Some of those are the same vowels at different lengths, though. The accent in A Á E É actually mean different vowels. The rest are just duplicates, marking how long you're supposed to hold the same sound. The little line above an A changes the /ɑ/ sound into an /a/, while Ö and Ő are both /ə/, or somewhere thereabouts your usual mid central vowel. Ő is just longer. To put it into another context, the difference between I and Í would be somewhat analogues to the difference between "pick" and "peek".
Australian English has a very similar 7+length set, then adding a number of weird diphthongs. The short "ü" only occurs in diphthongs never alone, eg: AÜ "boat", ŐU "curl" & ÜU "fuel".
I really want to hear what a language made entirely of vowels would sound like I'm imagining it would basically just sound like what it's like trying to talk to dentists while they have their fingers in your mouth
There's a whole sentence in Brazilian Portuguese made entirely of vowels (including semivowels too): "ó o auê aí" [ˌɔwaˈwe aˈi]. It roughly means "look at this mess". :)
In the first 64 seconds you explaining why my child self always thought the pronunciation in English is stupid. In portuguese those are true vowels, apparently.
Artifexian In Portuguese it is so weird to hear "I" being pronounced as "ai" or "a" being pronounced "ei". It is like seeing people use the imperial system all over again! Though by what I heard it makes sense of using "æ" and it was removed as, as usual, typers ruin everything. I still keep them in my world though.
Portuguese also miss the point on vowels, adding extra vowels to change the sound of consonants, which is redundant. The word "Portuguese" itself is a flaw, as it could simply be "portugese". Without the /u/, it ends up being spelled portujese, so you are using a vowel to make sure people won't spell /g/ as /j/ when you could simply use /g/ or /j/. The use o /ü/ to remind the spelling of the /u/ after a /g/ is an aberration. Also, Portuguese has 7 vowels, not 5, as /ê/ and /é/ sounds different, same for /ô/ and /ó/.
Adolpho Paiva plus â and á, and the unstressed e sound. But the palatalization of c and g Makes perfect sense, It happens in many languages, and happened as early as vulgar latin. English is the odd one out with its irregularities such as girl, get or give. Remember thé letter j is a recent invention. I'm okay with orthography being eymological, as long as it's not random (french piqûre, pôle, poids, vingt... Make no sense whatsoever)
In spanish, the graphic letters correspond exactly with the 5 sounds. In spanish we have only 5 vowels sounds. Yes, I understand the different between letter and sound, instead spanish have only 5 of each and there is a 100% equivalence. In some parts of the south of Spain, the have more, because they dont pronunciate the /s/ in the final of the word as strong as the rest, so they enfatizate more in the last vowas for making plurals, but this diferences are just alophones of the 5 official sounds.
Technically the "u" in the digraphs "qu" and "gu" (before "e" and "i") isn't pronounced, and sometimes the vowels "u" and "i" represent semi-consonants. But yeah, we get the point.
Arturo Stojanoff Yes, the is the qu exception. But the gu is necesary because ge and gi dont sound like ga go and gu. And in regular spanish there is never semiconsonants.
Hey Artifexian, I am not Japanese but I am spending a semester abroad in Tokyo. Your point about length of vowels is spot on; Japanese has long and short vowels. Long vowels such as in 東京 (とうきょう) which is read [to̞ːkjo̞ː] and written Tōkyō. Here the characters う(U) elongates the sound from the character と(TO). The second half of the word (きょう) is composed of き(KI), little ょ (YO), which merges itself with KI to create the KYO sound and う(U), which prolongues the KYO (but is not pronounced as an U). However your example of the word すし(sushi) to explain voiceless vowels is, to my knowledge, unusual. Sushi is usually pronounced SU-SHI with a slight emphasis on the sound SHI. Some examples of voiceless vowels in Japanese: the first [i] in ちかい chikai (near); [i] and [u] in きます kimasu (to come); [u] in ですdesu (to be) is voiceless. Japanese has the little sokuon っ that you might want to touch on a video that explains consonants. It is a very peculiar sound. The way my Japanese teachers taught me was trying to imagine holding your breath for a fraction of a second while saying the word. Great video, as always.
+cogogaRJ Gemination (represented by the sokuon in Japanese) is actually a language feature that creeps up quite frequently, although is not that common in Germanic languages. Finnish is the other major one that most people think of, with all of its double consonants and vowels (ex. muta ≠ muuta ≠ muttaa, tuli ≠ tulli). Other languages that feature consonant gemination include Arabic and Korean.
+cogogaRJ Italian is also a mainstream European language that has geminated consonants: "fatto" (made) is pronounced with a geminated /t/. Actually, Italian can geminate almost all of its consonants, and some of them are only found geminated. There is no simple /sh/ sound, only a geminated one like in "pesce" (fish), and the same goes for /ny/ ("segno" sign) and /ly/ ("figlio" son). The /z/ phoneme as in "rosa" (rose) is the only consonant that can never occur geminated. Sorry for the bad phonetics, I can't type IPA right now.
+Ashtar Balynestry Hmmm, interesting. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't those different then the Japanese ones? Here the sukuon doesn't mark a change of pronounciation based on geminated consonants, rather skuon is it's own sound. Listen to the pronounciation of まって (matte), meaning the imperative form of "stop". translate.google.com/#ja/en/%E3%81%BE%E3%81%A3%E3%81%A6 Can you hear the little stop? That's the sokuon. We show it when writing with western characters by using geminated consonants. However it is *not* the same as, for example, in Portuguese "carro" /h/ or "caro" /r/. I think we use geminated consonants when transcribing Japanese because there is no other way of indicating the pause. If I'm wrong, please let me know, I'm only a stundent.
+cogogaRJ No, sokuon is gemination. The thing is that when you geminate a plosive, which is a sound like /p/, /t/, /k/ in which the air is expelled abruptly from the mouth after being blocked, the only way to make it longer is to make the blockage last longer, which would essentially cause you to pause before saying it. Japanese has a syllabic writing system, but its phonotactics aren't quite as strict, so they created ways to get around its limitations. It can't represent nasal vowels, so a hentaigana variant of /mu/ was resurrected to represent them (/n/), and it can't represent consonant clusters, so to write them, you write a syllable beginning with the first consonant, and then a small version of the rest of the syllable (/ki/ + /yo/ = /kyo/). Similarly, since a lot of the words with sokuon are descendants of Middle Chinese words that ended in /t/, (compare Japanese /ichi, hachi/ with Cantonese /yat, baat/, and these numbers develop sokuon when added to a counter, like /issai, hassai/), a small syllable with /t/, that is, /tsu/, was co-opted to represent it. About Portuguese "carro" vs "caro", in Latin you did geminate the /r/ (just make it last longer), but Portuguese speakers eventually turned the geminated sound into a uvular fricative, which is now a separate phoneme. You still write itwith a double r, but it's a totally different sound now.
Kôitsu_ Greetings Estonian! I've got to say that you've got some diphthongs even we don't use, that's how we can tell our languages apart. Btw I was over there a few weeks ago in search of cheap booze, I bet you've encountered this phenomenon before, haven't you?
Anston [Music] oh, yes I have, but personally I don't mind some of our favourite neighbours visiting us, even if it is just for the cheap alcohol. Talking about languages I really like Finnish language very much, it sounds familiar yet strange, I hope I can learn it some day!
Kôitsu_ Good for you! I visited this awesome fast restaurant called Wok to Walk, it was as quick and cheap as Subway but it was very refreshing, too bad we don't have one here.
because it's english! In italian we say a, e, i, o, u in a single sound, it's stupid to have a letter I and call it EYE or writing different than the pronunciation in general like english does
I'm pretty fluent in English, but I'll be damned if I sometimes don't pause and ponder why "A" sounds more like "E", "E" like "I" and "I" like "A". Who thought it's a good idea?
Lucas M, German just uses either 'ei' or 'ai' to represent /ai/, sine the other five vowel letters are already reserved for pretty distinct and straight-forward phonetic vowels (I believe there's a little bit of variation in pronounciation, but it's subtle and you don't even realize as a native speaker that not every a, e, i, o, or u sounds the same - if it doesn't).
Not true. Italian has the open è /ɛ/ (like the first "e" in "bene") and the closed é /e/ (like the "e"' in "stella") and the open ò /ɔ/ (like the "o" in parola") and the closed ó /o/ (like the "o" in "ombra") .
FAUX!!! "Saint" is pronunced /sɛ̃/, not /sã/. In fact, the sound /ã/ doesn't really exist in french, it's more like /ɑ̃/, like in "sang" (/sɑ̃/) It depends on the accent/dialect, but it's true in standard french. However, in Quebec, the sound /ɑ̃/ is pronunced more like /ã/. I know it because I'm from there myself. ^^ (NB : /ɛ̃/ is pronunced more like /ĩ/ in Quebec, free information =3)
Mercure250 If I had seen a lot of Chinese names, I'd concur. Even though I'd really be interested in the numbers of people who speak English and Chinese and have access to TH-cam versus those that speak English and French and have access to TH-cam.
+Mercure250 Actually, ɛ̃ has moved to æ̃ or even ã for some speakers. The sound is usually transcribed as ɛ̃ because of tradition. It's like English "ʌ", which is in fact realized as "ɐ" in RP.
Penny Lane You can’t speak Chinese as it is not one language, but rather a group of many related languages. The so-called dialects of Chinese are typically mutually incomprehensible. Cantonese and Mandarin are like English and French to each other. Though I suppose you could describe English as “Insular West Germanic Indo-European” and French as “Northwestern Late Common Italic Indo-European”, thus English and French both speak dialects of Indo-European.
In polish, we have: A O E I U Y - which make the exact sound as vowels should, we also have modified vowels( not exactly vowels): Ą Ó Ę And J Ł which are semi-vowels.
It's funny, because when I started learning English at school (I'm Brazilian, a Portuguese speaker), the teacher used to write on the board: A -> Ei E -> i I -> Ai O -> Ôu U -> Iu
@@wildstarfish3786 dude you do know that ô is used in portuguese right? IPA doesn't use it, neither does it use capital letters, where in the world did you get the idea that this is IPA???
@@glitchy9613 because of the fact they had to transcribe english letters to letters that sound NOTHING like the sound those letters default to in ANY latin language
+iEliteTester greek has a latino slavic accent greek its closer to a latin language but it aint it is hellenic so...complicated with our bros wich have the biggest ship ever to sink on the bottom of aegean sea (britannic) huuuu.....
Razvan Popovici everyone but the english pronounce vowels like this, even chinese people for good sakes, i guess its the bretons that had this conventions, oh wait no, in welsh they do pronounce vowels like normal people, so its the french fault, well, normans
Two note signing is so cool. We had a troupe of Tibetan throat singers visit campus while I was in college. People could hear them across campus even though they were inside
I'm really baffled you do not have more subscribers than you do. Your videos are always amazing and they teach me so much stuff in such a short timespan. Keep going at it Edgar!
+AbleToWuppii You know, I just don't think this channel has mass appeal - which is cool. But please do consider sharing my videos, it would help loads with my goal of reaching 10,000 subs. :)
In Portuguese (at least the Brazilian variation) all the "vowels" are vowels, though "i" and "u" may be semi vowels depending on use, and theres â, ã, é, ó and õ to confuse spanish people.
na verdade, a gente pode ouvir as deferenças, mas a gente acha que é o sotaque mesmo e não uma distinção necessária. É dizer, não temos as orelhas fechadas kkkkkk. A gente pode diferenciar entre "avó" e "avô", mas para nós, não é algo distivo. Por ejemplo, en México, tenemos 11 vocales, 6 orales y 5 oronasales (no son propiamente nasales). Las 5 oronasales /ã̠/, /ẽ̞/, /ĩ/, /õ̞/, /ũ/. Estas, en otros países son mera casuailidad, y se pronuncian antes de N o M o Ñ, y bueno, no son un factor distintivo como lo es en português, sin embargo, en países como México, Cuba, parte de España o en GE, y otras partes más, sí son factor distintivo, es decir, no decimos "pan", sino "pã", sin embargo, no se reconocen por la RAE ni por nadie jajajjaaj. Aclaro, el português en realidad tiene 5 vocales nasale, 2 semivocales nasales y otras 8-9 orales, y no, no son las mismas que las del español. Segunda aclaración, en español, suelen considerarse alófonos y no fonemas como tal. [mĩ̯ẽn.tras], en este caso, se forma diptongo y ambas se nasalizan, ¿Por qué ustedes no las distinguen?, fácil, porque no son iguales a las del portugués. [miˈẽtɾas] (português) vs. [mĩ̯ẽ̞n.tras], como ves, en español se diptonga, pero en portugués no, segundo, en portugués la vocal es lo suficientemente nasal como para reemplezar a la "n", es decir, no la pronuncian, mientras en que español, no. tɾɐ̃skɾisˈɐ̃w̃ (portugués) vs. tɾãns.kɾip.ˈsjõn. La misma historia. Las 6 orales /a̠/, /e̞/, /i/, /o̞/, /u/, /ə̥/ (aquí vemos a la schwa, y es la que hace que "pesos", "pesas" y "peces" se pronuncien igual en México, es decir: [ˈpe̞sə̥s]). Esto es en México, sin embargo, el repertorio de sonidos vocálicos del andaluz es más grande. 17 vocales: 7 oronasales (casi nasales por completo), y 10 orales. las 7 nasales(a veces oronasales, dependiendo del dialecto del andaluz) /ã̠/, /ẽ̞/, /ĩ/, /õ̞/, /ũ/, /ɛ̃/, /ɔ̃/. Y las 10 orales son /a̠/, /e̞/, /i/, /o̞/, /u/, /ɔ/, /ɛ/, /æ̞/, /ʊ̝/, /ɪ̝/. Sin embargo, no se consideran fonémas, sino alófonos en la mayoría de las ocasiones, aunque las nasales sean distintivas en andaluz como en português o francés, no se les da esa categoría porque habría que meternos en debates y sucedería una revolución fonológica que no queremos ahorita. Mis lenguas maternas son el español y el português, y sí se oyen las diferencias tanto en español, como en portugués.
In the french "saint", it is not [ã] (nazalized a) but [ɛ̃] (perceived as a nazalized i). French nazalized vowels are always a problem for foreigners. Especially [œ̃] (nazalized u), except for portuguese and hindi speakers (maybe others too, but I didn't meet them).
+Napishtim Crap! You're right about "saint". Sorry about the mistake. And, yes, I find nasalized vowels very difficult - much more so than clicks, implosives etc - but they do sound awesome.
+Artifexian I use to hear that nasal vowels are a big problem for freigners learning portuguese as well, we use it all the time. It may also be the reason we have so few operas written in portuguese :/ Nasalized vowels are hard to project.
+Rígille Scherrer Borges Menezes I actual know a few opera singers, might ask them about how they deal with nazalisation whilst singing - particularly in French songs.
+Napishtim Yeah, I'm working on a conlang and I decided to get rid of all nazalized vowels for that reason. I still kept the French u [y] though, I hope people don't butcher it up too much considering I also have a [u] sound.
If there's any language with "quiphthongs", it would probably be Finnish. It can have large numbers of vowels with no consonants to break them up, like in "hääyöaieuutinen" - "plans for wedding night". The represents an IPA /y/.
+rzeka Finnish always cracks me up and that one takes the cake. LOL Counting numbers are another exercise in futility. I find it extremely surprising with all of the Finnish people here in the US that we only have ONE word from Finnish: sauna. BTW, where I grew up, we had so many Finns around we actually regularly celebrated St. Urho's Day with a downtown parade and everything. =_)
Yeah, and all the other letters are not consonants either. THEY'RE JUST SYMBOLS FOR CONSONANTS! Therefore there are no vowels or consonants in the alphabet.
Thanks a lot Edgar, really. Artifexian became one of the best channels I subscribe, and when I see there's a new video out I just run to watch it. You are healping me so much with my conlang, and I just don't know how to thank you.
Finally someone understands my struggles with English vowels! My native language is Spanish, so I'm rather used to AEIOU being proper vowels. By the way, my grandma taught me some Italian, and I remember this word AUIOLA (kitchen pot, I believe), a really tongue twister and also a //cuatriptongo//
In additional for Vietnamese, I just have counted and Vietnamese has: -12 monophthongs -a lot of combinations (diphthongs, triphthongs) -6 tones Each monophthongs has its own letters, with different tone marks, but sound the same as it names With informal speaking (in different local accents), some tones and monophthongs merge into one due to accent habits Which explained to me why I feel so hard when I started English even though I learned English since Kindergarten because words are different from sounds
I don't know why, how or when I found your videos. I don't even know why I now fine language so interesting (and wish I'd learned more about it at school). Whatever the answers to these questions, the real answer is "I'm just glad that I did". Cheers!
Judging by the comments, English might actually be the exception when it comes to pronouncing AEIOU as diphtongs. They are apparently all monophtongs in Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Danish, German, French, and presumably a couple more.
Scandinavian dialects in general are actually very prone to diphthongisation of the long vowels. Even "standard" Swedish tends to have funky offglides making the long vowels not quite pure, but speakers tend to perceive them as pure, which leads to them being taught as pure, and the result is that learners often have a little bit of an accent that natives who pronounce their vowels like this can't quite place because they don't realise the difference between truly pure monophthongs and the "impure" monophthongs of their own pronunciation. And again, many dialects fully diphthongise (or even triphthongise) the vowels. The short vowels, however, tend to be pure monophthongs basically everywhere. This is probably more prominent in Sweden and Norway than in Denmark. As for Faroese and Icelandic, languages historically descended from Scandinavian dialects of Norway, the process was already going on at the time of their breakoff and both vernaculars today have diphthongs as standard (and dialectal) realisations of most long vowels. Portuguese AFAIK has similar tendencies under a few circumstances as well. Standard Castilian Spanish is indeed the go-to example for pure and unreduced vowels however.
Ava Skoog Thanks for the rather lengthy insight! "Accents" that aren't perceived by the speakers due to not noticing miniscule differences in pronunciation is a huge topic by itself.
Speaking of sounds, the way he pronounces the final "t" in words like "height" or "light" is just beautiful. I could spend my all day listening to him pronouncing words like that.
+Felix Jin I knew my pronunciation was way off. Just couldn't get my food hole to do the correct thing. Thanks for throwing the IPA in comments. Merry Christmas too you to and a very happy new year.
In Chinese hanyupinyin (which is like a way to 'spell' the pronunciation of the words out) the vowels are a, e, i, o, u and ü. They're also spoken the same way they're supposed to. All the Chinese examples in this video were actually hanyupinyin (zhī and shī) and they were on top of the actual Chinese characters.
Overtone singing! Hooray! Hello, fellow world-builder. I've watched a few videos on youtube about constructed languages and yours are by far the most entertaining and the most informative. You're the only person I've seen who has even touched on the subject of overtone singing. I haven't done much research on the topic yet, but it's something I've wanted to play with in the novels I'm writing. I wanted to have a group of isolated, slightly differently evolved humans whose vocal tracts make Mongolian style throat singing easier to produce than a normal human language. I got the idea from a theory I heard about in college but it was only mentioned in passing by one of my professors. I think there's a book called The Singing Neanderthal about it. I'm not sure if I'd want to, or even be capable, of designing it as a complete language, but I'd like to take a crack at it. I think using a form of music as a language has a lot of interesting potential. What do you think? Any advice on how to tackle it? Would a language sung instead of spoken even work? My worry was there wouldn't be enough sounds to make it a complete and complex language, but my other notion was to include things like body language as an added way of communicating. It's all still in the idea phase and I may not even do it, but I'd really like to hear your opinion. Also if you like that sort of thing, there's a great documentary about a blind musician who travels to Tuva. It's called Genghis Blues. Seriously, check it out.
I am super excited for next year's conlang videos! After those can you do something on the development of measurement of time? And then maybe creation of ecosystems. :P
Oh hey! This is reminding me of how at the school I go to there are some people with a dialect of English in which all phonetic sounds (both consonants and vowels) are made with the tip tongue in the same location, only moving other parts of the mouth (or very rarely the very back of the tongue), and they have some words with as many as eight vowels without a single consonant (other than maybe a glottal stop)
This one video was all I needed to see to subscribe to your channel. You have given me in one video more then I have found in my vowel research over the last year. Thanks you are amazing.
Thanks for this - I argue with friends all the time that letters are not vowels. They are symbols that represent sounds. 'How' and 'House' have the same sound, that is represented alternatively by w and u. in this case, it's considered loosely as a continental sound (which is why we are taught that W is never a vowel in English except in Welso loanwords like cwm and cwtch. ) we see the same sound in 'ciao' (an Italian word borrowed in English) and thus ao is also representing the same continental sounds.
In Korean, all of the names of the vowels are the vowel themselves. (All the monophthongs of Korean) ㅏ /ɐ/ ㅓ /ʌ/ ㅗ /o/ ㅜ /u/ ㅡ /ɯ/ ㅣ /i/ ㅐ /ɛ/ ㅔ /e/ ㅚ /ø/ ㅟ /y/
I never quite know why I watch your videos as I tend to have little interest in the topics. That is, until I've finished a video and then its all I can think about. Keep up the videos and merry Christmas!
Just because they conveniently and/or are designed to align. Does not meant they aren't "totally unrelated ideas", they're independent from one another. They _are_ unrelated.
That isn't the point. Your letter is still an arbitrary symbol. This symbol "A" is not in any way connected to the process of making the sound "ah", or whatever sound you take it to represent. As an illustration of this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerogram
I'd just like to say thankyou so much. I found your videos about September last year (I think), and they have helped immensely to develop the language I have been creating for a novel I've been writing for a couple of years. Not just that but I find all your videos really interesting whether I use the information or not 😁
After 3:00 This certainly is because I'm Brazilian but i only raise a part of the middle tongue to say "U" (it stays stick to the bottom of the mouth) And to say "I" i just curl up my tongue upwards so that only the left and right points touch the top
Magi V I've been studying German for two years now and I still don't know how to pronounce the "ö" vowel. I think it's like the British "r" in the word "further" but the British "r" sound would be used in German as an "ö" sound like in "möchte" or "mögen" or "könig". What is the proper way to pronounce the German "ö" sound?
Magi V I've been studying German for two years now and I still don't know how to pronounce the "ö" vowel. I think it's like the British "r" in the word "further" but the British "r" sound would be used in German as an "ö" sound like in "möchte" or "mögen" or "könig". What is the proper way to pronounce the German "ö" sound?
The letter "ö" is close to the sound "e" makes in the word "driver" said with an American accent. The only difference is that you should shape your lips as you would when saying "o".
Magi V It's the same in Dutch, although each one of these letters also has a different version (pronounced longer but not just in duration) that is written the same way some of the time, of which some are in fact diphthongs.
That overtone singing was pretty good. Not as good as people who spend their lives devoted to it, obviously, but way better than most people could even come close to.
+Oculus Universale Sort of. I was raised speaking both German and English but my German has deteriorated over the years. At the moment, I am far from fluent but have enough to get by if needed.
So... after looking at the last few videos about all these sounds, I'm starting to get a much better clarification on my early studies of phonology when I gained an interest in what conlanging is. In my little note-jot journal, I've compiled a list of 50 consonants- a lot of them pertaining to the /bw/, /mw/, etc., and a few other distinctions like voiceless nasals, and placement of articulation with 't's and 'd's, being either dental, alveolar, and retroflex. Of course, retroflex 't's and 'd's don't sound much different, but have a nice distinction of tone in them. Other consonants include a lateral variation, for letters like s, z, sh, and zh having lateral counterparts. Going on, a few other distinctions between f's and v's- a variation where it's the top lip connecting to the bottom teeth row. This would be used at the beginning of words most likely. Finally, a distinction between wh and w, r and (rolled) r. I also compiled a total of 14 (or 28, if you want to count length) vowels. 7 of which are normal- a, e, i, o, u, oo as in foot, and i as in bit. The other 7 have creaky variations. I just like messing around with this kind of stuff, and seeing what I can come up with. It's just fun. Nothing tedious or time-consuming yet.
+Victor Houle Yes, have been told about this a number of times. Sorry for the mistake but thanks for pointing it out. Mistakes, when they make it through the filter, need to be identified and corrected ASAP.
with your videos, the long-ish waiting times are always rewarded with a high quality product, so first and foremost keep the quality up, rather than increasing the frequency.
+TheJklgamer Cheers! Totally agree, quality over quantity is the way to go. I admire the youtubers that stick to that philosophy: CGP Grey, Kurzgesagt, Veritasium, Vsauce, Veritasium etc.
Finally someone’s explaining what I had in head since I was 7, and I tried to explain that to every English and French teachers I ever had but they just looked at me confused-
04:00 Damn! I knew that I'm right about these frequencies! Some time ago I figured out that the different ways of articulating vowels is pretty much what a resonant filter does, and our mouth is pretty much a resonant cavity to make this filtering possible. For example, when you shape your mouth roundly, the symmetry of the circle allows only a certain frequency to come out of your mouth (all radial standing waves are of the same wavelength), and you produce pretty much a pure monochromatic (or rather monotonic) sinusoid. The more you open your mouth, the more different wavelengths can get out, resulting in more content of higher harmonics in the spectrum. But when you shape your mouth as a thin slit, only short wavelength waves can oscillate vertically, but long waves can oscillate horizontally. It pretty much causes horizontal polarization in the sound wave (unfortunately, I haven't heard about anyone measuring the polarization of sound waves in speech yet :P ). I'm not sure if our ears can detect polarization, but they can definitely decompose the spectrum, and because of this polarization, there's a variation in spectrum as well, because now the lower part of the spectrum is missing and there's more content of the higher harmonics. So, long story short, the "oo" sounds are "more low-pitch waves, less high-pitch waves", the "ee" sounds are "more high-pitch waves, less low-pitch waves", the "a" sounds are pretty much all harmonics ("both high, low and middle pitches"), and "o" is close to a monotonic middle ("no low harmonics, no high harmonics, just the middle"). So there actually _is_ a connection between the IPA vowel graph and the spectra. Speaking of which... Do you know any free software which is capable of analyzing your voice's spectrum and then converting it into a position on the IPA vowel graph as you speak to the microphone? Such software could definitely help in learning correct pronunciations of foreign languages or finding out which IPA symbol to use for a particular vowel you know how to pronounce. 09:00 That Bob Ross reference though :D
Here in Brazil (portuguese), AEIOU are pronounced: A is like the A sound in "dark". E is like the A sound in "ray" I is like the Y sound in "yellow" O is like the first O in "robot" U is like the OO in "root"
CarcaráCafé O inglês também passou por um período de mudança radical nos sons de muitas palavras, chamado de Grande Mudança Vocálica, que deixou a ortografia completamente defasada em relação à pronúncia.
Nosso alfabeto é de quinta mão: nós usamos um alfabeto que foi emprestado dos portugueses, que emprestaram dos visigodos, que emprestaram dos romanos, que emprestaram dos etruscos, que adaptaram dos fenícios.
CarcaráCafé os visigodos emprestaram o alfabeto latino depois de invadirem o território do império romano, pra escrever as línguas derivadas do latim que eventualmente viraram o português
+Artifexian As a French speaker I actually doubt the "ain" sound is a variation of the "a", but rather of the "i". Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me like the A is mostly there as an etymological leftover from an older spelling and pronunciation (saint in Spanish becomes santa, pain becomes pan). There might be a small nuance I don't here but as far as I know "saint" and "fin" rhyme perfectly. The variation of "a" would be the "an" sound (without the i) like in "blanc", "banc" and "grand". French spelling is horribly confusing even for French speakers so your mistake is absolutely understandable (though in a way I like our spelling system because it usually traces back all the way to the early latin variations and all that, with ghost letters everywhere etc etc). If some day you need some advice on some French pronunciation I'd be glad to help :) (And I also speak Dutch fluently which is even weirder) I love your channel!
+Amozmusicmaker Ye, I've since learned that I totally messed up that French bit. The "ain" sound I mention is in fact a [ɛ̃] but is perceived as a nasalized "i". I love the sound of your language but, man, french spelling is a utter nightmare, imo.
"Some sort of timely fashion." It is the middle of May now and I only see 2 more videos in this playlist. Get on this. I have a family of languages to build and you are the best help I have had since google itself.
Ah !.. English, your vowels are so messed up ! By the way, in french is not pronounced /sã/ but /sɛ̃/ (wich is really funny since it is homophonic with (breasts) ! Also the /ã/ exists only in québecois (canadian french and i can guaranty you that french native speakers are able to note the difference) in european and african french it is /ɑ̃/ and in some swiss accents /ɒ̃/.
English uses short and long vowels extensively. When you learn it, you think about it just like when learning Japanese. The only difference is that English short and long vowels also usually associated with different sounds. But they are still very explicitly long and short.
+Tsharli Foster (AdrenalineVan) I know...it was either now or Friday and it's already been 4 weeks since the last video. ASAP was the name of the game.
Artifexian Yeah... I have a somewhat bad habit of commenting before I finish watching the video, so I had no idea that you were pushed for time. These videos are brilliant, by the way.I think maybe you should at least touch on grammar: like cases and word order; because phonology isn't the only important part of languages.
+Tsharli Foster (AdrenalineVan) Absolutely. In the next linguistics vid, I'll nail down what sounds my language will use. I'll talk through my creative considerations etc. Then it's on to grammar and then...who knows :)
But it *is* yellow. Color is just how our brains interpret light. There is no difference between how our brain interprets an equal mixture of green and red dots or the 'yellow' wavelength of light. We don't see wavelengths, we see colors, yellow is always yellow.
I'm late to comment, but in case you still don't know... The RYB colour model is simply an outdated guess at how colour works. RGB is the additive colour model, used for lights (stagelights, tv screens, etc). CYM is the subtractive colour model, used for inks, paints, etc. The 3 kinds of receptors in the eyes pick up wavelengths associated with red, green, and blue respectively. So it's RGB. Technically the eyes don't receive colour of course, the brain somehow produces it based on the combination of receptors that are triggered.
I don't think he used the wrong symbol at all: the English words "may" and "my" (for example) are written /meɪ/ and /maɪ/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet (which the use of / / pressupposes) -- using /ɪ/ (not /i/) as the second element in each case.
@8:18, is that a single sentence or two? If it's one, how are we supposed to understand it please? Also, could you provide a link to that poem about the Chinese nephew please?
+Cubeazza But is never pronounced /f/ at the beginning of a syllable, nor are the letters ever pronounced /ʃ/ at the end of a syllable. Not in English anyway. It's a creative respelling, but without the accompanying explanation any English speaker would pronounce as "goaty".
I've NEVER heard any english speaker pronounce "women" that way. It's pronounced with a short e sound, like "wehmin". There are better examples to use than that of O being pronounced differently.
As far as I can recall, I have NEVER heard any English speaker pronounce "women" as anything remotely like "wehmin". Most, if not all, American English dialects pronounce the first vowel sound in women with basically the same vowel sound that's found in fish. I'm not saying you're wrong here, but I don't know what English accents would use the /ɛ/ as the first vowel sound in women. I am, to the contrary, very familiar with the use of /ɪ/.
_And the question remains_ How in the fuck do you write songs in Chinese if they have tones!? Ever since I learned about tonal languages i've just had this question and I fear it's one of those ungoogleable questions. - EDIT - Turns out you ignore them, other ways of pronouncing will give clues aside from context. Suace: www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ua1h6/eli5_in_tonal_languages_like_mandarin_how_do_you/
+Soupy Fun fact, in Vietnamese, there is no choice but to follow the tones when writing music! If you don't, words will be barely unintelligible. Same with Cantonese, but not Mandarin. There goes my Vietnamese songwriting career...
My language has = A E I O U, and to make other sounds we usually double the vowels = aa ee ii oo uu It's tonal but tells you the tone through combinations of vowels and consonants kind of like Thai Alphabet or Chinese pinyin tone markers. Example na is soft, nha is breathier and heavier while n'a is equivalent to the *ng* in song. And nga itself makes a different sound to the ng in song. Na nha n'a nga ngwa nza nja etc.
What people always forget to mention is that the Lion-Eating Poet poem is written in Classical Chinese, that is Chinese as it was three thousand years ago. Therefore it actually makes no sense to pronounce it in modern Mandarin "shi shi shi shi..." If you want to pronounce the poem in modern Mandarin then you should be consistent and rewrite the poem using modern Mandarin grammar and vocabulary.
+Baptiste PARIS Ye, I meesed up on the French. Apologies. There is length but we don't derive meaning from it. There is no [bim] that contrasts with [bi:m], if you get me.
In Hungarian we have:
A,Á,E,É,I,O,Ó,Ö,Ő,U,Ú,Ü and Ű.
And they're all proper vowels.
Not diphtongs?
Some of those are the same vowels at different lengths, though. The accent in A Á E É actually mean different vowels. The rest are just duplicates, marking how long you're supposed to hold the same sound.
The little line above an A changes the /ɑ/ sound into an /a/, while Ö and Ő are both /ə/, or somewhere thereabouts your usual mid central vowel. Ő is just longer.
To put it into another context, the difference between I and Í would be somewhat analogues to the difference between "pick" and "peek".
Australian English has a very similar 7+length set, then adding a number of weird diphthongs. The short "ü" only occurs in diphthongs never alone, eg: AÜ "boat", ŐU "curl" & ÜU "fuel".
@LUCA MORIN Portuguese has A, Ã, À, Á, E, É, Ê, I, Í, O, Õ, Ó, Ô, U, Ú
@@andor888 pretty sure ö is /ø/ and not /ə/
I really want to hear what a language made entirely of vowels would sound like
I'm imagining it would basically just sound like what it's like trying to talk to dentists while they have their fingers in your mouth
how about semivowels
There's a whole sentence in Brazilian Portuguese made entirely of vowels (including semivowels too): "ó o auê aí" [ˌɔwaˈwe aˈi]. It roughly means "look at this mess". :)
In Romanian we have a pretty long sentence with only vowels: "Oaia aia e a ei, eu i-o iau", which means "That sheep is hers, I'm taking it from her".
@@stefantrandafir1099 isn't i in oaia is a consonant /j/
@@siratshi455 umm I don't think so, in Romanian a, e, i, o and u are all vowels (i and u can also be semivowels)
In the first 64 seconds you explaining why my child self always thought the pronunciation in English is stupid. In portuguese those are true vowels, apparently.
+Enkii Muto Man, totally with you on this. "What do you mean "climb" is spelled with a "b"...who thought this was a good idea?"
Artifexian In Portuguese it is so weird to hear "I" being pronounced as "ai" or "a" being pronounced "ei". It is like seeing people use the imperial system all over again!
Though by what I heard it makes sense of using "æ" and it was removed as, as usual, typers ruin everything.
I still keep them in my world though.
Portuguese also miss the point on vowels, adding extra vowels to change the sound of consonants, which is redundant. The word "Portuguese" itself is a flaw, as it could simply be "portugese". Without the /u/, it ends up being spelled portujese, so you are using a vowel to make sure people won't spell /g/ as /j/ when you could simply use /g/ or /j/. The use o /ü/ to remind the spelling of the /u/ after a /g/ is an aberration. Also, Portuguese has 7 vowels, not 5, as /ê/ and /é/ sounds different, same for /ô/ and /ó/.
Adolpho Paiva plus â and á, and the unstressed e sound. But the palatalization of c and g Makes perfect sense, It happens in many languages, and happened as early as vulgar latin. English is the odd one out with its irregularities such as girl, get or give. Remember thé letter j is a recent invention. I'm okay with orthography being eymological, as long as it's not random (french piqûre, pôle, poids, vingt... Make no sense whatsoever)
@@Artifexian lmao i actually pronounce the bs
[LAUGHS IN SPANISH]
Gvido
And in most languages that aren’t English
**laughs in Swedish**
*laughs in Italian*
*looks confused in japanese*
*[LAUGHTS IN FEIJOADA]*
*laughs in tijolinho*
In Spanish, all of the vowels are actually vowel sounds, as far as I know.
Same in german
+Adam Smith And Norwegian
+John Balboa and Danish
+Adam Smith In Portuguese as well.
Adam Smith, saves espanol?
In spanish, the graphic letters correspond exactly with the 5 sounds. In spanish we have only 5 vowels sounds. Yes, I understand the different between letter and sound, instead spanish have only 5 of each and there is a 100% equivalence. In some parts of the south of Spain, the have more, because they dont pronunciate the /s/ in the final of the word as strong as the rest, so they enfatizate more in the last vowas for making plurals, but this diferences are just alophones of the 5 official sounds.
ybuhj
Technically the "u" in the digraphs "qu" and "gu" (before "e" and "i") isn't pronounced, and sometimes the vowels "u" and "i" represent semi-consonants. But yeah, we get the point.
Arturo Stojanoff Yes, the is the qu exception. But the gu is necesary because ge and gi dont sound like ga go and gu. And in regular spanish there is never semiconsonants.
YPG in Arabic they have three
Creeper Pro yes, I know
Aeiou might not be vowels in english but they are in latin languages .
+Foxintoxx french.......
+Miguel Bartelsman omelette du fromage
+Foxintoxx omelette au fromage*
+Mark Serrano chut il faut les laisser dans leur désillusions ;)
+Foxintoxx hum...no? My dialect of French has 12 distinct vowel phonemes, and some have up to 16.
The Shishishishishi story made me lose it.
+109Rage Me too. Glad I stumbled across them in research.
Hey Artifexian,
I am not Japanese but I am spending a semester abroad in Tokyo. Your point about length of vowels is spot on; Japanese has long and short vowels. Long vowels such as in 東京 (とうきょう) which is read [to̞ːkjo̞ː] and written Tōkyō. Here the characters う(U) elongates the sound from the character と(TO). The second half of the word (きょう) is composed of き(KI), little ょ (YO), which merges itself with KI to create the KYO sound and う(U), which prolongues the KYO (but is not pronounced as an U).
However your example of the word すし(sushi) to explain voiceless vowels is, to my knowledge, unusual. Sushi is usually pronounced SU-SHI with a slight emphasis on the sound SHI. Some examples of voiceless vowels in Japanese: the first [i] in ちかい chikai (near); [i] and [u] in きます kimasu (to come); [u] in ですdesu (to be) is voiceless.
Japanese has the little sokuon っ that you might want to touch on a video that explains consonants. It is a very peculiar sound. The way my Japanese teachers taught me was trying to imagine holding your breath for a fraction of a second while saying the word.
Great video, as always.
+cogogaRJ Gemination (represented by the sokuon in Japanese) is actually a language feature that creeps up quite frequently, although is not that common in Germanic languages. Finnish is the other major one that most people think of, with all of its double consonants and vowels (ex. muta ≠ muuta ≠ muttaa, tuli ≠ tulli). Other languages that feature consonant gemination include Arabic and Korean.
+ArchKDE I did not know that the name of it was gemination. Thanks, very interesting indeed.
+cogogaRJ Italian is also a mainstream European language that has geminated consonants: "fatto" (made) is pronounced with a geminated /t/. Actually, Italian can geminate almost all of its consonants, and some of them are only found geminated. There is no simple /sh/ sound, only a geminated one like in "pesce" (fish), and the same goes for /ny/ ("segno" sign) and /ly/ ("figlio" son). The /z/ phoneme as in "rosa" (rose) is the only consonant that can never occur geminated.
Sorry for the bad phonetics, I can't type IPA right now.
+Ashtar Balynestry Hmmm, interesting. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't those different then the Japanese ones? Here the sukuon doesn't mark a change of pronounciation based on geminated consonants, rather skuon is it's own sound. Listen to the pronounciation of まって (matte), meaning the imperative form of "stop". translate.google.com/#ja/en/%E3%81%BE%E3%81%A3%E3%81%A6
Can you hear the little stop? That's the sokuon. We show it when writing with western characters by using geminated consonants. However it is *not* the same as, for example, in Portuguese "carro" /h/ or "caro" /r/. I think we use geminated consonants when transcribing Japanese because there is no other way of indicating the pause.
If I'm wrong, please let me know, I'm only a stundent.
+cogogaRJ No, sokuon is gemination. The thing is that when you geminate a plosive, which is a sound like /p/, /t/, /k/ in which the air is expelled abruptly from the mouth after being blocked, the only way to make it longer is to make the blockage last longer, which would essentially cause you to pause before saying it.
Japanese has a syllabic writing system, but its phonotactics aren't quite as strict, so they created ways to get around its limitations. It can't represent nasal vowels, so a hentaigana variant of /mu/ was resurrected to represent them (/n/), and it can't represent consonant clusters, so to write them, you write a syllable beginning with the first consonant, and then a small version of the rest of the syllable (/ki/ + /yo/ = /kyo/). Similarly, since a lot of the words with sokuon are descendants of Middle Chinese words that ended in /t/, (compare Japanese /ichi, hachi/ with Cantonese /yat, baat/, and these numbers develop sokuon when added to a counter, like /issai, hassai/), a small syllable with /t/, that is, /tsu/, was co-opted to represent it.
About Portuguese "carro" vs "caro", in Latin you did geminate the /r/ (just make it last longer), but Portuguese speakers eventually turned the geminated sound into a uvular fricative, which is now a separate phoneme. You still write itwith a double r, but it's a totally different sound now.
Why the fuck did a bowling pin teach me about vowels
Just a Finnish guy passing by, laughing a little.
you are not special one here mate, just your southern neighbour passing by.
Kôitsu_ Greetings Estonian! I've got to say that you've got some diphthongs even we don't use, that's how we can tell our languages apart. Btw I was over there a few weeks ago in search of cheap booze, I bet you've encountered this phenomenon before, haven't you?
Anston [Music] oh, yes I have, but personally I don't mind some of our favourite neighbours visiting us, even if it is just for the cheap alcohol. Talking about languages I really like Finnish language very much, it sounds familiar yet strange, I hope I can learn it some day!
Kôitsu_ Good for you! I visited this awesome fast restaurant called Wok to Walk, it was as quick and cheap as Subway but it was very refreshing, too bad we don't have one here.
+Kôitsu_ That's how estonian sounds to finns (or atleast to me).
because it's english! In italian we say a, e, i, o, u in a single sound, it's stupid to have a letter I and call it EYE or writing different than the pronunciation in general like english does
+Federico Trenton Having been raised speaking German, the English spelling system has always baffled me.
Artifexian
What about the German word “Ei” ?
No one is complaining there
I'm pretty fluent in English, but I'll be damned if I sometimes don't pause and ponder why "A" sounds more like "E", "E" like "I" and "I" like "A".
Who thought it's a good idea?
Lucas M, German just uses either 'ei' or 'ai' to represent /ai/, sine the other five vowel letters are already reserved for pretty distinct and straight-forward phonetic vowels (I believe there's a little bit of variation in pronounciation, but it's subtle and you don't even realize as a native speaker that not every a, e, i, o, or u sounds the same - if it doesn't).
Not true. Italian has the open è /ɛ/ (like the first "e" in "bene") and the closed é /e/ (like the "e"' in "stella") and the open ò /ɔ/ (like the "o" in parola") and the closed ó /o/ (like the "o" in "ombra") .
FAUX!!! "Saint" is pronunced /sɛ̃/, not /sã/.
In fact, the sound /ã/ doesn't really exist in french, it's more like /ɑ̃/, like in "sang" (/sɑ̃/)
It depends on the accent/dialect, but it's true in standard french.
However, in Quebec, the sound /ɑ̃/ is pronunced more like /ã/. I know it because I'm from there myself. ^^
(NB : /ɛ̃/ is pronunced more like /ĩ/ in Quebec, free information =3)
+Mercure250
Yeah, surprisingly many Chinese critics here and few people commenting on the French pronunciation.
Penny Lane Not surprising at all. The are way more chinese people in the world than french people. :')
Mercure250 If I had seen a lot of Chinese names, I'd concur. Even though I'd really be interested in the numbers of people who speak English and Chinese and have access to TH-cam versus those that speak English and French and have access to TH-cam.
+Mercure250 Actually, ɛ̃ has moved to æ̃ or even ã for some speakers. The sound is usually transcribed as ɛ̃ because of tradition. It's like English "ʌ", which is in fact realized as "ɐ" in RP.
Penny Lane
You can’t speak Chinese as it is not one language, but rather a group of many related languages. The so-called dialects of Chinese are typically mutually incomprehensible. Cantonese and Mandarin are like English and French to each other. Though I suppose you could describe English as “Insular West Germanic Indo-European” and French as “Northwestern Late Common Italic Indo-European”, thus English and French both speak dialects of Indo-European.
In polish, we have: A O E I U Y - which make the exact sound as vowels should, we also have modified vowels( not exactly vowels): Ą Ó Ę And J Ł which are semi-vowels.
keep in mind Ó is read the same as U
j and ł i think are consostants
It's funny, because when I started learning English at school (I'm Brazilian, a Portuguese speaker), the teacher used to write on the board:
A -> Ei
E -> i
I -> Ai
O -> Ôu
U -> Iu
why that makes no sense why would you know the ipa before latin letters
@@wildstarfish3786 That's 100% not IPA that's portuguese transcription of how the English letters sound
@@glitchy9613 that's 100% not portuguese unless Portuguese doesn't use latin letters
@@wildstarfish3786 dude you do know that ô is used in portuguese right? IPA doesn't use it, neither does it use capital letters, where in the world did you get the idea that this is IPA???
@@glitchy9613 because of the fact they had to transcribe english letters to letters that sound NOTHING like the sound those letters default to in ANY latin language
In German, all of them happen to be vowels.
in spanish, italian, french and portuguese too
+Paramone Gaming Greek too, English is weird
+iEliteTester greek has a latino slavic accent greek its closer to a latin language but it aint it is hellenic so...complicated with our bros wich have the biggest ship ever to sink on the bottom of aegean sea (britannic) huuuu.....
Razvan Popovici everyone but the english pronounce vowels like this, even chinese people for good sakes, i guess its the bretons that had this conventions, oh wait no, in welsh they do pronounce vowels like normal people, so its the french fault, well, normans
+Paramone Gaming french are more faulty then gypsyes
Two note signing is so cool. We had a troupe of Tibetan throat singers visit campus while I was in college. People could hear them across campus even though they were inside
Q: "is there such a thing as quipthongs?"
A: "away"
/əˈweɪ/
I don't see it being a quipthong.
i checked with an ipa and i think i say it like ɐuei
which is four vowels
@@Mabeloid
so you say apart and about as abaut and apart? theres also canadian ebuut
I'm really baffled you do not have more subscribers than you do.
Your videos are always amazing and they teach me so much stuff in such a short timespan.
Keep going at it Edgar!
+AbleToWuppii You know, I just don't think this channel has mass appeal - which is cool. But please do consider sharing my videos, it would help loads with my goal of reaching 10,000 subs. :)
Quality not quantity :)
+Guðni Rúnar Jónasson The Kurzgesagt method of video making.
th-cam.com/users/Kurzgesagt
I've used your videos before for school projects and recommended people to pay your channel a visit.
+AbleToWuppii Super! You are awesome :)
*rest of the world laughing quietly*
In Portuguese (at least the Brazilian variation) all the "vowels" are vowels, though "i" and "u" may be semi vowels depending on use, and theres â, ã, é, ó and õ to confuse spanish people.
na verdade, a gente pode ouvir as deferenças, mas a gente acha que é o sotaque mesmo e não uma distinção necessária. É dizer, não temos as orelhas fechadas kkkkkk.
A gente pode diferenciar entre "avó" e "avô", mas para nós, não é algo distivo.
Por ejemplo, en México, tenemos 11 vocales, 6 orales y 5 oronasales (no son propiamente nasales).
Las 5 oronasales /ã̠/, /ẽ̞/, /ĩ/, /õ̞/, /ũ/.
Estas, en otros países son mera casuailidad, y se pronuncian antes de N o M o Ñ, y bueno, no son un factor distintivo como lo es en português, sin embargo, en países como México, Cuba, parte de España o en GE, y otras partes más, sí son factor distintivo, es decir, no decimos "pan", sino "pã", sin embargo, no se reconocen por la RAE ni por nadie jajajjaaj. Aclaro, el português en realidad tiene 5 vocales nasale, 2 semivocales nasales y otras 8-9 orales, y no, no son las mismas que las del español.
Segunda aclaración, en español, suelen considerarse alófonos y no fonemas como tal.
[mĩ̯ẽn.tras], en este caso, se forma diptongo y ambas se nasalizan, ¿Por qué ustedes no las distinguen?, fácil, porque no son iguales a las del portugués.
[miˈẽtɾas] (português) vs. [mĩ̯ẽ̞n.tras], como ves, en español se diptonga, pero en portugués no, segundo, en portugués la vocal es lo suficientemente nasal como para reemplezar a la "n", es decir, no la pronuncian, mientras en que español, no.
tɾɐ̃skɾisˈɐ̃w̃ (portugués) vs. tɾãns.kɾip.ˈsjõn.
La misma historia.
Las 6 orales /a̠/, /e̞/, /i/, /o̞/, /u/, /ə̥/ (aquí vemos a la schwa, y es la que hace que "pesos", "pesas" y "peces" se pronuncien igual en México, es decir: [ˈpe̞sə̥s]).
Esto es en México, sin embargo, el repertorio de sonidos vocálicos del andaluz es más grande.
17 vocales: 7 oronasales (casi nasales por completo), y 10 orales.
las 7 nasales(a veces oronasales, dependiendo del dialecto del andaluz) /ã̠/, /ẽ̞/, /ĩ/, /õ̞/, /ũ/, /ɛ̃/, /ɔ̃/.
Y las 10 orales son /a̠/, /e̞/, /i/, /o̞/, /u/, /ɔ/, /ɛ/, /æ̞/, /ʊ̝/, /ɪ̝/.
Sin embargo, no se consideran fonémas, sino alófonos en la mayoría de las ocasiones, aunque las nasales sean distintivas en andaluz como en português o francés, no se les da esa categoría porque habría que meternos en debates y sucedería una revolución fonológica que no queremos ahorita.
Mis lenguas maternas son el español y el português, y sí se oyen las diferencias tanto en español, como en portugués.
In the french "saint", it is not [ã] (nazalized a) but [ɛ̃] (perceived as a nazalized i).
French nazalized vowels are always a problem for foreigners. Especially [œ̃] (nazalized u), except for portuguese and hindi speakers (maybe others too, but I didn't meet them).
+Napishtim Crap! You're right about "saint". Sorry about the mistake. And, yes, I find nasalized vowels very difficult - much more so than clicks, implosives etc - but they do sound awesome.
+Artifexian I use to hear that nasal vowels are a big problem for freigners learning portuguese as well, we use it all the time. It may also be the reason we have so few operas written in portuguese :/
Nasalized vowels are hard to project.
+Rígille Scherrer Borges Menezes I actual know a few opera singers, might ask them about how they deal with nazalisation whilst singing - particularly in French songs.
+Artifexian It's very nice on your part
+Napishtim Yeah, I'm working on a conlang and I decided to get rid of all nazalized vowels for that reason. I still kept the French u [y] though, I hope people don't butcher it up too much considering I also have a [u] sound.
1:54 All Seven of those Australian diphthongs are used in the word “No”.
If there's any language with "quiphthongs", it would probably be Finnish. It can have large numbers of vowels with no consonants to break them up, like in "hääyöaieuutinen" - "plans for wedding night". The represents an IPA /y/.
+rzeka Finnish always cracks me up and that one takes the cake. LOL Counting numbers are another exercise in futility. I find it extremely surprising with all of the Finnish people here in the US that we only have ONE word from Finnish: sauna. BTW, where I grew up, we had so many Finns around we actually regularly celebrated St. Urho's Day with a downtown parade and everything. =_)
This is what I thought. A, E, I, O, and U are not vowels. THEY'RE JUST SYMBOLS FOR VOWELS!
+Jacob Scholte Script ≠ sound.
Yeah, and all the other letters are not consonants either. THEY'RE JUST SYMBOLS FOR CONSONANTS! Therefore there are no vowels or consonants in the alphabet.
@@Artifexian N word ≠ Love
I very much enjoyed going "eeeeee uuuu eeeee uuu ooooo ahhhh oooooo ahhh" throughout this video, so thanks for that Artifexian.
Thanks a lot Edgar, really. Artifexian became one of the best channels I subscribe, and when I see there's a new video out I just run to watch it. You are healping me so much with my conlang, and I just don't know how to thank you.
Finally someone understands my struggles with English vowels! My native language is Spanish, so I'm rather used to AEIOU being proper vowels. By the way, my grandma taught me some Italian, and I remember this word AUIOLA (kitchen pot, I believe), a really tongue twister and also a //cuatriptongo//
they're the same letters though
In additional for Vietnamese, I just have counted and Vietnamese has:
-12 monophthongs
-a lot of combinations (diphthongs, triphthongs)
-6 tones
Each monophthongs has its own letters, with different tone marks, but sound the same as it names
With informal speaking (in different local accents), some tones and monophthongs merge into one due to accent habits
Which explained to me why I feel so hard when I started English even though I learned English since Kindergarten because words are different from sounds
I don't know why, how or when I found your videos. I don't even know why I now fine language so interesting (and wish I'd learned more about it at school). Whatever the answers to these questions, the real answer is "I'm just glad that I did". Cheers!
+John Walters On a long enough timeline everyone will be drawn towards Artifexian. :P Thanks a ton for watching!
Judging by the comments, English might actually be the exception when it comes to pronouncing AEIOU as diphtongs.
They are apparently all monophtongs in Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Danish, German, French, and presumably a couple more.
Scandinavian dialects in general are actually very prone to diphthongisation of the long vowels.
Even "standard" Swedish tends to have funky offglides making the long vowels not quite pure, but speakers tend to perceive them as pure, which leads to them being taught as pure, and the result is that learners often have a little bit of an accent that natives who pronounce their vowels like this can't quite place because they don't realise the difference between truly pure monophthongs and the "impure" monophthongs of their own pronunciation.
And again, many dialects fully diphthongise (or even triphthongise) the vowels. The short vowels, however, tend to be pure monophthongs basically everywhere.
This is probably more prominent in Sweden and Norway than in Denmark. As for Faroese and Icelandic, languages historically descended from Scandinavian dialects of Norway, the process was already going on at the time of their breakoff and both vernaculars today have diphthongs as standard (and dialectal) realisations of most long vowels.
Portuguese AFAIK has similar tendencies under a few circumstances as well. Standard Castilian Spanish is indeed the go-to example for pure and unreduced vowels however.
Ava Skoog Thanks for the rather lengthy insight!
"Accents" that aren't perceived by the speakers due to not noticing miniscule differences in pronunciation is a huge topic by itself.
I think the vast majority of languages have vowels that are named the same way they are pronounced
rzeka
If you think about it, it's weird that a vowel would _not_ simply be pronounced the way it sounds to begin with.
INCORECT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6:14 that would be Moloko, with just 1-2 vowels, while some say that Ubykh could even have 3
Speaking of sounds, the way he pronounces the final "t" in words like "height" or "light" is just beautiful. I could spend my all day listening to him pronouncing words like that.
In Mandarin, "shi" is pronounced more like [ʂɨɻ]. Great video btw. Merry christmas!
+Felix Jin I knew my pronunciation was way off. Just couldn't get my food hole to do the correct thing. Thanks for throwing the IPA in comments. Merry Christmas too you to and a very happy new year.
^ i thought my screen was dirty at first when i read OPs comment ahahah
Same for "Zhi". I am not usually one to correct people on this, but this is a video about vowels :)
In Chinese hanyupinyin (which is like a way to 'spell' the pronunciation of the words out) the vowels are a, e, i, o, u and ü. They're also spoken the same way they're supposed to. All the Chinese examples in this video were actually hanyupinyin (zhī and shī) and they were on top of the actual Chinese characters.
6:14 that would be Moloko with just 1-2 vowels, and some say that Ubykh could also have 3 vowels
your videos are soooo good, you deserve so much more subs for all the work you put into your vids. keep it up :D
5:02 he deadass became mongolian
Your videos are always such a pleasure to watch! Happy Christmas! :)
+Xavier Jones Cheers, buddy. Happy Christmas to you too, thanks so much for watching. Really means a lot. :)
Overtone singing! Hooray!
Hello, fellow world-builder. I've watched a few videos on youtube about constructed languages and yours are by far the most entertaining and the most informative. You're the only person I've seen who has even touched on the subject of overtone singing.
I haven't done much research on the topic yet, but it's something I've wanted to play with in the novels I'm writing. I wanted to have a group of isolated, slightly differently evolved humans whose vocal tracts make Mongolian style throat singing easier to produce than a normal human language. I got the idea from a theory I heard about in college but it was only mentioned in passing by one of my professors. I think there's a book called The Singing Neanderthal about it. I'm not sure if I'd want to, or even be capable, of designing it as a complete language, but I'd like to take a crack at it. I think using a form of music as a language has a lot of interesting potential.
What do you think? Any advice on how to tackle it? Would a language sung instead of spoken even work? My worry was there wouldn't be enough sounds to make it a complete and complex language, but my other notion was to include things like body language as an added way of communicating. It's all still in the idea phase and I may not even do it, but I'd really like to hear your opinion.
Also if you like that sort of thing, there's a great documentary about a blind musician who travels to Tuva. It's called Genghis Blues. Seriously, check it out.
Very interesting talk on vowels!! I'll be sure to save this in my list of reference material c:
+Nikolaj Lepka This is why I make these videos. Thanks for watching m'man.
Artifexian good to know you got our backs
I am super excited for next year's conlang videos! After those can you do something on the development of measurement of time? And then maybe creation of ecosystems. :P
Oh hey! This is reminding me of how at the school I go to there are some people with a dialect of English in which all phonetic sounds (both consonants and vowels) are made with the tip tongue in the same location, only moving other parts of the mouth (or very rarely the very back of the tongue), and they have some words with as many as eight vowels without a single consonant (other than maybe a glottal stop)
This one video was all I needed to see to subscribe to your channel. You have given me in one video more then I have found in my vowel research over the last year. Thanks you are amazing.
Thanks for this - I argue with friends all the time that letters are not vowels. They are symbols that represent sounds.
'How' and 'House' have the same sound, that is represented alternatively by w and u. in this case, it's considered loosely as a continental sound (which is why we are taught that W is never a vowel in English except in Welso loanwords like cwm and cwtch. ) we see the same sound in 'ciao' (an Italian word borrowed in English) and thus ao is also representing the same continental sounds.
This was the first video of Artifexian's that I ever watched, quite a while ago, but certainly not the last. Keep on making videos!
In Korean, all of the names of the vowels are the vowel themselves.
(All the monophthongs of Korean)
ㅏ /ɐ/
ㅓ /ʌ/
ㅗ /o/
ㅜ /u/
ㅡ /ɯ/
ㅣ /i/
ㅐ /ɛ/
ㅔ /e/
ㅚ /ø/
ㅟ /y/
+Jihoon Kim I wonder is English one of the few major languages that "misrepresents" it's vowels?
Your videos are so good and detailed... How the heck do you not have way more subscribers? Keep it up!
when your language has 12 vowels which are 'real' vowels
I never quite know why I watch your videos as I tend to have little interest in the topics. That is, until I've finished a video and then its all I can think about. Keep up the videos and merry Christmas!
+BlueHat Haha...great comment. Merry Christmas to you too, BlueHat.
"Speach and writing are two totally unrelated ideas" *in English*. Please. Some of us make our letters correspond to one sound and one sound only.
Except this doesn't account for allophones, regional differences and language change.
Martin Kunev Прав си. True.
But still, for some languages and their writing systems - they're not "totally unrelated ideas".
Just because they conveniently and/or are designed to align. Does not meant they aren't "totally unrelated ideas", they're independent from one another. They _are_ unrelated.
That isn't the point. Your letter is still an arbitrary symbol. This symbol "A" is not in any way connected to the process of making the sound "ah", or whatever sound you take it to represent.
As an illustration of this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerogram
Phonetic alphabet for everyday use destroys your language, and kills regional dialects
I'd just like to say thankyou so much. I found your videos about September last year (I think), and they have helped immensely to develop the language I have been creating for a novel I've been writing for a couple of years. Not just that but I find all your videos really interesting whether I use the information or not 😁
*laughs in japanese, german, spanish, latin, italian, swedish, french*
Normie
After 3:00
This certainly is because I'm Brazilian but i only raise a part of the middle tongue to say "U" (it stays stick to the bottom of the mouth)
And to say "I" i just curl up my tongue upwards so that only the left and right points touch the top
L is not a vowel
In German, all of these ARE actually vowels, since we pronounce them with their pure sounds and not as diphtongs like in English:)
Magi V I've been studying German for two years now and I still don't know how to pronounce the "ö" vowel. I think it's like the British "r" in the word "further" but the British "r" sound would be used in German as an "ö" sound like in "möchte" or "mögen" or "könig". What is the proper way to pronounce the German "ö" sound?
Magi V I've been studying German for two years now and I still don't know how to pronounce the "ö" vowel. I think it's like the British "r" in the word "further" but the British "r" sound would be used in German as an "ö" sound like in "möchte" or "mögen" or "könig". What is the proper way to pronounce the German "ö" sound?
The letter "ö" is close to the sound "e" makes in the word "driver" said with an American accent. The only difference is that you should shape your lips as you would when saying "o".
Magi V It's the same in Dutch, although each one of these letters also has a different version (pronounced longer but not just in duration) that is written the same way some of the time, of which some are in fact diphthongs.
Tobias Moes Dutch had a voiced velar fricative while German doesnt
That overtone singing was pretty good. Not as good as people who spend their lives devoted to it, obviously, but way better than most people could even come close to.
In my language written = spoken.
so AEIOU is vowels.
/a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/
same here
+Ime same
+Znik yep hahahaha
Znik Nope.
Dude, I loooove your videos, and as a fellow conlanger, I am absolutely stoked for the conlanging videos!
+Dustin Johnston Cheers, buddy. Thanks for watching. I'm looking forward to it too. Stay tuned.
I'm not saying that your chinese pronunciation is really bad... but your chinese pronunciation is really bad. Sorry.
+Oculus Universale Haha. I'm totally with you there. I gave it my best shot but those tones...they're tricky at best.
Artifexian True. Chinese is hard for non-native speakers. But are you Bilingual?
+Oculus Universale Sort of. I was raised speaking both German and English but my German has deteriorated over the years. At the moment, I am far from fluent but have enough to get by if needed.
Your tones are okay, but you're pronouncing the retroflex consonants as postvelar consonants.
*postalveolar
So... after looking at the last few videos about all these sounds, I'm starting to get a much better clarification on my early studies of phonology when I gained an interest in what conlanging is.
In my little note-jot journal, I've compiled a list of 50 consonants- a lot of them pertaining to the /bw/, /mw/, etc., and a few other distinctions like voiceless nasals, and placement of articulation with 't's and 'd's, being either dental, alveolar, and retroflex. Of course, retroflex 't's and 'd's don't sound much different, but have a nice distinction of tone in them. Other consonants include a lateral variation, for letters like s, z, sh, and zh having lateral counterparts. Going on, a few other distinctions between f's and v's- a variation where it's the top lip connecting to the bottom teeth row. This would be used at the beginning of words most likely. Finally, a distinction between wh and w, r and (rolled) r.
I also compiled a total of 14 (or 28, if you want to count length) vowels. 7 of which are normal- a, e, i, o, u, oo as in foot, and i as in bit. The other 7 have creaky variations.
I just like messing around with this kind of stuff, and seeing what I can come up with. It's just fun. Nothing tedious or time-consuming yet.
Saint is pronounced with a nasal /ε/ not /a/.
depends on dialect
+Victor Houle Yes, have been told about this a number of times. Sorry for the mistake but thanks for pointing it out. Mistakes, when they make it through the filter, need to be identified and corrected ASAP.
Noam Tashma I'd be interested in knowing what sort of dialect articulates «ain» that way.
London/Cockney would be one.
É: the presenter was referring to the FRENCH word "saint", i.e. /sɛ̃/ !
with your videos, the long-ish waiting times are always rewarded with a high quality product, so first and foremost keep the quality up, rather than increasing the frequency.
+TheJklgamer Cheers! Totally agree, quality over quantity is the way to go. I admire the youtubers that stick to that philosophy: CGP Grey, Kurzgesagt, Veritasium, Vsauce, Veritasium etc.
Finally someone’s explaining what I had in head since I was 7, and I tried to explain that to every English and French teachers I ever had but they just looked at me confused-
This video changed my life and opened me up to throat singing. Thank you.
Awesome job mate!
+Drop Bear Cheers and can I just say your thumbnail is epic!
04:00 Damn! I knew that I'm right about these frequencies! Some time ago I figured out that the different ways of articulating vowels is pretty much what a resonant filter does, and our mouth is pretty much a resonant cavity to make this filtering possible. For example, when you shape your mouth roundly, the symmetry of the circle allows only a certain frequency to come out of your mouth (all radial standing waves are of the same wavelength), and you produce pretty much a pure monochromatic (or rather monotonic) sinusoid. The more you open your mouth, the more different wavelengths can get out, resulting in more content of higher harmonics in the spectrum. But when you shape your mouth as a thin slit, only short wavelength waves can oscillate vertically, but long waves can oscillate horizontally. It pretty much causes horizontal polarization in the sound wave (unfortunately, I haven't heard about anyone measuring the polarization of sound waves in speech yet :P ). I'm not sure if our ears can detect polarization, but they can definitely decompose the spectrum, and because of this polarization, there's a variation in spectrum as well, because now the lower part of the spectrum is missing and there's more content of the higher harmonics.
So, long story short, the "oo" sounds are "more low-pitch waves, less high-pitch waves", the "ee" sounds are "more high-pitch waves, less low-pitch waves", the "a" sounds are pretty much all harmonics ("both high, low and middle pitches"), and "o" is close to a monotonic middle ("no low harmonics, no high harmonics, just the middle").
So there actually _is_ a connection between the IPA vowel graph and the spectra.
Speaking of which... Do you know any free software which is capable of analyzing your voice's spectrum and then converting it into a position on the IPA vowel graph as you speak to the microphone? Such software could definitely help in learning correct pronunciations of foreign languages or finding out which IPA symbol to use for a particular vowel you know how to pronounce.
09:00 That Bob Ross reference though :D
noooo keep doing IPA videos! I'm learning so much! This video actually helps me a lot with my French pronunciation.
+William Andrea Don't worry the IPA will feature in the future but it won't be the main focus. I got language to construct :)
Making Sedang:
Guy a: So how many vowels should we have?
Guy b: YES.
Here in Brazil (portuguese), AEIOU are pronounced:
A is like the A sound in "dark".
E is like the A sound in "ray"
I is like the Y sound in "yellow"
O is like the first O in "robot"
U is like the OO in "root"
***** But the main sound is those.
Sometime, O can sound like U and E can sound like I.
Isso faz você apreciar mais as reformas ortográficas rere
CarcaráCafé O inglês também passou por um período de mudança radical nos sons de muitas palavras, chamado de Grande Mudança Vocálica, que deixou a ortografia completamente defasada em relação à pronúncia.
Nosso alfabeto é de quinta mão: nós usamos um alfabeto que foi emprestado dos portugueses, que emprestaram dos visigodos, que emprestaram dos romanos, que emprestaram dos etruscos, que adaptaram dos fenícios.
CarcaráCafé os visigodos emprestaram o alfabeto latino depois de invadirem o território do império romano, pra escrever as línguas derivadas do latim que eventualmente viraram o português
Merry Christmas to you too! Looking forward to you starting on your own language next video!
it will actually be his oxt video, his next video is going to be geography. he alternates I think.
+Saffrin - Me too. Equal parts joy and trepidation.
+Soupy He does indeed.
Speak ALL the sounds!
+veggiet2009 Would that I could.
lol wut
+Artifexian As a French speaker I actually doubt the "ain" sound is a variation of the "a", but rather of the "i". Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me like the A is mostly there as an etymological leftover from an older spelling and pronunciation (saint in Spanish becomes santa, pain becomes pan). There might be a small nuance I don't here but as far as I know "saint" and "fin" rhyme perfectly. The variation of "a" would be the "an" sound (without the i) like in "blanc", "banc" and "grand". French spelling is horribly confusing even for French speakers so your mistake is absolutely understandable (though in a way I like our spelling system because it usually traces back all the way to the early latin variations and all that, with ghost letters everywhere etc etc). If some day you need some advice on some French pronunciation I'd be glad to help :) (And I also speak Dutch fluently which is even weirder) I love your channel!
+Amozmusicmaker Ye, I've since learned that I totally messed up that French bit. The "ain" sound I mention is in fact a [ɛ̃] but is perceived as a nasalized "i". I love the sound of your language but, man, french spelling is a utter nightmare, imo.
*say*
"Speech and writing are two totally unrelated ideas"
Serbo-Croatian: HOW DARE YOU! (Hau der ju)
John Madden! Football!
"Some sort of timely fashion." It is the middle of May now and I only see 2 more videos in this playlist. Get on this. I have a family of languages to build and you are the best help I have had since google itself.
So how frontal and high are the i's of the Knights of Ni?
+TheOneManGeekArmy Probably very much so, it seems. :D
done properly, your tongue hits the back of your teeth. It's even in front of the IPA version.
you mean the ees right?
@@wildstarfish3786 potato potato
@@Toost914 no? unless you mean /i/s which are different from regular is
I did not expect Artifexian to do Mongolian Throat singing
Ah !.. English, your vowels are so messed up !
By the way, in french is not pronounced /sã/ but /sɛ̃/ (wich is really funny since it is homophonic with (breasts) ! Also the /ã/ exists only in québecois (canadian french and i can guaranty you that french native speakers are able to note the difference) in european and african french it is /ɑ̃/ and in some swiss accents /ɒ̃/.
+tonio103683 also i saw and know that many viewers have already told you, but i wanted to expose a litlle about the differences in the dialects)
+tonio103683 Cool! Much appreciated. The more info the better.
i would say saint as /sɛ̃ẽ̆nʔ/ and seins as /sɛ̃ẽ̆nd͡z/
English uses short and long vowels extensively. When you learn it, you think about it just like when learning Japanese. The only difference is that English short and long vowels also usually associated with different sounds. But they are still very explicitly long and short.
What are you doing uploading at this ungodly hour? (11:29 PM GMT)
+Tsharli Foster (AdrenalineVan) I know...it was either now or Friday and it's already been 4 weeks since the last video. ASAP was the name of the game.
Artifexian Yeah... I have a somewhat bad habit of commenting before I finish watching the video, so I had no idea that you were pushed for time. These videos are brilliant, by the way.I think maybe you should at least touch on grammar: like cases and word order; because phonology isn't the only important part of languages.
+Tsharli Foster (AdrenalineVan) Absolutely. In the next linguistics vid, I'll nail down what sounds my language will use. I'll talk through my creative considerations etc. Then it's on to grammar and then...who knows :)
+Tsharli Foster (AdrenalineVan) he needs soup.
Damn, that overtone singing sounds really cool
But it *is* yellow. Color is just how our brains interpret light. There is no difference between how our brain interprets an equal mixture of green and red dots or the 'yellow' wavelength of light. We don't see wavelengths, we see colors, yellow is always yellow.
+IGameChangerI Yes, but there's interesting complexity behind the yellow facade. Just like theres interesting complexity behind A,E, I, O and U.
On top of this, nobody can tell me for sure which colour receptors actually are in our eyes: some say ryb, others rgb, yet others cym..?
Artifexian Mostly semantics though, although I guess that that is your point after all.
I'm late to comment, but in case you still don't know...
The RYB colour model is simply an outdated guess at how colour works.
RGB is the additive colour model, used for lights (stagelights, tv screens, etc).
CYM is the subtractive colour model, used for inks, paints, etc.
The 3 kinds of receptors in the eyes pick up wavelengths associated with red, green, and blue respectively.
So it's RGB.
Technically the eyes don't receive colour of course, the brain somehow produces it based on the combination of receptors that are triggered.
The Thu'um is strong with this lad, indeed.
May the fus ro dah be with you.
the english letters 'a' and 'e' are pronounced /ei/ and /ai/, not like you wrote them.
+Hákon Darri Egilsson E is /i/ is it not?
+Artifexian
I think he means the english letter "i"?
Artifexian I meant the letter "i",
you used the wrong symbol, you used ɪ, but it's supposed to be i
I don't think he used the wrong symbol at all: the English words "may" and "my" (for example) are written /meɪ/ and /maɪ/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet (which the use of / / pressupposes) -- using /ɪ/ (not /i/) as the second element in each case.
He didn't use the wrong one, you did: just try saying /a/ and /i/ very fast, you'll realise it's not the same as for example in "lie", which is /laɪ/
@8:18, is that a single sentence or two? If it's one, how are we supposed to understand it please? Also, could you provide a link to that poem about the Chinese nephew please?
Should have mentioned ghoti, being pronunced as fish (-touGH-wOmen-naTIon)
+Cubeazza But is never pronounced /f/ at the beginning of a syllable, nor are the letters ever pronounced /ʃ/ at the end of a syllable. Not in English anyway. It's a creative respelling, but without the accompanying explanation any English speaker would pronounce as "goaty".
+Cubeazza Aw, man...that would have been a great my way of demonstrating my point. :(
I've NEVER heard any english speaker pronounce "women" that way. It's pronounced with a short e sound, like "wehmin". There are better examples to use than that of O being pronounced differently.
As far as I can recall, I have NEVER heard any English speaker pronounce "women" as anything remotely like "wehmin". Most, if not all, American English dialects pronounce the first vowel sound in women with basically the same vowel sound that's found in fish. I'm not saying you're wrong here, but I don't know what English accents would use the /ɛ/ as the first vowel sound in women. I am, to the contrary, very familiar with the use of /ɪ/.
@@awesomelyshorticles Whoever's been pronouncing women like that has been pronouncing it wrong. It is pronounced /ˈwɪmɪn/
Linguists: There are only 5 basic vowels, all other vowels are combinations of these vowels or these vowels with different tones.
Serbs:
mini francis That claim isn't even really correct
Hodor. Hodor hodor, hodor. Hodor hodor. Hodor! Hodor!
isnt that a Mongolic word?
the thumbnail confused me a bit because i thought of the SHORT vowel sounds and not the LONG vowel sounds
_And the question remains_ How in the fuck do you write songs in Chinese if they have tones!? Ever since I learned about tonal languages i've just had this question and I fear it's one of those ungoogleable questions.
- EDIT -
Turns out you ignore them, other ways of pronouncing will give clues aside from context.
Suace: www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ua1h6/eli5_in_tonal_languages_like_mandarin_how_do_you/
+Soupy Good old reddit. :)
+Soupy Fun fact, in Vietnamese, there is no choice but to follow the tones when writing music! If you don't, words will be barely unintelligible. Same with Cantonese, but not Mandarin. There goes my Vietnamese songwriting career...
+AngieMyst I didn't know Vietnamese had tones! :D How are they denoted when writing?
+AngieMyst I did not know this. Thanks +AngieMyst.
+Soupy They uses accents like á à ạ ả or ã which, since they dont use digrams and only diacritics, give them letters like ở or ṹ
That gentleman appears to be treating his aunt’s hemorrhoids without his hands...
In portuguese they have just one sound, so, *jokes on english*
**MALEFIC LAUGH**
My language has = A E I O U, and to make other sounds we usually double the vowels = aa ee ii oo uu
It's tonal but tells you the tone through combinations of vowels and consonants kind of like Thai Alphabet or Chinese pinyin tone markers. Example na is soft, nha is breathier and heavier while n'a is equivalent to the *ng* in song. And nga itself makes a different sound to the ng in song. Na nha n'a nga ngwa nza nja etc.
e ya e ya e ya
e yu e yu e yu
😅
lol😂😂😂
Seriously. That's pretty damn good overtone singing for someone who wasn't brought up with it.
:(
What people always forget to mention is that the Lion-Eating Poet poem is written in Classical Chinese, that is Chinese as it was three thousand years ago. Therefore it actually makes no sense to pronounce it in modern Mandarin "shi shi shi shi..." If you want to pronounce the poem in modern Mandarin then you should be consistent and rewrite the poem using modern Mandarin grammar and vocabulary.
You forgot y... I'm appalled *equality for y* !
Isn't the /i/ sound in long? Like [bi:m]. So English have short and long vowels, right?
Edit: French is pronounced [sɛ̃] not [sã]
+Baptiste PARIS Ye, I meesed up on the French. Apologies. There is length but we don't derive meaning from it. There is no [bim] that contrasts with [bi:m], if you get me.
+Artifexian Oh, I get it! Thank you for this great video btw :)
Whoever disliked this is on a quest to dislike all TH-cam videos ever or just has no life.
Just came across this. fascinating. and I just wanted to say I love the Blob Ross illustration