Search Norrlands Guld - Pschu on UA-cam. There are some variations of it though.
Recently I found myself making a fricative sound made by closing the jaw and blowing air between the top teeth and the area inside the mouth between the bottom lip and teeth. It sounds a bit like f and th, and the voiced version between v and a voiced th. I don't think this is on the IPA and I've never heard of it in a language, despite it being quite distinctive and easy to pronounce.
What fun, James! I love the way this makes me want to try all of the sounds, and I love learning about the surprising variety of sounds in languages around the world. You've done a great job of showing me how the sounds that are part of our non-word language are parts of other languages. Cheers!
I cry on the inside for not having one of these cool sounds in my native language...the best that Mandarin could do is the retroflex consonants and the so-called vocalic fricative ("empty rime"), which are complicated but nowhere as unique as this. It seems to me, though, that there is considerably less "bizarre sounds" that we can identify in the vowel category? With consonants you get all these wild variations in place/manner of articulation, phonation/aspiration, and airstream mechanism, whereas mainly three axes (frontedness, height and roundedness) characterize all vowels in the world - we could of course include tone and phonation as well - and there aren't really any vowels that is truly "bizarre" compared to consonants. Or am I just too accustomed to hearing bizarre vowels that I just don't consider them to be bizarre anymore?
You're just used to hear bizarre tones and a complex vowel system. I just can't figure out how to say those tones and I discarded learning tonal languages long ago. My native language (Brazilian Portuguese) is pretty plain compared to Mandarin. Which feature would be bizarre in my language? I think the only thing that is unique in Brazilian Portuguese phonology is the variable "hard-R" (Brazilian R differs from European Portuguese voiced uvular fricative-appoximant featured in video, and in most accents isn't even an R but a voiceless fricative variable at glottal, uvular, velar and palatal) and... boring nasal vowels? -.-
The R is even more boring. Even being variable, it's just academic shenanigans. Everything is homophone, you can realize it just as the boring [h] or [x]. :|
Aww...well, Mandarin still has a lot of sounds that sound cool to my foreign ears anyway, heck, I've devoted years of my life to learning Mandarin simply because I love the sound of it! I like to listen to and study Chinese accents and dialects too. In Standard Mandarin I just love the sound of for example: 哥, 草, 儿, 果, 日, 去, 土, 高, 欧...I could go on and on. Some of these vowels have equivalents in some dialects in my own mother tongue (Swedish), but it's rare to hear them and when listening to Mandarin I get to enjoy them all the time, it's total ear candy! And I just love pronouncing the consonant sounds in Mandarin too, like the zh in 周, x in 迅 and ng in 梦. I'm darn happy I managed to master Chinese pronunciation, it brings me much joy :-D. But there are a bunch of other languages with lots of cool sounds in them such as Icelandic, Mongolian, Hebrew and Persian that I wish I could learn too, one lifetime is not enough :-/
As far as mandarin is concerned you have the following "weird" ones: ɤ (close-min back unrounded vowel), and you have the same distinction I have in my native language (polish), whish is the distinction between sh/x (mandarin pinyin) sz/ś (polish), and similar (but not identical, because in mandarin there is the distinction of aspiration, but in polish there is the distinction of voiceness): zh/j (mandarin pinyin) dż/dź (polish) and ch/q (mandarin pinyin) cz/ć (polish).
I used to get in trouble in Spanish class because I'm tongue-tied and have to replace the Spanish alveolar trill with a uvular trill. While not the same thing, they sound sufficiently close that nobody complained when I worked in Santiago a decade later. I'm also part Swedish, so I'll just blame the Scandihoovians for my Spanish speech impediment. :) BTW: The pulmonic ingressive voiceless palatal trill was spectacular. You could probably scare kids with that on Halloween.
Very informative! I learned a lot and the way you explained them were fantastic! Every time you listed when we've done these sounds before, I had an AHA! moment!
How is this called? Step one: ingresive alveolar plosive closing. Step two: you get your lips close together. Step three: release the ingresive alveolar plosive and have your lips be slighly sucked in so that they abruptly close, stopping the air flow and producing a sound that resonates in your ribcage. Tb tb tb tb Tp tp Tph Tb Thb Idk, sounds weird. You can also make a similar sound without getting air into your lungs, a kind of click version of it, though it is much weaker and a bit unreliable. May be safer though, my left lung hurts from doing this...
Dental fricatives? Unusual in world languages, and apparently not used in international English for that reason - perhaps in a century or so they won't exist in standard English.
James Harbeck Dental fricatives (voiced and voiceless) both exist in Arabic. Mostly in classic Arabic so yea I guess they are on their way out. In many modern Arabic dialects you use the t and d sounds instead. The sounds used to exist in my language too, but looong before there was a me. ;)
TIL i sometimes do a pharyngeal fricative when I say "okay" lazily. I've been unintentionally augmenting it over time and it's gotten to the point where instead of a "k" sound I roll the sound in my throat.
So, I made it a challenge to make be sound you were describing in IPA before you made it, and I almost choked on this last one!!! Haha! Thanks for the video, it was fun!
Difficult in the Dutch language for foreigners are: /ɣ/ (g) wich is the voiced counterpart of /x/ (ch), /œy/ (ui) and /ɔu/ (ou, au), whose pronunciation is between /aʊ/ and /oʊ/. In Poldernederlands (Polder Dutch) there is a tendence to: - replace /ɛɪ/ by /æɪ/, /ɔu/ by /aʊ/, /œy/ by /ʌy/. In Dutch /r/ and /ʁ/ have the tendency to be pronounced as /ɹ/ (so as in English), only before a consonant and at the end of a word. The children singing group Kinderen voor Kinderen has a heavy influence on it. The name of that r is Gooise r.
I can make quite many other sounds that I've never heard in a language. For instance if I lightly hold my tongue between my lower and upper jaw teeth and then breath in through the mouth, the bottom side of my tongue vibrates making a pretty unqiue sound lol
Great video! It's intersting to me how many English speakers have trouble with our German /x/ and /R/, while many Germans can't do /r/ or /θ/. But I think vowel shades are the hardest for many. Even Germans with a good command of English struggle with /æ/, while "pure" /o:/ and /u:/ remain a mystery to English speakers (except for Scots and other dialect speakers).
In Minnesota, we have [o:] & [u:], probably because we're so close to Canada, as well as having many of Scandinavian heritage. For "Oh, yes" we say [o: ja:] : )
Ptiki Try the Polish Ą and Ę ;) . If you know French, it should be easier. the first one is like the french "on" as in for example "on va". An example would be for example "Ej, ty, skąd przyszłeś?" (hey, you, where did you come from?). The second one is somewhat harder to explain, but easier to pronounce once you get it. I have no idea how to discribe it.
Czech is very easy langauge for me 😂 I was choosing between Czech and polish and dude pls, polish is the damnest language in the whole world 😂 it's so hard that I wanted to cry. But I'm trying to learn it anyway XD but I've not done much progress yet ;_;
@@tomaszantochow8391 I'm learning Polish, and I just pronounce ą and ę as on and en when followed by another consonant. For example 'skąd' I pronounce 'skond', and 'męczący' I pronounce 'menczoncy'.
Honestly, you don't… because it's not used in normal verbal communication. But it's an ingressive nasal-velar trill, which in standard feature geometry is impossible. Because try doing it in the middle of a word. :)
@@sesquiotic How is this called? Step one: ingresive alveolar plosive closing. Step two: you get your lips close together. Step three: release the ingresive alveolar plosive and have your lips be slighly sucked in so that they abruptly close, stopping the air flow and producing a sound that resonates in your ribcage. Tb tb tb tb Tp tp Tph Tb Thb Idk, sounds weird. You can also make a similar sound without getting air into your lungs, a kind of click version of it, though it is much weaker and a bit unreliable. May be safer though, my left lung hurts from doing this...
at around 5.35 when he's discussing the breathing consonants, it's quite common in Finnish language, among older people mostly, that they breath in whilst using a finnish affirmative (kyllä, joo, niin etc) it sounds a little like what you described. I have yet to hear that in another language. also I have yet to anyone (who isn't welsh) accurately sound the 'Ll' as in Llewellyn or Llanelli. I can only describe it as forcing air out around the sides of your tongue whilst it is spread flat. and yes it is quite useless to be both a finnish and welsh speaker. Thank god I have english!
There is a similar sound in the north of Sweden, when they breath in while saying "shoo"; it's also an affirmative. They speak with very few words up there :)
Re sound nr 8: people in rural areas of Western Jutland , Denmark, use a sound you can produce by saying the word YES while inhaling (the first sound). Is it what you're talking about?
I am writing my own language and I have included one of my favorite sounds. This sound is the Voiced/Voiceless (both work in my language) alveolar lateral Fricative (ɮ/ɬ). When I tell people about the sounds in my language this is the one I go to. It is difficult to pronounce without practice.
There are some other sounds that might sound to be common but arent found in any natural language like [bβ] [ʡ̬ʕ] [ʡʜ] (there are some languages which have a [ʡʢ]) and
The welsh one is used when two l's are next to each other. Ex gal vs gall. gal is how you'd pronounce in english (if you're just going by the l sound) and gall would have that hiss at the end. It's very fun. Sounds like someone with a very strong lisp saying gosh, but also not really
3a5T0, the French r is pretty heavily pronounced by the singer Edith Piaf, in her song Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (Lyrics) - Edith Piaf She pronounces it slightly longer and more hearable than I am used to, when observing and listening French speech.
+RhythmAddictedState I'm not a linguist, but as far as I know, "pulmonic ingressive palatal trill" means that you have to roll a Spanish-sounding "r" by hitting your tongue against the palate in your mouth (google it), while inhaling air into the mouth.
I know two sounds that don't exist in any language and don't have an official IPA character: velaric egressive bilabial stop and velaric egressive labiodental fricative. For these sounds the back of the tongue touches the velum and blocks the air just like in clicks. But the front of the tongue moves forward to push out air in a way similar to edjectives. For the velaric egressive bilabial stop I use the character ᴘ and for the velaric egressive labiodental fricative I use the character ꜰ.
Linguo-labial consonants are another interesting type of sound. They are pronounced by placing your tongue tip or blade against your upper lip. They are found in just a handful of languages in Vanuatu :).
+spaghetti It's not a click, clicks are only found in Africa and one register of an Australian language. It is not pulmonic, it is ingressive. Air goes in.
About the uvular trill, in Portuguese you can say rrr with a uvular trill but equivalently you can also say it with the trill you use at 0:19. And this last one is older and more common actually.
The Japanese "R" sound is really word, as a Filipino it was difficult to deviate from the rolling "R" sound that I've been used too. It's kind of a half "L" half "R"
I used to think that as an Arabic speaker but I discovered my mistake. the Arabic ghain is a voised velar fricative and not a uvular trill. The difference is quite subtle though
In Australian English there are sounds I had to practice on: "snake" pronounced as [snæɪk], "puck" as [pɐk] and "park" as [pɐːk]. I used to pronounce these words as [sneɪk], [pʌk] and [pɑːk] respectively.
And I thought Hungarian has plenty of unique sounds, since it has like 40 letters. Really can't imagine myself able to pronounce most of these sounds. Impressive video.
That's super interesting. Us Icelandics do use the HL-sound, for instance in Hlemmur, a bus station downtown. What I wonder is: Are there any languages other than Icelandic where people speak in whole sentences while inhaling? We do that sometimes. It's mostly done by women expressing shock or particularly juicy gossip. I've asked around and so far I know of no other people that speak in entire sentences while inhaling.
Is it odd that can't produce the fairly common alveolar trill, but I can produce the rarer bilabial, linguolabial, lateral, and uvular trills quite easily?
Adam Thornton Is being able to produce a bilabial trill considered rarer than being able to produce an alveolar trill? I was under the impression it is easier to produce the first than the latter, since I myself, try as I might, cannot produce an alveolar trill. I found that most people can do the bilabial trill.
There's the "ṇ" and "ē" in Pashto. The "ṇ" makes an "nr" sound in words like "paṇa" (page). The "ē" makes a sound that sorta falls in the middle of the "e" and "i" for words like Quētta (name of a city). We also pronounce "o" differently with a sound that sorta falls in the middle of the "o" and "u". Then we have special letters for the "ts" and "dz" sounds.
I just repeated the word "Rauch" out loud for about 10-20 times, until I actually got what you said in the video. Never occurred to me that it isn't a regular "r" sound and German is my mother tongue. So strange.
I have number 10 - voiceless bilabial nasal. Write it like this in IPA: m̥. It's pretty strange when you hear it in other languages, like Jalapa Mazatec or Burmese. We (English speakers) say it when we are agreeing with someone in conversation without opening our mouths, written usually like this, 'mmhmmm'. IPA looks like this, mm̥m. (Also have a Wycliffe connection :) )
Interesting. Unlike the voiced nasals, it seems that there is no sound at all coming from the the mouth. So the unvoiced alveolar, bilabial, and velar nasals all sound the same to me--air coming out your nose.
Okay actually I was waiting for the hungarian language 'cause we have some letters that foreigners can't pronounce such as 'ty' 'gy' 'ny'. I taught hungarian for foreigners and they couldn't pronounce gyöngy, tyúk and nyúl correctly. :)
I think the sound "ы" from my native language that is from Russian deserves to be on this list. As I know, that sound is difficult to pronounce for foreigners :-) The last sound sounded like it was from some horror movie :D
WanderingRandomer In romania there are quite some people that pronounce "r" weird. Because they say the r wrong, it makes speaking english difficult, but makes french easier because of the accent.
I can roll my R's in slavic languages like Russian, but not in Spanish. Probably because Russian only requires my tongue to roll off the roof of my mouth one time really quickly, while Spanish words like "perro" demand the rolled sound be extended. I notice the my inability to roll my R in Spanish makes it easier to pronounce nasal R's in French and the L/R hybrid consonant in Japanese than peers who can roll their R's.
what about vowels? Cantonese has a pretty difficult dipthong in the word for up. Seung : to say it right you have drop your tongue to the bottom of your mouth. Thai uses a doozy in their word for hand---meuh, and the word for pandan leaf, a popular dessert flavor as well as a popular girls' nickname----toei. Vowels are not always as straightforward as Spanish, not even when one's native language has a whole spectrum of them like English.
Bilabial trill: ʙ
Pharyngeal fricative: ħ (voiceless) ʕ (voiced)
Implosive velar stop: ɠ
Uvular trill: ʀ
Alveolar click: |
Palatal click: !
Lateral click: ǁ
Pulmonic ingressive voiceless lateral fricative: ɬ (no IPA to indicate on character that it is ingressive)
James Harbeck
I bet there’s an extinct language that has Pulmonic Ingressive Voiceless Lateral Fricative.
Also, I Pulmonic Ingressive Voiceless Palatal Fricative. It’s now 400 and 30
8/19/2020 TUE
Idk if you're gonna see this, but I'd like to make a couple corrections.
Dental Click: ǀ
You used a correct description but wrong name of the click
Alveolar Click: ǃ
You described an apical (tip of tongue) palatal click [ ǂ̺]. The alveolar click is like your description but you do it on your alveolar ridge, not the palata
Palatal Click: ǂ
This is actually palatoalveolar (done with the same tongue position as [ʃ])
Ingressive [ɬ] is written: ɬ↓
ɬ↓ is the correct spelling to mark ingressivity
Fascinating. I did not know I wanted to know this. I guess I did. My head feels a strange warmth as my neurons are making new connections. Thank you. A little late, but sincere nonetheless .
But one language does have the last one... the Predator's language lol
God, I love linguistics.
Study it! It's amazing!
Same
I really live cheese, but who fucking cares. Good for you
Same
@@hatamtamimi8799 what are some resources you’d suggest? 😮
So beatbox is a language of odd sounds from other languages. The more you know.
We singers use the bilabial trill (we call it the lip trill) as warm-ups of
our voices before we sing.
***** The bilabial lip trill places the vocal resonance in the front of the face in the sinus area. The voice is produced by the vibration of the vocal cords in the throat, but in order for the voice to have that ring and carrying power, especially for opera singers, it must resonate in the bridge of the nose area. The lip trill in warm-up exercises sends the focal point of the voice directly to that area.
You're welcome.
That click on 4.05 means no in Turkish. Instead of saying no (hayır), we make that sound.
you didn't mention the nothern Swedish word for yes when all we do is an inhaling breathing sound.
Maybe that doesn't count but it is funny though
I didn't know my northern neighbor are so lazy when it comes to forming a language. Well, lazy and pretty practical.
Sofie Lingsell Hmm yes, it sounds like [ɬ↓], which means that its a [ɬ] (voiceless alveolar lateral fricative), but you inhale when saying it.
Sofie Lingsell I would call it a pulmonic ingressive voiceless alveolar lateral fricative
we do that in norwegian too :) in all dialects
We do it all the time here in northern Sweden! (I live in a town called Piteå that is pretty far up north)
I happen to be a big fan of making "weird" noises, so I was able to emulate all of these quiet well, including stringing them along with other sounds. It's a skill I am very happy to have, so I enjoyed copying along with all of the noises you made.
I loved this video! I teach Phonetics and Phonology at a brazilian university and I will certainly show it for my students to show them some of the many different and amazing sounds that languages around the world have. :)
Thank you!
I will try to find the best possible way to represent a pulmonic ingressive voiceless palatal trill.
A retroflex trill is symbolized in Wikipedia as [ɽ͡r], where ɽ is the symbol for a retroflex flap. If we replace the ɽ with a palatal flap symbol, we should be now representing a palatal trill. A palatal flap doesn't have a symbol, but many flaps that don't have an IPA symbol are represented as extra-short plosives (stops) since they are the same thing according to some sources. A voiceless palatal stop is [c] and the voiceless flap should be [c̆]. Now we can add a tie bar and a voiceless rolled r and we get [c̆͜r̊]. The IPA doesn't have a way to indicate ingressive airflow, but the extIPA does, and that is ↓. Thus a voiceless pulmonic ingressive palatal trill could be [c̆͜r̊↓]. In case you can't see them in this comment, there should be a tie bar (an arc) above the letters ɽr and below the symbols c̆r̊. Such an arc is used to indicate affricates and double articulations, and it doesn't matter whether you put it above or below the letters.
Great, man. Many thanks. Can you make the sound?
+Douglas Kaipper You're welcome. No, I can't make that sound.
The thing im wondering is how tf is [ɽ͡r] a retro trill? secondly how tf are you gona pronounce [ɽ͡r]? a retro tap and immediately (or at the same time) a alveolar (not even a post alveolar) trill like wtf? its noted that Toda has a clear retroflex trill no tapping not alveolars so?
5:54 sounds like [ɫuˈɛɫɪn]. Should be [ɫəˈwɛlɪn]. (Note proper Welsh spelling Llywelyn.)
I believe that you mean [ɬ].
Teach me how to make that last sound, I must use it in a conlang! Somehow...
Do the Spanish 'rr' sound while inhaling. I've been trying to make this sound for days. I couldn't do it.
James, you said that you didn't know of any language which uses pulmonic ingressive consonants. When I lived in Finland, I was constantly amazed at how women speaking Finnish to one another never had to stop to breathe. They often spoke at top speed as they sucked in air.
I really like your sarcastic-know-it-all demeanor. That, and the bonus sound sounds like a handheld noise-maker (the kind on a stick that makes the clacking noise).
1:29 is how americans portray arabic in movies ...
Norwegian has that gurgling-R on thw west coast. We call it a skarre-r and I'm a user of it
This was an extremely interesting video, thank you very much for giving those real-world examples for sounds unfamiliar to English. Have you heard Georgian ejectives before?
you forgot the inhaling of swedish!
Christian Sven Jimmie Karlsson Yeees! It needed to make the list! I have no idea what the fancy word for it is called. I use it A LOT. Not many sounds are made on inhaling so this is rather odd for others. For me, totally normal. LOL.
deadpoetoftheyear I'm interested to know what it sounds like. Do you have any links?
Islam Benfifi Yes, there is a beer commercial making fun of how much the sound is used in northern Sweden. Search Norrlands Guld - Pschu on UA-cam. There are some variations of it though.
Is this sound written as Sj??
Islam Benfifi You don't write that word, it is a sound for the word "yes" (ja)
>that was bad German
I speak German and I can confirm. That was bad German. Don't worry, though.
You should try looking into Adyga language (Circassian), and some Dagestani languages :) I get exhausted even listening to it
Listening to "them", sorry :-)
My God Adyghe sounds so harsh, it's very unique in that sense :)
Dude my parents are from Dagestan and the language they speak (lezgi) is just hard to pronounce. Such unusual sounds.
so good to know all that odd shit in one place ! :p great fun :))
ty for the effort (but I know it was for the fun in the first place):)
Recently I found myself making a fricative sound made by closing the jaw and blowing air between the top teeth and the area inside the mouth between the bottom lip and teeth. It sounds a bit like f and th, and the voiced version between v and a voiced th. I don't think this is on the IPA and I've never heard of it in a language, despite it being quite distinctive and easy to pronounce.
That is the bidental fricative found in the extIPA and one language in the Caucuses has it Pining for the fjords.
Wow!...You are AMAZING!!! :)
What fun, James! I love the way this makes me want to try all of the sounds, and I love learning about the surprising variety of sounds in languages around the world. You've done a great job of showing me how the sounds that are part of our non-word language are parts of other languages.
Cheers!
I cry on the inside for not having one of these cool sounds in my native language...the best that Mandarin could do is the retroflex consonants and the so-called vocalic fricative ("empty rime"), which are complicated but nowhere as unique as this.
It seems to me, though, that there is considerably less "bizarre sounds" that we can identify in the vowel category? With consonants you get all these wild variations in place/manner of articulation, phonation/aspiration, and airstream mechanism, whereas mainly three axes (frontedness, height and roundedness) characterize all vowels in the world - we could of course include tone and phonation as well - and there aren't really any vowels that is truly "bizarre" compared to consonants. Or am I just too accustomed to hearing bizarre vowels that I just don't consider them to be bizarre anymore?
You're just used to hear bizarre tones and a complex vowel system. I just can't figure out how to say those tones and I discarded learning tonal languages long ago. My native language (Brazilian Portuguese) is pretty plain compared to Mandarin.
Which feature would be bizarre in my language? I think the only thing that is unique in Brazilian Portuguese phonology is the variable "hard-R" (Brazilian R differs from European Portuguese voiced uvular fricative-appoximant featured in video, and in most accents isn't even an R but a voiceless fricative variable at glottal, uvular, velar and palatal) and... boring nasal vowels? -.-
The R is even more boring. Even being variable, it's just academic shenanigans. Everything is homophone, you can realize it just as the boring [h] or [x]. :|
Aww...well, Mandarin still has a lot of sounds that sound cool to my foreign ears anyway, heck, I've devoted years of my life to learning Mandarin simply because I love the sound of it! I like to listen to and study Chinese accents and dialects too. In Standard Mandarin I just love the sound of for example: 哥, 草, 儿, 果, 日, 去, 土, 高, 欧...I could go on and on. Some of these vowels have equivalents in some dialects in my own mother tongue (Swedish), but it's rare to hear them and when listening to Mandarin I get to enjoy them all the time, it's total ear candy! And I just love pronouncing the consonant sounds in Mandarin too, like the zh in 周, x in 迅 and ng in 梦. I'm darn happy I managed to master Chinese pronunciation, it brings me much joy :-D. But there are a bunch of other languages with lots of cool sounds in them such as Icelandic, Mongolian, Hebrew and Persian that I wish I could learn too, one lifetime is not enough :-/
As far as mandarin is concerned you have the following "weird" ones:
ɤ (close-min back unrounded vowel), and you have the same distinction I have in my native language (polish), whish is the distinction between sh/x (mandarin pinyin) sz/ś (polish), and similar (but not identical, because in mandarin there is the distinction of aspiration, but in polish there is the distinction of voiceness): zh/j (mandarin pinyin) dż/dź (polish) and ch/q (mandarin pinyin) cz/ć (polish).
unoduetre12345
I wish Mandarin was transliterated with Polish letters. They make a lot more sense than their weird Pinyin equivalents.
I used to get in trouble in Spanish class because I'm tongue-tied and have to replace the Spanish alveolar trill with a uvular trill. While not the same thing, they sound sufficiently close that nobody complained when I worked in Santiago a decade later. I'm also part Swedish, so I'll just blame the Scandihoovians for my Spanish speech impediment. :)
BTW: The pulmonic ingressive voiceless palatal trill was spectacular. You could probably scare kids with that on Halloween.
Very informative! I learned a lot and the way you explained them were fantastic! Every time you listed when we've done these sounds before, I had an AHA! moment!
Great video! Except that the German "r" (uvular fricative/approximant) is not the same as in French (uvular trill).
the french r is a uvular fricative, and the german one is a uvular trill
@@1leon000 oh shi you're right
@@voicedbilabialtrill2514 ik
This was very insightful and a good listen. The last sound was amazing in that it takes quite some effort it seems to produce it.
How is this called?
Step one: ingresive alveolar plosive closing.
Step two: you get your lips close together.
Step three: release the ingresive alveolar plosive and have your lips be slighly sucked in so that they abruptly close, stopping the air flow and producing a sound that resonates in your ribcage.
Tb tb tb tb
Tp tp
Tph
Tb
Thb
Idk, sounds weird.
You can also make a similar sound without getting air into your lungs, a kind of click version of it, though it is much weaker and a bit unreliable. May be safer though, my left lung hurts from doing this...
Absolutely awesome way of teaching pronounciation. Love it
What about english th sound? This os the most awkward sound :D
Dental fricatives? Unusual in world languages, and apparently not used in international English for that reason - perhaps in a century or so they won't exist in standard English.
James Harbeck Dental fricatives (voiced and voiceless) both exist in Arabic. Mostly in classic Arabic so yea I guess they are on their way out. In many modern Arabic dialects you use the t and d sounds instead. The sounds used to exist in my language too, but looong before there was a me. ;)
I love dental fricatives. They just sound so nice. I believe they occur in modern Greek, both voiced and voiceless.
James Harbeck Danish still has the voiced variety.
James Harbeck You think that we're going to start saying "I sink zat"? :-D
TIL i sometimes do a pharyngeal fricative when I say "okay" lazily. I've been unintentionally augmenting it over time and it's gotten to the point where instead of a "k" sound I roll the sound in my throat.
I'll be very happy to show this video to my students. :)
So, I made it a challenge to make be sound you were describing in IPA before you made it, and I almost choked on this last one!!! Haha! Thanks for the video, it was fun!
Difficult in the Dutch language for foreigners are: /ɣ/ (g) wich is the voiced counterpart of /x/ (ch), /œy/ (ui) and /ɔu/ (ou, au), whose pronunciation is between /aʊ/ and /oʊ/. In Poldernederlands (Polder Dutch) there is a tendence to:
- replace /ɛɪ/ by /æɪ/, /ɔu/ by /aʊ/, /œy/ by /ʌy/. In Dutch /r/ and /ʁ/ have the tendency to be pronounced as /ɹ/ (so as in English), only before a consonant and at the end of a word. The children singing group Kinderen voor Kinderen has a heavy influence on it. The name of that r is Gooise r.
I can make quite many other sounds that I've never heard in a language. For instance if I lightly hold my tongue between my lower and upper jaw teeth and then breath in through the mouth, the bottom side of my tongue vibrates making a pretty unqiue sound lol
Great video! It's intersting to me how many English speakers have trouble with our German /x/ and /R/, while many Germans can't do /r/ or /θ/. But I think vowel shades are the hardest for many. Even Germans with a good command of English struggle with /æ/, while "pure" /o:/ and /u:/ remain a mystery to English speakers (except for Scots and other dialect speakers).
In Minnesota, we have [o:] & [u:], probably because we're so close to Canada, as well as having many of Scandinavian heritage. For "Oh, yes" we say [o: ja:] : )
bro /x/ is so easy
I was expecting Czech Ř - raised alveolar non-sonorant trill.
Ptiki Try the Polish Ą and Ę ;) . If you know French, it should be easier. the first one is like the french "on" as in for example "on va". An example would be for example "Ej, ty, skąd przyszłeś?" (hey, you, where did you come from?). The second one is somewhat harder to explain, but easier to pronounce once you get it. I have no idea how to discribe it.
Tomasz Antochów I speak Polish. Ą and Ę are not impressive to me. My native language is Serbian :)))
Czech is very easy langauge for me 😂 I was choosing between Czech and polish and dude pls, polish is the damnest language in the whole world 😂 it's so hard that I wanted to cry. But I'm trying to learn it anyway XD but I've not done much progress yet ;_;
Is this okay to pronounce Polish «rz» as Czech «ř»?
@@tomaszantochow8391 I'm learning Polish, and I just pronounce ą and ę as on and en when followed by another consonant. For example 'skąd' I pronounce 'skond', and 'męczący' I pronounce 'menczoncy'.
Holy crap, someone on UA-cam actually pronounced the voiced uvular trill correctly!
He sounds so extremely rough when he does the sounds or the languages xD It's funny
I really found this interesting and your descriptions and examples were great! :-) Sandy
What do you call snoring in standard phonetic terminology?
Honestly, you don't… because it's not used in normal verbal communication. But it's an ingressive nasal-velar trill, which in standard feature geometry is impossible. Because try doing it in the middle of a word. :)
ingressive nareal fricative
@@sesquiotic How is this called?
Step one: ingresive alveolar plosive closing.
Step two: you get your lips close together.
Step three: release the ingresive alveolar plosive and have your lips be slighly sucked in so that they abruptly close, stopping the air flow and producing a sound that resonates in your ribcage.
Tb tb tb tb
Tp tp
Tph
Tb
Thb
Idk, sounds weird.
You can also make a similar sound without getting air into your lungs, a kind of click version of it, though it is much weaker and a bit unreliable. May be safer though, my left lung hurts from doing this...
*the uvular trill is used in quite a few norwegian dialects as well as in danish
at around 5.35 when he's discussing the breathing consonants, it's quite common in Finnish language, among older people mostly, that they breath in whilst using a finnish affirmative (kyllä, joo, niin etc) it sounds a little like what you described. I have yet to hear that in another language.
also I have yet to anyone (who isn't welsh) accurately sound the 'Ll' as in Llewellyn or Llanelli. I can only describe it as forcing air out around the sides of your tongue whilst it is spread flat.
and yes it is quite useless to be both a finnish and welsh speaker. Thank god I have english!
There is a similar sound in the north of Sweden, when they breath in while saying "shoo"; it's also an affirmative. They speak with very few words up there :)
Nothing difficult about the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative, imo :) Also, norwegians breath inwards on affirmatives as well.
That was fascinating!
Re sound nr 8: people in rural areas of Western Jutland , Denmark, use a sound you can produce by saying the word YES while inhaling (the first sound). Is it what you're talking about?
I am writing my own language and I have included one of my favorite sounds. This sound is the Voiced/Voiceless (both work in my language) alveolar lateral Fricative (ɮ/ɬ). When I tell people about the sounds in my language this is the one I go to. It is difficult to pronounce without practice.
Can someone explain to me how to pronounce the lest one (#9)?
I enjoyed this video very much and for sure I'll show it to my students. I know they'll love it as well. Gracias :)
There are some other sounds that might sound to be common but arent found in any natural language like [bβ] [ʡ̬ʕ] [ʡʜ] (there are some languages which have a [ʡʢ]) and
The welsh one is used when two l's are next to each other. Ex gal vs gall. gal is how you'd pronounce in english (if you're just going by the l sound) and gall would have that hiss at the end. It's very fun. Sounds like someone with a very strong lisp saying gosh, but also not really
3a5T0, the French r is pretty heavily pronounced by the singer Edith Piaf, in her song
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (Lyrics) - Edith Piaf
She pronounces it slightly longer and more hearable than I am used to, when observing and listening French speech.
Obviously Finnish.
How the hell do you make the last one? :D
+RhythmAddictedState I'm not a linguist, but as far as I know, "pulmonic ingressive palatal trill" means that you have to roll a Spanish-sounding "r" by hitting your tongue against the palate in your mouth (google it), while inhaling air into the mouth.
***** Oh, ok, that explains a lot! Gonna practice now. I love linguistics and phonetics, so this will be fun. :)
+RhythmAddictedState I think that's snoring.
SigmaXVirus Kinda, yeah.
SigmaXVirus You don't roll Spanish "r"s while you're snoring, do you? :D
Palatal is where peanut butter sticks. lol. Thank you for the video!!
I know two sounds that don't exist in any language and don't have an official IPA character: velaric egressive bilabial stop and velaric egressive labiodental fricative.
For these sounds the back of the tongue touches the velum and blocks the air just like in clicks. But the front of the tongue moves forward to push out air in a way similar to edjectives.
For the velaric egressive bilabial stop I use the character ᴘ and for the velaric egressive labiodental fricative I use the character ꜰ.
Linguo-labial consonants are another interesting type of sound. They are pronounced by placing your tongue tip or blade against your upper lip. They are found in just a handful of languages in Vanuatu :).
Icelandic has a lateral click as well (such as the last two letters in "Eyjafjallajökull")
It's not really a click; it's an affricate.
James Harbeck It can be, but a lot of southerners pronounce it more like a click. I understand though, it's supposed to be an affricate
+spaghetti It's not a click, clicks are only found in Africa and one register of an Australian language. It is not pulmonic, it is ingressive. Air goes in.
About the uvular trill, in Portuguese you can say rrr with a uvular trill but equivalently you can also say it with the trill you use at 0:19. And this last one is older and more common actually.
no, it isnt. Its older but no longer more common
he got dressed up for the video, but still does it in his kitchen :D
The Japanese "R" sound is really word, as a Filipino it was difficult to deviate from the rolling "R" sound that I've been used too.
It's kind of a half "L" half "R"
+KetsuWoTabeta
Hello again.
The Japanese R doesn't have a single pronounciation!
I'm not Swedish, but as far as I know it mostly occurs in the south, near Denmark
6 of the 8 sounds are found in Nguni languages(especially Zulu and Xhosa), from 3-8.
I'm german but I often don't do a uvular trill but replace it with other sounds because it's easier
the letter ghain in arabic = the sound from #4
I used to think that as an Arabic speaker but I discovered my mistake. the Arabic ghain is a voised velar fricative and not a uvular trill. The difference is quite subtle though
The uvular trill in Swedish is only used in some accents in southern Sweden :)
We make the click sound in Turkish to say no or to show kind of surprise. Also we have this weird /r/ with fricative which challenge foreigners.
You should have mentioned the Quadrilabial affricate.
+K Sriram I see what you did there ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
In Australian English there are sounds I had to practice on: "snake" pronounced as [snæɪk], "puck" as [pɐk] and "park" as [pɐːk]. I used to pronounce these words as [sneɪk], [pʌk] and [pɑːk] respectively.
So you pronounced them like an American? Where are you from, originally?
And I thought Hungarian has plenty of unique sounds, since it has like 40 letters. Really can't imagine myself able to pronounce most of these sounds. Impressive video.
That's super interesting. Us Icelandics do use the HL-sound, for instance in Hlemmur, a bus station downtown.
What I wonder is: Are there any languages other than Icelandic where people speak in whole sentences while inhaling? We do that sometimes. It's mostly done by women expressing shock or particularly juicy gossip. I've asked around and so far I know of no other people that speak in entire sentences while inhaling.
my breathing goes crazy when I try to do the last one
Is it odd that can't produce the fairly common alveolar trill, but I can produce the rarer bilabial, linguolabial, lateral, and uvular trills quite easily?
uvular trill, also known as the chewbacca noise 😁
Adam Thornton Is being able to produce a bilabial trill considered rarer than being able to produce an alveolar trill? I was under the impression it is easier to produce the first than the latter, since I myself, try as I might, cannot produce an alveolar trill. I found that most people can do the bilabial trill.
There's the "ṇ" and "ē" in Pashto. The "ṇ" makes an "nr" sound in words like "paṇa" (page). The "ē" makes a sound that sorta falls in the middle of the "e" and "i" for words like Quētta (name of a city). We also pronounce "o" differently with a sound that sorta falls in the middle of the "o" and "u". Then we have special letters for the "ts" and "dz" sounds.
Except that none of them have anything to do with the sounds you think you could never pronounce, but already have.
I love pharyngeal fricatives, both hearing them and making them myself.
This guy reminds me of Sheldon Cooper. trippy
I'm swedish and uses the rolling R. Altouhg i never heard anyone doing an R with the uvula. We just do it exactly as you wrote :)
#9 sometimes comes up when people snore
I just repeated the word "Rauch" out loud for about 10-20 times, until I actually got what you said in the video. Never occurred to me that it isn't a regular "r" sound and German is my mother tongue. So strange.
Xhosa has pretty much all these sounds, I'd maybe exclude the last one.
When i learned English I had difficulty with both "TH" sound, I used to make a S or F
Tämähän oli mielenkiintoinen. :D
oui
*****
2 please
Bwoah, a Finn!
He talked about the alveolar click but he did a dentel click instead
I have number 10 - voiceless bilabial nasal. Write it like this in IPA: m̥. It's pretty strange when you hear it in other languages, like Jalapa Mazatec or Burmese. We (English speakers) say it when we are agreeing with someone in conversation without opening our mouths, written usually like this, 'mmhmmm'. IPA looks like this, mm̥m.
(Also have a Wycliffe connection :) )
Interesting. Unlike the voiced nasals, it seems that there is no sound at all coming from the the mouth. So the unvoiced alveolar, bilabial, and velar nasals all sound the same to me--air coming out your nose.
Fabulous job there, bro!
It amazes me that Tlingit is always left out when it comes to giving examples of clicking phonemes-they have great examples!!
The uvula sound is only used in southern Sweden where they speak really weird haha
i wanted to hear each of them doing it, more fun and precise and would have made more sense!
Okay actually I was waiting for the hungarian language 'cause we have some letters that foreigners can't pronounce such as 'ty' 'gy' 'ny'. I taught hungarian for foreigners and they couldn't pronounce gyöngy, tyúk and nyúl correctly. :)
Sorry 'ny' is easy to pronounce :D
Sorry 'ny' is easy to pronounce.
But Germans have "ty" in tja
which means well (like in well, there I go) or the Hungarian word "hát" (hát.., arra megyek)
We have all these sounds in Russian. More challenging are vowels, since o sounds like u to me, and é sounds like í
Can you record a word or two with them in it?
I think the sound "ы" from my native language that is from Russian deserves to be on this list. As I know, that sound is difficult to pronounce for foreigners :-)
The last sound sounded like it was from some horror movie :D
+GMByte Java
It's not very strange, It's just a vowel roughly between english "oo" and "ee"
+GMByte Java I believe the phonetic term for that vowel (I'm learning Russian at the moment) is a central closed non-rounded vowel.
ac989
Yup. It's between /ɯ/ and /i/
It's was easy to learn for me since my language's long [u] is a close central rounded vowel.
ac989 Удачи в изучении! :)
Большое спасибо!
Fabulous - Very Helpful indeed Thanks a lott.
Once again I find myself asking how did I get here?
I don't known how it works, but in some way you are making linguistics seem cool.
Like it isn't already?
great great great videos you have :) thank you!
I could never roll my 'r's. Seriously, how do you do it? It just sounds like I'm choking or something...
It's about the accent, i'm from Romania and we say the "r" sound like that. I know it's kind of a late response, but better later than never.
vidiac2012 I've found out since that I have a slight lisp and I've been pronouncing my 'r's wrong my whole life. Apparently it's not uncommon.
WanderingRandomer In romania there are quite some people that pronounce "r" weird. Because they say the r wrong, it makes speaking english difficult, but makes french easier because of the accent.
I can roll my R's in slavic languages like Russian, but not in Spanish. Probably because Russian only requires my tongue to roll off the roof of my mouth one time really quickly, while Spanish words like "perro" demand the rolled sound be extended. I notice the my inability to roll my R in Spanish makes it easier to pronounce nasal R's in French and the L/R hybrid consonant in Japanese than peers who can roll their R's.
Norway say both those 'r' types I think. It depends if you're speaking with a Bergen accent or like the rest of the country
You forgot Norway for the uvular trill, one of the more distinct dialects does that :P
So it sounds like the rolled R is easier to learn as a child than an adult? Any suggestion on how to learn to make the sound?
what about vowels? Cantonese has a pretty difficult dipthong in the word for up. Seung : to say it right you have drop your tongue to the bottom of your mouth. Thai uses a doozy in their word for hand---meuh, and the word for pandan leaf, a popular dessert flavor as well as a popular girls' nickname----toei. Vowels are not always as straightforward as Spanish, not even when one's native language has a whole spectrum of them like English.
Can't you make a velar fricative trill? Just make the /x/ noise but more harsh
Creeper Pro Because the range of the tongue’s motion is extremely restricted in true velar position it’s impossible to make a velar trill or tap.