I'm surprised that the term "minimal pair" never came up in this video, though the concept itself is discussed without putting a name to it. When two words with different meanings are phonetically identical except for a single sound (like pit/bit in english, or the tal/tʰal example given in the video), they're called a minimal pair, and this is a VERY important concept in phonology, because it's proof that the sound difference is semantically relevant, or salient, in that language. It proves that the distribution of those sounds is not *predictable*, since they can both appear in the same environment, so they cannot be allophones of the same phoneme.
I'm not a native English speaker but I've been studying the language for some time now. My knowledge about Phonology increased so much thanks to this short video. Thank you, Crash Course!
A Spanish person told me I actually sound Hispanic not like an American trying to speak Spanish. That was a huge compliment. I accomplished this by listening to their music and singing along.
My native languages are modern Mandarin, Cantonese, and an ancient dialect “Ai.” Since high school, I learnt English in Canada, then German in Germany. When I start comparing these languages, I have found so many phonological similarities (linguistic relativity), especially among some of the most commonly used terms such as fire, work, do etc. However, it should not be a huge surprise as we humans are shaped the same way, and migration has also promoted frequent exchange of culture.
Well, English and German are both a part of the Germanic language family (which is a subfamily of the Indo-European family), so that's probably why they're so similar.
Still feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of terminologies and stuff, but this is a much better experience than in a classroom setting. Thanks Crash Course!
Ever since aspiration had been brought to my attention a few years ago, I can't not hear it when watching videos here on TH-cam, especially since the aspiration is really noticeable in certain words; like I've heard people pronounce "castle" as /kxæsl/, or at least that's how clear the aspiration sounds to me. For those unfamiliar with IPA, the /x/ is like a really hard raspy h
I'm a non-native but very experienced english speaker and to my surprise the aspiration example didn't work for me - I pronounce both team and steam with exacly the same aspiration. How curious!
I tend to do the same because my native language (German) uses aspiration with almost all of these sounds. Therefore, I also usually don't hear the difference. So even for an experienced speaker - if it's a difference that you don't perceive, you'll probably carry over some of your native phonology.
Man do I love phonology! And also, Scoutmaster Gavagai! I also especially like you giving plenty of examples of sign phonology. Even in undergraduate work, you don't usually get a good look at that.
I did a quick look into aspiration vs voicing in plosives to see how different languages distinguish them - In addition to the 2-way combo system English has got, you got languages that distinguish with voicing alone (like French, Dutch, and Greek), languages that distinguish aspiration alone (like Mandarin and Icelandic) languages that don't distinguish either (like Hawaiian an Cherooke), languages with a three-way distinction between aspirated voiceless, unaspirated voiceless, and voiced (like Punjabi, Eastern Armenian and Wu), and then you have the mindnumbing 4-way distinction between unaspirated voiceless, aspirated voiceless, unaspirated voiced, and the ever-so-rare _aspirated voiced_ system that is common among many Indian Languages in the Indo-Aryan branch. (Even a short read on some Wikipedia articles reveals that this is all way more complicated, there are other ways to change sounds beyond this leading to all kinds of allophones - like "unaspirated voiced" plosives usually aren't actually unaspirated, they're murmured.)
You're not ready to learn that English primarily distinguishes plosives by aspiration rather than voicing, hence why "sbin" sounds near-identical to "spin".
Hi. English's system is a two-way distinction between aspiration and non-aspiration, like Icelandic (and indeed, most, if not all, Germanic languages). We perceive the unaspirated stops as voiced in English, but, typically, they are voiceless, especially at the beginning of words. English "voiced stops" tend to be actually voiced only between vowels or next to voiced sibilants.
By the way, it there a linguistic sub-genre for how written languages have changed with internet influences? The above comment with extra punctuation as an example? ^^^
I don't know why I am commenting this, I fully understand that sounds of foreign languages will be pronounced differently by people (as you mentioned as well) But as a native Hindi speaker who has got too used to hearing English native speakers, I rarely recognise all the different ways the t is pronounced by native speakers unless I am focusing exactly on the sound. But when you said chutney and chuʈney, it was so contrasting to the actual ʈ sound that we make. You said chuʔni and chutʰni. Not really chuʈni. Yeah, we distinguish based on aspirations also 😅
idk if theres gonna be a second episode on phonology but just in case theres not with rules based phonology we also have to consider the order of the rules that are applied to a language. we can consider a language to have a pool of phonemes, of underlying representations, and to also have a set of rules which are applied to those underlying representations, transforming them into surface representations, the actual sounds that exist in the real world. however, sometimes when a rule is applied, it can literally destroy environments which another rule might target, so if you, as a phonologist, mess up the ordering, it can leave you with an incorrect surface representation. theres four instances where this (or something like it) happens and they all have names: bleeding, feeding, counterbleeding, and counterfeeding, and i cannot for the life of me remember which means what. i think bleeding is where Rule A is applied and that prevents Rule B from being applied, and feeding is where Rule B can only be applied iff Rule A is applied first. i definitely dont remember what the counter-rules mean. thats why i tend to favor constraint-based phonology. so here we learned the basics of rule-based phonology, which abstracts phoneme -> allophone as the phoneme going through some sort of machine (the rule) and becoming something else. constraint-based phonology abstracts phoneme -> allophone by taking the surface realization known to be correct, compiling that one with a group of alternatives known (obviously) to not be correct, and then ordering a list of known constraints (which are linguistic universals known to be applicable to every language's phonology, but which also have contradicting constraints to allow for variation) to eliminate each one until the one you know to be correct "wins". and then what happens is that the order you came up with just so happens to fit with any sound change you want to investigate, although this is impossible to accomplish with just one sound change. you gotta make so many tables to actually order every constraint for a language. okay so like, the surface realizations, or candidates, are listed in a table in the first column. next, are a sequence of columns labeled on the top row with the constraints. if a candidate violates a constraint, it gets a star * and is eliminated. the most important constraints are first in the sequence, and this process continues until you are left with one candidate. or two, if the language allows free variation! the point isnt to find the correct allophone (of course) its to find an order of constraints which can be universally applied to a specific language. unfortunately, historical sound change cannot easily be modelled with constraint since you need to visualize a change in time. linear, rule-based phonology makes this exceedingly simple. after all, how am i supposed to visualize a sound change from protoindoeuropean to proto-germanic? with two whole ass tables?? no, im gonna write a rule for that. simple one line, rule p > f. dunno if thats a PIE > Proto germanic but whatever.
Assume, you have two rules A: ɣ → ∅ / V_ and B: e → i /_e. If the rule order for that language is AB and you have an underlying form /teɣe/, you get [tee] after A applies, and [tie] after B applies. In that Order, rule A feeds rule B, the rule order AB is *feeding*. Now consider rule order BA: you get [teɣe] after B applies. Note that the intermediate form and underlying form are the same since the context for B is not fulfilled. Then rule A applies and you get [tee]. Since rule B has already been applied, albeit without change, it cannot apply again in rule-based approaches. The feeding we experienced in the AB rule order, is "countered" by the altered second rule order BA, hence the term *counter-feeding*. Another set of rules could be A: V → ∅ / VVC_ and B: plosive → fricative / V_V Assume an underlying form /heidinir/. You get [heidnir] after A applies, which destroys the context for rule B, so your surface form is [heidnir]. AB is therefore a *bleeding* rule order. If you change the rule order to BA, the bleeding of rule B is countered, so you get [heiðinir] after B applies, and [heiðnir] after A applies; the rule order BA is therefore *counter-bleeding*. The same rule order, however, is not feeding, since rule A would apply regardless of whether rule B applied before, or not. Regarding your second point: *Do not ever mix up diachronic linguistics with structural (or synchronic) linguistics.* The models of synchronic linguistics, be they constraint based or rule based, apply only to structures, never to processes.
yes, anyone can say 'team' using aspirated or un-aspirated T sounds, it will just take a lot of practice for someone who is accustomed to hearing them as the exact same letter.
I'm still confused on the way she pronounces the unaspirated "t" still sounds aspirated to me, just with less emphasis on the "puff of air". Anyone else feels this way? I'm used to the unaspirated "t" as in spanish tener, chinese 大 and indonesian tangan, and i find that her unaspirated t sounds different than all of them. Is it that the unaspirated t can be pronounced two different ways?
It’s more likely that as a native English speaker she had to work very hard just to pronounce the unaspirated /t/ on its own at all. Since we normally would never need to do that in English, it’s something we don’t learn to do and have to do manually. I actually gave it a go watching this and I can’t get anything even close to what she did.
For most British English speakers the word should have been [wɔːʔə] or [wɔːtə], never [wɔʔə]. Scottish and Irish English would have a short vowel, but they're also rhotic. Vowel length is a vital distinction in this case, it helps you tell your watts from your warts.
I'm not a master of British Phonology but there's something called "Allophonic vowel length" which means the /ɔ/ sound in water is still pronounced long without the length symbol because it occurs before a voiced consonant and I'll be liar of CD, vowels in wart and watt represented with different phonems.
@@ardasnnnn Allophonic vowel length just means that a certain sound comes in two forms depending on the context, which doesn't apply here because they are different phonemes. Wart and water contain the same environment in BE, whereas in AE they're different. Plus water doesn't even contain a voiced [d] or [ɾ] in BE, it's a voiceless [tʰ] or [ʔ]. In either case it's definitely [ɔː] as in law, not [ɔ] as in lot.
I still wish the examples were given by native speakers or signers of the languages in question whenever possible. It would have been helpful for viewers to actually hear Nepali tal with an unaspirated t so that they could tell what it sounds like when it doesn't follow s.
More of this, please! I would very much like to know how to read the phonetic guide to pronouncing words. This would be especially helpful with learning a new language.
In my language (Danish), there is no meaningful distinction between a voiced s-sound and an unvoiced one. To this day I simply cannot hear the difference - unless some times if it is deliberately exaggerated. This is problematic when an American is spelling a word with a C or a Z, where that is the only distinction. I know what the difference is. I can reproduce the difference in my own speech, but I don't have an intuitive sense of which is correct from listening to the speech of others, so I generally just use the unvoiced sound. In the other direction, I have also noticed a similar problem. The Danish language has some vowel sounds that do not exist in the English language. Particularly noticable for me, the typical Danish o has a sound that English speakers generally can't replicate correctly. In other words, I have never met someone whose first language is English who could pronounce my first name.
Since I'm learning foreign languages, I'm noticing patterns in different languages all the time e.e..and my brain went overtime on the "water" part.. In Norwegian, its vann or vannet (the water)..because Norwegian's articles and plurals fuse to the endings of their subjects..Worth noting that the t at the end of vannet is actually silent.. In German, its Wasser, or Das Wasser (the water)..because German really has a thing for getting articles meaning the right, according to the word genders..x.x.. In Scottish Gaelic, the t can become "t-" and fuse to the beginning of its subject..as in "t-gealach" (the moon).. Romanian does the same as Norwegian with its plurals and articles, but of course different endings than Norwegian and this also doesn't happen for every single word..Apă (water) and Apa (the water)..No ending for the fused form, just remove the long a umlaut..
Another fun metathesis example in English is the wap. When there was a whole hive of them, they were said as plural, waps. But it underwent metathesis and became wasp. But now that sounds singular again because the s isn't at the end, so to make it plural we have to say wasps, which is pretty tough for a lot of people, particularly non-native speakers.
They're different. An unaspirated 't' is quite distinct from 'd'. In a large number of languages, aspirated and unaspirated sounds contrast with each other much more than a voiced vs unvoiced contrast. And we aren't even talking about anything terribly exotic! This is somewhere where _English_ is weird.
they're similar to English speakers because aspiration is not a distinctive phonological feature in English, and as a result we have less practice in hearing the difference
For an English speaker, it is easier to hear the difference between unaspirated voiceless and voiced when it occurs at the end of a word: compare "cup" to "cub", or "cot" to "cod", the difference here is in the voice alone. Its 's true that when an unaspirated consonant occurs in a place English wouldn't put it (like at the beginning of a word) It sounds virtually identical to the voiced version for an English speaker, but speakers of other languages would be able to pick it out.
Before you publish these videos, can you please watch them with sub titles (closed captions) on, in both full screen and non full screen mode? You put up all these graphics and pieces of information that are not visible to your viewers, because the subtitles are sitting over the top of that section of the screen.
I'm still having some difficulty understanding the difference between phones and phonemes. (It's possible I was taught incorrectly ...) It was my understanding that phonemes refer to any sound utterance, like what you might find on the IPA, and are written with brackets to show that it's representing pronunciation only and not necessarily content, whereas slashes are used to represent word and sound usage or pronunciation guidelines without the IPA (for example, saying "ni hao" is pronounced /knee how/ instead of [ni hau]. Am I wrong? Can I get some clarification? I understand what's being explained in the video, but I'm wondering if my understanding of what phonemes are is also flawed? Thanks and DFTBA!!!!!
Phones are actual sounds. Phonemes are the _perception_ of a sound (in context). The phoneme /t/, for instance, has multiple realisations depending on context, this in /top/ and /stop/, /t/ is _phonemically_ the same sound, the phonetic realisations of each /t/ are [t_h] and [t] (I'm assuming you know X-SAMPA: I can't type IPA right now. '_h' means aspiration). Thus, a phoneme is a _subjective_ view of a sound, while a phone is an _objective_ view of a sound. Mind you, I can see how this can get confusing, not least because sometimes sounds that are objectively the same are subjectively different due to their context.
Yes, your understanding is incorrect. Basically, phones are the sounds themselves, and phonemes are the sounds as we perceive them in the context of a particular language. Phones are written in brackets [] (narrow transcription), while phonemes are written in slashes // (broad transcription). For example, "butter" is pronounced /'bʌtər/ in most dialects of English. That's phonemic, meaning those phonemes can be realized as different phones in different dialects/accents. For example in General American English, the /t/ is a flap, [ɾ], and the /ər/ is an r-colored vowel [ɚ]; so, ['bʌɾɚ]. Meanwhile in England, the final /r/ is deleted; so, ['bʌtə]. Meanwhile in French, "butter" is a different word that's spelled the same, but pronounced totally differently, /byte/. In Quebec, the /y/ becomes [ʏ]; so, something like [bʏte].
Talking about being unable to hear the difference: I'm learning German and I'm still unable to tell the difference between u and ü just by hearing the word, for me they sound just the same.
As a native German speaker this is absolutely baffling to me. But I guess your ear is doing what it ilhas learned to do and as the difference does not exist in English, it is a muscle you never trained. The humans are amazing I so many unexpected ways.
Pay attention how you make the /i/ sound as in the word "sea". The "ü" sound is actually the rounded version of the same sound. So I want you to keep voicing the /i/sound as much as you can and meanwhile keeping your jaw and tongue at the same position but round your lips then you get the "ü" sound :) Disclaimer: Actually that is mentioned in the previous video but I still tried to explain :) By the way I'm someone Turkish but we have the same "ü" sound in German represented with /y/.
Yeah so I've tried a couple of times to explain how to pronounce *Tycho Brahe's* name in danish - in writng in the youtube comments. It can't be done. (Tycho Brahe was a 16th Century danish astronomer who lost his nose in a duel.) Same situation with the word *hygge.* We use the [y] sound a lot in the scandinavian languages. And we write it with the letter "y"! How radical.
And then you get into word stress which, as a french speaker, i didnt even know was a thing. Spent years wondering why i never sounded quite right speaking english even when i had the right pronounciation :') also couldn't really hear the difference between aspirated and unaspirated in the video so that was interesting
Hmm, but even when a difference in sound makes a difference in meaning, such as in the case of "rabid" and "rabbit," it's not necessarily a guarantee that speakers won't simply treats the words as homophones rather than observing the distinction. Such as in the English, "pen" and "pin." Lots of English speakers, myself included, don't even attempt to say those words differently even though they have different meanings and COULD be said differently to improve clarity.
There's the hamster one in the video, which I've heard IRL, wave there's a very similar example I know I've said, I actively noticed at some point I was adding a sound, and I remember having that moment when I had that thought, but I can't recall the word off the top of my head...
intense intensity for intensities.., in tents, in tent city, four in ten cities... when i go camping, my dreams are in tents... when models go camping, they are pretty in tents...
Here is what an accent is: It is when a speaker applies the phonological rules of her own native language to the grammar and lexic of a foreign language. Plain and simple.
I do that. I never thought about it explicitly until just now, but I do. Also it's the same process that makes people say "gramma" and "grampa". I guess I assumed I was just dropping the d out of those words, but now that I actually listen, it is also changing the n to an m in addition to dropping the d. I'm from New England, but I think people elsewhere do it too, why else would "gramps" be a commonly recognized term for one's grandfather... Now I need to pay more attention! :D
Yonder lies the castle of my fodder. Could you getme a glas of wadder? It's funny when americans say "addams" for "atoms", "data" becomes "dadda", etc..
How is Newton's universal law of gravity proved to be a universal law - meaning it is true in any and every part of this universe - without Newton himself travelling to all parts of universe to verify?
I had never seen exemples of phonological processes in sign languages, how interesting! Thank you!
The trolling prowess this one possesses is sublime.
I'm surprised that the term "minimal pair" never came up in this video, though the concept itself is discussed without putting a name to it. When two words with different meanings are phonetically identical except for a single sound (like pit/bit in english, or the tal/tʰal example given in the video), they're called a minimal pair, and this is a VERY important concept in phonology, because it's proof that the sound difference is semantically relevant, or salient, in that language. It proves that the distribution of those sounds is not *predictable*, since they can both appear in the same environment, so they cannot be allophones of the same phoneme.
I'm not a native English speaker but I've been studying the language for some time now. My knowledge about Phonology increased so much thanks to this short video. Thank you, Crash Course!
Ah, yes, the Rihanna language.
but seriously, seeing the assimilation in sign languages is very interesting!
Phonology? More like Funology!
I think when recommending this Crash Course to somebody, I'll tell them to "follow the purple rabbit."
wow, that actually works. Why does there seem to be a mascot for every one of the Crash Courses nowadays? I love it
A Spanish person told me I actually sound Hispanic not like an American trying to speak Spanish. That was a huge compliment. I accomplished this by listening to their music and singing along.
8:35 I regularly tell my son to "wash your hams!". I love linguistics and am realizing the specifics of how I play with it though this series. :D
You're OK as long as he doesn't think you are telling him to wash his rear-end...
I love the sign language inclusion!
I have never been more tempted to learn ASL. Thanks for an awesome new series l didn't know I needed!
My native languages are modern Mandarin, Cantonese, and an ancient dialect “Ai.” Since high school, I learnt English in Canada, then German in Germany. When I start comparing these languages, I have found so many phonological similarities (linguistic relativity), especially among some of the most commonly used terms such as fire, work, do etc. However, it should not be a huge surprise as we humans are shaped the same way, and migration has also promoted frequent exchange of culture.
Well, English and German are both a part of the Germanic language family (which is a subfamily of the Indo-European family), so that's probably why they're so similar.
Cool, dass du Deutsch sprichst! :D
If Ai is ancient, how come that it's one of your native languages?
Showing what these concepts can look like in sign languages just tickle my brain!
Still feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of terminologies and stuff, but this is a much better experience than in a classroom setting. Thanks Crash Course!
"steam" is unaspirated, despite what the meaning of the word would suggest.
I misread this as “phrenology”, and became seriously concerned for a moment
I could see how you'd be concerned lol
crash course conspiracy theories when
I read this as pawlogy... thought I'd see cats or dogs or animals with paws. Slightly disappointed
@@mintcarouselchannelabandon5109 well, he predicted it
Ever since aspiration had been brought to my attention a few years ago, I can't not hear it when watching videos here on TH-cam, especially since the aspiration is really noticeable in certain words; like I've heard people pronounce "castle" as /kxæsl/, or at least that's how clear the aspiration sounds to me.
For those unfamiliar with IPA, the /x/ is like a really hard raspy h
/kx/ is an affricate - a stop followed by a fricative. So I think that's called "affrication".
I pronounce aspirated t's as an aspirated affricate. Like "tie" [t͡sʰaɪ̯]
I don’t think an aspirated /k/ would become a velar affricate in any dialect, but ok
I'm a non-native but very experienced english speaker and to my surprise the aspiration example didn't work for me - I pronounce both team and steam with exacly the same aspiration. How curious!
I tend to do the same because my native language (German) uses aspiration with almost all of these sounds. Therefore, I also usually don't hear the difference. So even for an experienced speaker - if it's a difference that you don't perceive, you'll probably carry over some of your native phonology.
Same here ...
I'm a native speaker and I do the same thing.
Interesting. I'm also a non-native, but it worked for me. Maybe because my native language (German) is closely related.
Philadelphian water: [wʊdɹ̩]
Thank you!
"This should be fairly straightforward to follow."
"What if I asked you for water?"
"You lost me..."
Man do I love phonology! And also, Scoutmaster Gavagai! I also especially like you giving plenty of examples of sign phonology. Even in undergraduate work, you don't usually get a good look at that.
The best episode so far. Thanks for your efforts.
Please more and more linguistics ❤
It was great seeing parts of linguistics I've observed watching conlang videos. More more more please
This course is fascinating! I love it
I'm from Nepal!!!
It was good to hear you speak Nepali!
I did a quick look into aspiration vs voicing in plosives to see how different languages distinguish them - In addition to the 2-way combo system English has got, you got languages that distinguish with voicing alone (like French, Dutch, and Greek), languages that distinguish aspiration alone (like Mandarin and Icelandic) languages that don't distinguish either (like Hawaiian an Cherooke), languages with a three-way distinction between aspirated voiceless, unaspirated voiceless, and voiced (like Punjabi, Eastern Armenian and Wu), and then you have the mindnumbing 4-way distinction between unaspirated voiceless, aspirated voiceless, unaspirated voiced, and the ever-so-rare _aspirated voiced_ system that is common among many Indian Languages in the Indo-Aryan branch.
(Even a short read on some Wikipedia articles reveals that this is all way more complicated, there are other ways to change sounds beyond this leading to all kinds of allophones - like "unaspirated voiced" plosives usually aren't actually unaspirated, they're murmured.)
You're not ready to learn that English primarily distinguishes plosives by aspiration rather than voicing, hence why "sbin" sounds near-identical to "spin".
Hi. English's system is a two-way distinction between aspiration and non-aspiration, like Icelandic (and indeed, most, if not all, Germanic languages). We perceive the unaspirated stops as voiced in English, but, typically, they are voiceless, especially at the beginning of words. English "voiced stops" tend to be actually voiced only between vowels or next to voiced sibilants.
"voiced aspirated" consonants are the ones that are murmured
When I lived in Boston I met and identified a fellow southern Pennsylvanian by his pronunciation of "water."
As an ELT student this lecture helped me a lot. Tysm🎉❤
this. is. FASCINATING.
By the way, it there a linguistic sub-genre for how written languages have changed with internet influences? The above comment with extra punctuation as an example? ^^^
Sounds like you'd enjoy the book Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch (one of the writer of this series!)
thank you so much ❤️
I'm looooving this series! All the sign language examples are absolutely amazing! Already waiting for the next episode =)
Taylor must be a professional rabbitologist and just happens to do linguistics on the side
Kudos! please go on with phonology-related topics
Tks from Brazil. I luv u guys, u guys gives me n my knowledge dignity, I hate been in a corrupt coutry w non-educational education.
I don't know why I am commenting this, I fully understand that sounds of foreign languages will be pronounced differently by people (as you mentioned as well)
But as a native Hindi speaker who has got too used to hearing English native speakers, I rarely recognise all the different ways the t is pronounced by native speakers unless I am focusing exactly on the sound. But when you said chutney and chuʈney, it was so contrasting to the actual ʈ sound that we make. You said chuʔni and chutʰni. Not really chuʈni. Yeah, we distinguish based on aspirations also 😅
Well done guys!...Keep up the good work...We are proud of you!...
idk if theres gonna be a second episode on phonology but just in case theres not
with rules based phonology we also have to consider the order of the rules that are applied to a language. we can consider a language to have a pool of phonemes, of underlying representations, and to also have a set of rules which are applied to those underlying representations, transforming them into surface representations, the actual sounds that exist in the real world.
however, sometimes when a rule is applied, it can literally destroy environments which another rule might target, so if you, as a phonologist, mess up the ordering, it can leave you with an incorrect surface representation. theres four instances where this (or something like it) happens and they all have names: bleeding, feeding, counterbleeding, and counterfeeding, and i cannot for the life of me remember which means what. i think bleeding is where Rule A is applied and that prevents Rule B from being applied, and feeding is where Rule B can only be applied iff Rule A is applied first. i definitely dont remember what the counter-rules mean. thats why i tend to favor constraint-based phonology.
so here we learned the basics of rule-based phonology, which abstracts phoneme -> allophone as the phoneme going through some sort of machine (the rule) and becoming something else. constraint-based phonology abstracts phoneme -> allophone by taking the surface realization known to be correct, compiling that one with a group of alternatives known (obviously) to not be correct, and then ordering a list of known constraints (which are linguistic universals known to be applicable to every language's phonology, but which also have contradicting constraints to allow for variation) to eliminate each one until the one you know to be correct "wins". and then what happens is that the order you came up with just so happens to fit with any sound change you want to investigate, although this is impossible to accomplish with just one sound change. you gotta make so many tables to actually order every constraint for a language.
okay so like, the surface realizations, or candidates, are listed in a table in the first column. next, are a sequence of columns labeled on the top row with the constraints. if a candidate violates a constraint, it gets a star * and is eliminated. the most important constraints are first in the sequence, and this process continues until you are left with one candidate. or two, if the language allows free variation! the point isnt to find the correct allophone (of course) its to find an order of constraints which can be universally applied to a specific language.
unfortunately, historical sound change cannot easily be modelled with constraint since you need to visualize a change in time. linear, rule-based phonology makes this exceedingly simple. after all, how am i supposed to visualize a sound change from protoindoeuropean to proto-germanic? with two whole ass tables?? no, im gonna write a rule for that. simple one line, rule p > f. dunno if thats a PIE > Proto germanic but whatever.
Assume, you have two rules
A: ɣ → ∅ / V_
and
B: e → i /_e.
If the rule order for that language is AB and you have an underlying form /teɣe/, you get [tee] after A applies, and [tie] after B applies. In that Order, rule A feeds rule B, the rule order AB is *feeding*.
Now consider rule order BA: you get [teɣe] after B applies. Note that the intermediate form and underlying form are the same since the context for B is not fulfilled. Then rule A applies and you get [tee]. Since rule B has already been applied, albeit without change, it cannot apply again in rule-based approaches. The feeding we experienced in the AB rule order, is "countered" by the altered second rule order BA, hence the term *counter-feeding*.
Another set of rules could be
A: V → ∅ / VVC_
and
B: plosive → fricative / V_V
Assume an underlying form /heidinir/. You get [heidnir] after A applies, which destroys the context for rule B, so your surface form is [heidnir]. AB is therefore a *bleeding* rule order.
If you change the rule order to BA, the bleeding of rule B is countered, so you get [heiðinir] after B applies, and [heiðnir] after A applies; the rule order BA is therefore *counter-bleeding*. The same rule order, however, is not feeding, since rule A would apply regardless of whether rule B applied before, or not.
Regarding your second point:
*Do not ever mix up diachronic linguistics with structural (or synchronic) linguistics.* The models of synchronic linguistics, be they constraint based or rule based, apply only to structures, never to processes.
could a Nepalese person say 'team' with both different T's ?
yes, anyone can say 'team' using aspirated or un-aspirated T sounds, it will just take a lot of practice for someone who is accustomed to hearing them as the exact same letter.
I'm still confused on the way she pronounces the unaspirated "t" still sounds aspirated to me, just with less emphasis on the "puff of air". Anyone else feels this way? I'm used to the unaspirated "t" as in spanish tener, chinese 大 and indonesian tangan, and i find that her unaspirated t sounds different than all of them. Is it that the unaspirated t can be pronounced two different ways?
It’s more likely that as a native English speaker she had to work very hard just to pronounce the unaspirated /t/ on its own at all. Since we normally would never need to do that in English, it’s something we don’t learn to do and have to do manually. I actually gave it a go watching this and I can’t get anything even close to what she did.
What a great series :) Thank you so much for creating this. This is fascinating.
Thank you for making all things much more interesting, Kudos Crush course
How do ull come up with such greatand interesting ideas 😍😍 it's really funology
Thanks
I'm loving these. Thanks.
For most British English speakers the word should have been [wɔːʔə] or [wɔːtə], never [wɔʔə]. Scottish and Irish English would have a short vowel, but they're also rhotic. Vowel length is a vital distinction in this case, it helps you tell your watts from your warts.
Maybe they were trying to represent another dialect? Maybe Aussie or Kiwi? I don't know too much about those.
I'm not a master of British Phonology but there's something called "Allophonic vowel length" which means the /ɔ/ sound in water is still pronounced long without the length symbol because it occurs before a voiced consonant and I'll be liar of CD, vowels in wart and watt represented with different phonems.
@@somedragontoslay2579 They both have long [oː], it's only American English that lacks a length distinction for vowels.
@@ardasnnnn Allophonic vowel length just means that a certain sound comes in two forms depending on the context, which doesn't apply here because they are different phonemes. Wart and water contain the same environment in BE, whereas in AE they're different. Plus water doesn't even contain a voiced [d] or [ɾ] in BE, it's a voiceless [tʰ] or [ʔ]. In either case it's definitely [ɔː] as in law, not [ɔ] as in lot.
Amazing 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Or wourder as it is in jersey
Fascinating
Very interesting : ) Thanks!
Khmer has aspirations in more words than I can count. :D
Love the Sherpa rabbit!
I still wish the examples were given by native speakers or signers of the languages in question whenever possible. It would have been helpful for viewers to actually hear Nepali tal with an unaspirated t so that they could tell what it sounds like when it doesn't follow s.
More of this, please! I would very much like to know how to read the phonetic guide to pronouncing words. This would be especially helpful with learning a new language.
Crash Course Sanskrit when?
In my language (Danish), there is no meaningful distinction between a voiced s-sound and an unvoiced one. To this day I simply cannot hear the difference - unless some times if it is deliberately exaggerated. This is problematic when an American is spelling a word with a C or a Z, where that is the only distinction. I know what the difference is. I can reproduce the difference in my own speech, but I don't have an intuitive sense of which is correct from listening to the speech of others, so I generally just use the unvoiced sound.
In the other direction, I have also noticed a similar problem. The Danish language has some vowel sounds that do not exist in the English language. Particularly noticable for me, the typical Danish o has a sound that English speakers generally can't replicate correctly. In other words, I have never met someone whose first language is English who could pronounce my first name.
Since I'm learning foreign languages, I'm noticing patterns in different languages all the time e.e..and my brain went overtime on the "water" part..
In Norwegian, its vann or vannet (the water)..because Norwegian's articles and plurals fuse to the endings of their subjects..Worth noting that the t at the end of vannet is actually silent..
In German, its Wasser, or Das Wasser (the water)..because German really has a thing for getting articles meaning the right, according to the word genders..x.x..
In Scottish Gaelic, the t can become "t-" and fuse to the beginning of its subject..as in "t-gealach" (the moon)..
Romanian does the same as Norwegian with its plurals and articles, but of course different endings than Norwegian and this also doesn't happen for every single word..Apă (water) and Apa (the water)..No ending for the fused form, just remove the long a umlaut..
Another fun metathesis example in English is the wap. When there was a whole hive of them, they were said as plural, waps. But it underwent metathesis and became wasp. But now that sounds singular again because the s isn't at the end, so to make it plural we have to say wasps, which is pretty tough for a lot of people, particularly non-native speakers.
Love love love
there it is, the gavagai, crash course gavagai
I used to work in Singapore and had a lot of experience with wo-ah
Hey guys, imagine an imaginary menagerie manager managing an imaginary menagerie.
and I can can a can as a canner can can a can ;p
Stop that
にゃにゃめにゃにゃじゅうにゃにゃどのにゃらびでにゃくにゃくいにゃにゃくにゃにゃはんにゃにゃだいにゃんにゃくにゃらべてにゃがにゃがめ
dis is komplikeited
Does unaspirated [t] pronounce the same way as like letter "d"? Or they are just really similar to each other?
they’re similar, the difference is how they’re voiced (there’s a previous cc ling episode about this!)
They're different. An unaspirated 't' is quite distinct from 'd'. In a large number of languages, aspirated and unaspirated sounds contrast with each other much more than a voiced vs unvoiced contrast. And we aren't even talking about anything terribly exotic! This is somewhere where _English_ is weird.
they're similar to English speakers because aspiration is not a distinctive phonological feature in English, and as a result we have less practice in hearing the difference
For an English speaker, it is easier to hear the difference between unaspirated voiceless and voiced when it occurs at the end of a word: compare "cup" to "cub", or "cot" to "cod", the difference here is in the voice alone. Its 's true that when an unaspirated consonant occurs in a place English wouldn't put it (like at the beginning of a word) It sounds virtually identical to the voiced version for an English speaker, but speakers of other languages would be able to pick it out.
Before you publish these videos, can you please watch them with sub titles (closed captions) on, in both full screen and non full screen mode? You put up all these graphics and pieces of information that are not visible to your viewers, because the subtitles are sitting over the top of that section of the screen.
I'm still having some difficulty understanding the difference between phones and phonemes. (It's possible I was taught incorrectly ...) It was my understanding that phonemes refer to any sound utterance, like what you might find on the IPA, and are written with brackets to show that it's representing pronunciation only and not necessarily content, whereas slashes are used to represent word and sound usage or pronunciation guidelines without the IPA (for example, saying "ni hao" is pronounced /knee how/ instead of [ni hau]. Am I wrong? Can I get some clarification? I understand what's being explained in the video, but I'm wondering if my understanding of what phonemes are is also flawed? Thanks and DFTBA!!!!!
Phones are actual sounds. Phonemes are the _perception_ of a sound (in context). The phoneme /t/, for instance, has multiple realisations depending on context, this in /top/ and /stop/, /t/ is _phonemically_ the same sound, the phonetic realisations of each /t/ are [t_h] and [t] (I'm assuming you know X-SAMPA: I can't type IPA right now. '_h' means aspiration).
Thus, a phoneme is a _subjective_ view of a sound, while a phone is an _objective_ view of a sound.
Mind you, I can see how this can get confusing, not least because sometimes sounds that are objectively the same are subjectively different due to their context.
Always use IPA between // and [] though, not fauxnetics like 'knee how'. Using fauxnetics just confuses things further.
Yes, your understanding is incorrect. Basically, phones are the sounds themselves, and phonemes are the sounds as we perceive them in the context of a particular language. Phones are written in brackets [] (narrow transcription), while phonemes are written in slashes // (broad transcription).
For example, "butter" is pronounced /'bʌtər/ in most dialects of English. That's phonemic, meaning those phonemes can be realized as different phones in different dialects/accents. For example in General American English, the /t/ is a flap, [ɾ], and the /ər/ is an r-colored vowel [ɚ]; so, ['bʌɾɚ]. Meanwhile in England, the final /r/ is deleted; so, ['bʌtə].
Meanwhile in French, "butter" is a different word that's spelled the same, but pronounced totally differently, /byte/. In Quebec, the /y/ becomes [ʏ]; so, something like [bʏte].
+
How come I didn't know about cc linguistics?!
Talking about being unable to hear the difference: I'm learning German and I'm still unable to tell the difference between u and ü just by hearing the word, for me they sound just the same.
Ü sounds a lot closer to /i/ "ee" to me, like a cross between the two.
As a native German speaker this is absolutely baffling to me. But I guess your ear is doing what it ilhas learned to do and as the difference does not exist in English, it is a muscle you never trained. The humans are amazing I so many unexpected ways.
I can hear the difference but I can’t figure out how to make it 😂
Pay attention how you make the /i/ sound as in the word "sea". The "ü" sound is actually the rounded version of the same sound. So I want you to keep voicing the /i/sound as much as you can and meanwhile keeping your jaw and tongue at the same position but round your lips then you get the "ü" sound :)
Disclaimer: Actually that is mentioned in the previous video but I still tried to explain :) By the way I'm someone Turkish but we have the same "ü" sound in German represented with /y/.
Yeah so I've tried a couple of times to explain how to pronounce *Tycho Brahe's* name in danish - in writng in the youtube comments. It can't be done. (Tycho Brahe was a 16th Century danish astronomer who lost his nose in a duel.) Same situation with the word *hygge.*
We use the [y] sound a lot in the scandinavian languages. And we write it with the letter "y"! How radical.
so, tall and stall feel the same to me. I can make stall feel unaspirated but it feels like I'm saying sdall.
And then you get into word stress which, as a french speaker, i didnt even know was a thing. Spent years wondering why i never sounded quite right speaking english even when i had the right pronounciation :')
also couldn't really hear the difference between aspirated and unaspirated in the video so that was interesting
isn't unaspirated t the same as d
Love watching these vids to learn things but idk why y’all gotta upload on a Friday after everyone’s tryna relax from the work/school week. Too much
Hmm, but even when a difference in sound makes a difference in meaning, such as in the case of "rabid" and "rabbit," it's not necessarily a guarantee that speakers won't simply treats the words as homophones rather than observing the distinction. Such as in the English, "pen" and "pin." Lots of English speakers, myself included, don't even attempt to say those words differently even though they have different meanings and COULD be said differently to improve clarity.
please make a video about military drafting
I find Epenthesis very rare. Aside from russian l and spanish and french e before consonant cluster with initial s, i know no examples.
There's the hamster one in the video, which I've heard IRL, wave there's a very similar example I know I've said, I actively noticed at some point I was adding a sound, and I remember having that moment when I had that thought, but I can't recall the word off the top of my head...
intense intensity for intensities.., in tents, in tent city, four in ten cities... when i go camping, my dreams are in tents... when models go camping, they are pretty in tents...
How I say "water": /ˈwɑˌɾɚɹ/
First
gee I’m early
Second
think I heard Cockney lol
So the unaspirated /t/ is the trick to an "Indian" accent
Here is what an accent is: It is when a speaker applies the phonological rules of her own native language to the grammar and lexic of a foreign language. Plain and simple.
Ok, I've never heard or seen it said as "hambag". Where do people say that?
I do that. I never thought about it explicitly until just now, but I do. Also it's the same process that makes people say "gramma" and "grampa". I guess I assumed I was just dropping the d out of those words, but now that I actually listen, it is also changing the n to an m in addition to dropping the d. I'm from New England, but I think people elsewhere do it too, why else would "gramps" be a commonly recognized term for one's grandfather... Now I need to pay more attention! :D
Yonder lies the castle of my fodder.
Could you getme a glas of wadder?
It's funny when americans say "addams" for "atoms", "data" becomes "dadda", etc..
How is Newton's universal law of gravity proved to be a universal law - meaning it is true in any and every part of this universe - without Newton himself travelling to all parts of universe to verify?
OK. lol