The Language Sounds That Do Exist, But Aren’t In The IPA

[@cordeaux]

you might want to check up on a whole lot of indigenous australian languages cuz they have the contrast between alveolar and dental - Ngarrindjeri, Adnyamathanha, Guugu Yimithirr, Kuuk Thaayorre, Wik Mungkan to name a few

[@flyingduck91]

what about postalveolar?

[@cordeaux]

idk any languages that contrast postalveolar with dental or alveolar idkkk

[@uniqueusername_]

Even irish English does.

[@humanname3653]

Wiradjuri words dharrang /d̪ərəŋ/ meaning message or letter; and darrang /dərəŋ/ meaning legs or thigh.

[@vignotum132]

@@flyingduck91I mean many have differences when it comes to fricatives, English for example has “s” and “sh”. I’m guessing you’re talking about stops though

[@matheussandbakk9959]

Even if they don't have entirely unique symbols to represent them, I still find it weird said spots simply aren't filled in the IPA since they indeed do exist

[@primalaspie]

One major correction: most Irish English and some Southern United States English exhibit th- stopping which does form a contrast between alveolar and dental plosives.

[@Qermaq]

The fricatives of course differ. The Mythical Suzie proves that. But the use of an alveolar t or n instead of a dental one doesn't impart lexical contrast. I can't say the wrong thing if I say it with an alveoral t.

[@georgepapastavros1113]

isn't the major difference the aspiration?

[@stanlij158]

I dont know where youre from but I live in Augusta GA in the deep south and I know nobody how pronounces th the same as the Irish, what I do hear is in AAVE where the voiceless dental fricative becomes a labio-dental fricative and the Voiced dental fricative becomes a voiced alveolar plosive. Augusta is a majority black city and although Im a minority being white and asian parts of the dialect have influenced my speech.

[@primalaspie]

@@stanlij158 I've lived in Mississippi and Louisiana my whole life, where this feature is quite prevalent among (but not exclusive to) rural white speakers, and I've heard it sporadically with folks from Tennessee and Alabama. I'd attribute you not encountering it to either geographical dialectal differences or Augusta being a large city which won't share as many features with rural speech.

[@stanlij158]

@@primalaspie Really? That's really interesting to think about. The dialectal differences in American English truly are there.

[@wezzuh2482]

Don't some Irish dialects of English have phonemic dentalization? Isn't that how they they distinguish from in many of those dialects?

[@actualgetawaycar]

a lot of languages contrast dental and alveolar stops. Some languages also contrast pre-velar and post-velar stops, and a bunch of other distinctions that do not get dedicated representations in the IPA without the use of diacritics. The IPA is quite biased in the languages it chooses to make easy to represent

[@navyblue484]

those diactrics can change the sound of the letters for example: ǎ /æ/ ě /ɛ/ ǐ /ɪ/ ǒ /ɔ/ ǔ /ʌ/ y̌ /ɪ/ or /ə/ all of these letters are short vowels if they were constonants, they would sound different for example: č /tcʰ/ ǧ /ɣ/ ň /ɳ/ ř /ʀ/ š /ʃ/ hope this has 100 likes

[@LloydSkyLion]

The Spanish 't' is not a dental stop. It's a dentalized alveolar stop which means it coarticulates on the teeth, but the stop is made with the blade of the tongue on the alveolar ridge and the tip happens to point more toward the teeth which is what that IPA diacritic under the symbol means.

[@watchmakerful]

Russian "t" is a better case of a dental "t".

[@LaPingvino]

The reason for this (and why you see big blocks without lines around the t/d part) is that IPA is meant to be as close as possible to the letters we are used to in European languages and it's meant to give you more like a strong hint on how to pronounce things rather than an exact description. It's fully in line with the IPA principles to use a technically incorrect character for a language's sound if it is more in line with how the sound is perceived. (actually there is a difference in usage like this between the // and [] notations). Per language, often a character stands in for a range of possible sounds that are phonemic. So whenever a sound only exists as a non-phonemic variant, it is likely not to get its own symbol, a symbol is only added to enable making the distinction inside a language.

[@vytah]

Dental vs alveolar T or D are separate phonemes in some dialects of Hiberno-English (Irish English). So thin vs tin is /t̪ʰɪn/ vs /tʰɪn/.

[@tovarishchfeixiao]

Wouldn't "thin" be with a [θ] sound instead of an aspirated t?????

[@vytah]

@@tovarishchfeixiao In most dialects of English, yes. In Hiberno-English, no.

[@piotrrybka318]

Great video and very good explanation. One addition: there was relatively recent request to add another symbol to fill in the gap in the vowel chart, namey for the open central unrounded vowel. According to Wikipedia, there were even 3 such requests, all of them being rejected. I could not find the information why they were rejected, but I would guess it was because the sound to be denoted by does not pass the minimal pair test with /a/ and /ɑ/.

[@zionfultz8495]

Finally this is notably not a case able to be made for every sound on here. For example a lot of languages distinguish aspirated and non-aspirated yet, aspiration is only marked via an extra symbol and not given a unique symbol. Things like glottalized or pharyngealized consonants as well. Kota also distinguishes dental and alveolar stops. It is in a way rather that the phoneme exists and is hard to write, or very common. Which gives it its spot on here, extIPA also has a bunch of extra stuff useful for non language sounds.

[@mr-vet]

Former Spanish linguist (and French & Indonesian), here….For the word Gato, the pronunciation of the t, is not always as you explain. It depends on the variety of Spanish (country/region…). In some varieties of Spanish, instead a soft t, it can be a hard t, as in English. I’ve travelled quite extensively in Ecuador, Peru, Spain, Panama, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Honduras, and the US, of course.

[@cerezabay]

What are you referring to when you say soft vs hard t?

[@jayasuryangoral-maanyan3901]

@@cerezabay hard is alveolar, soft is dental

[@norielgames4765]

Spanish speaker here, I can confirm. When he gave an example of the word Gato with a hard t I thought it sounded like a latin american accent to me (an European Spanish speaker)

[@gustavolopes5094]

I was curious about this, just watched it again and youtube recommended this. Thanks, 4-years-ago internet man! Hope you're doing well bud.

[@enricobianchi4499]

As a north Italian speaker with a 100% uvular R (way more trilled than standard German's), I am physically not able to produce a uvular tap reliably. I can produce a short uvular approximant or fricative, like standard German, a uvular trill, or a uvular plosive, but never a tap. I am perfectly able to distinguish alveolar trills from taps and flaps.

[@Astro_Guy_1]

2:18 I know you are not a native speaker, so it is not a critique, but as a Disclaimer: "Ehre" sounds very different to his pronounciation. I suggest viewers to look up the pronounciation. Google translate, funnily enough, does not manage to pronounce the "R" that is the subject of this video.

[@draco_lunae]

Yeah, I had to look at the screen and see the word spelled to even figure out what he was trying to say, I thought it was more so a butchering of Ähre 😅 the proper IPA on how to pronounce it would be ˈeːʁə (note the long first vowel and e rather than that guttural ɛ or smth that’s in the video)

[@samuelcheung4799]

Da würde das Wort "Erre" geschrieben werden.

[@Woof432]

Actually, the tt sound also appears in Korean in the letter “ㄸ”

[@Caleb.S.Spangenberg]

Why are you calling me weird for the way that I always say butter?

[@llllouis]

just for reference what type of english do u speak bc that does indeed sound weird to me 😭

[@oyenisis]

@@llllouis A dialect from literally anywhere outside of america. T-flapping is a general american feature.

[@vannillaAJofficial204]

​@@oyenisis also im not a native speaker but most my accent in english sounds american. and yet i dont really like how /ɾ/ is used in the language, like ive always associated it with the letter "r", not with "tt". probably because im brazilian and /ɾ/ is one of the ways to pronounce the letter "r" depending on where it is in the word

[@Mikelaxo]

As a Spanish speaking, I started mumbling to myself words with t and d, and I noticed they they're not always dental, and it depends on the vowels surrounding the consonant. If there's a rounded vowel then it's more likely to be dentalized as supposed to an open vowel, at least for my own way or speaking

[@hydro63]

Great video, thanks for explaining this to me I am not linguist, but i like linguistics Well, i hoped to see you make more videos, but i understand if you don't want to make them

[@cyrusalivox]

There are IPA symbols that don't correspond to any phoneme - for example, the open front rounded ɶ - and many phonemes that don't get their own IPA symbol: aspirated and breathy sounds, affricates, labio-velar sounds, and even the schwi in English "roses" (which contrasts with the schwa in "Rosa's"). It's not the International Phonemic Alphabet. Maybe one reason the labiodental flap and the labiodental nasal got their own IPA symbols is that the IPA has no diacritic for labiodental articulation.

[@rosiefay7283]

['ɹouzɪz]. No problem.

[@cyrusalivox]

@@rosiefay7283 That's a front vowel; the schwi is a back vowel.

[@kakahass8845]

The IPA has a diacritic for labio-dental articulation though.

[@cyrusalivox]

@@kakahass8845 What is it? Is it in Unicode?

[@kakahass8845]

@@cyrusalivox It's the same diacritic as the for dental consonants but added to bilabial consonants so labiodental [p] and [b] would be [p̪] and [b̪] also I would like to add some consonants like voiceless [r̥] contrasts with voiced [r] in multiple languages yet we have no symbol for the voiceless alveolar trill I honestly am starting to believe the international phonetic association rolls a dice to decide whether to add a symbol or not.

[@zionfultz8495]

This is a common misunderstanding of the alveolar column on the chart. In intention those symbols can represent dental, alveolar, or post-alveolar. There are common symbols used for dental and post-alveolar, without them most assume alveolar (extIPA gives a symbol that allows you to specify alveolar). In use, people rarely seem to take it this way and even I dislike the vagueness it creates

[@Yusuketh443]

hi :3 UwU

[@oxidine2968]

If there's no smybol for that, i'll add one. Me choosing a letter in conlan

[@rosiefay7283]

5:06 Yes, I did think you sounded weird, but that's because you said the word "butter" louder. If you'd said it at normal volume, it'd sound fine. The sound [tʰ] itself isn't weird. You'd pronounce "today" with [tʰ], wouldn't you? I suggest the following example: "stag" is [stag]; t-aspiration doesn't happen after syllable-initial [s]. If you were to pronounce it [stʰag], that would sound weird. Again it's not because you never use [tʰ], after all, you use it in "tag".

[@dunkleosteusterrelli]

> You'd pronounce today with tʰ Most accents don't do that

[@nikayra9564]

same with the bilabial approximant!!!! alot of Papua New Guinea's languages distinguished them brom the labio-velar approximant

[@vernowietsch]

That comparison between the spanish and english t trips me up because ive been doing it all my life but never noziced. I often wondered what exactly it was that made some people sound more accent free than others, but never once noticed that the t has the toung in a different place

[@martinomasolo8833]

Irish english distinguishes the minimal pair of alveolar and dental t

[@ExzaktVid]

This is a weird question, but I wonder if animals with complex speech have multiple languages (like dolphins)

[@ferudunatakan]

"It's not English tea"

[@spacesandwich5593]

I'm spanish and just thought I'd say something I've noticed, my Ds are dental but my Ts are alveolar

[@isaacbruner65]

I'm an English speaker trying to learn Spanish. I just tried it myself and, weirdly enough, when I pronounce "t" and "d" in English both are alveolar, but in Spanish I pronounce "d" as dental and "t" as alveolar.

[@gabmalagonpersonal]

Huh that happens to me too

[@wezzuh2482]

that might be because in Spanish /d/ has a dental allophone /ð/. Its the soft d you hear at the end of a word like cuidad.

[@spacesandwich5593]

@@wezzuh2482 As well as θ the vioceless dental fricative

[@ThalonRamacorn]

"Saying the same thing slightly differently but everyone understands what you are saying"... yeah... *cries in chinese* :D

[@David280GG]

underrated asf

[@jivkoyanchev1998]

Is the pronunciation you used for Ehre from a german dialect? Since in Hochdeutsch its definetly not pronounced like that. It's something like /eːʁə/.

[@brillitheworldbuilder]

Nope, the sound in German "Ehre" is actually a voiced uvular fricative, but the uvular tap is a common realization of the r in Yiddish, not in German

[@T.h.e.T.i.n.o]

As a Person Next to the Müritz, in Mecklenburg Vorporman. I can Assure you that it can happen In german, Because i, my Family, my Friends, and Evreyone here says /ʀ/ and do also have a tap if the Uvular Trill Comes befor Schwa😅 /vɛ̆n də mi͜ə nɪ̆ç ɡla͜opst... dan kɔ̆m dɔ̆χ ʀʊntʰɐ tsʊ̥ myːʀɪts/ ❤

[@lordanzu8763]

I think you mixed up the German Uvular Fricative with a Uvular Trill. In the German speech I listen to the fricative more than the trill.

[@sqohapoe]

In mandarin, aspirated th and non aspirated t are different phonemes. So why does IPA not include them as different symbols? It is not unlikely that aspiration form minimal pairs just as vocalization can do. I've always wondered why IPA treats two cases differently. Is it an eurocentric bias or does it have something linguistically justifies the choice?

[@enricobianchi4499]

eurocentric bias

[@eyeofthasky]

i agree on the narrative u wanna provide, also on the details u give as argument, but your realization of almost al details was....wrong xD ..will mention those which i remember: - "Ehre" has a looooong eeeeeeeh sound [e:] but thats not of much importance to the point of the video --- if the R in this case is a TAP is highly questionable tho, its simply an approximant - why using a phonemic transcription for Todd/nod that does NOT correlate with ur variety of english if u could use the adequate one? the written form suggests a merger of the vowels of "nod" and "father" but u clearly do have "nod" being its distinct vowel .... which sgain is not of importance for ur point, but so r all my notes here :D -- just highlighting inconsistencies - 6:34 that is NOT a trill but a fricative, a trill would involve trilling, i.e. the uvula smashing against ur surrounding tissue, like if u gargle -- or mimic a lawn mower or a cat purring - there ARE languages that contrast dental and alveolar T/D, and some continue this also with retroflex as the third contrast -- i forgot the name, but some are indic and some on the african side. if i can find the papers about them again i will provide the names - dont agree on the "phoneme" maxime of the IPA, it wants to show phones in order to acurately describe any language, also newly "discovered" languages or preserve/record languages that are dying. people MISSUSE ipa often, like caring only about phonemes and therefore rendering english R and /r/ instead of the appropriate symbol -- also which symbol u use as a phoneme marker is COMPLETELY up to an author, if u have a range of allophones who decides which of those allophone IPAs has to be the marker for the whole phoneme? the AUTHOR. cuz phonemes are definition constructions, akin to mathematical number spaces i.e. D={1; 2; 3; 4; 7} u can label this colection of values whatever u want be it "D" or "X" or if maths would do what linguists do, also "1". but some linguists label phonemes not with one of the symbols of their allophones, but with simply any thing, like R for a range of rotics. but it would also be as valid to use the emoji of a rubber duck, since in ANY case the author has to list the possible phones a phoneme can take shape.

[@NinjaAptxParaElPueblo]

In the Spanish variety that I speak there is not dental t or d

[@vannillaAJofficial204]

spanish varies a lot from dialect to dialect. now i dont speak a lot of spanish but portuguese is my native language and the dialectal differences are even bigger phonetically (and in every other way tbh). mostly the differences between pt-br and pt-pt. and since there are even more countries out there that speak spanish as a majority language id expect there to be even more differences

[@egohicsum]

i as a native german speaker would actually disagree and would say that the uvular tap is actually the standard way of pronouncing the r in Ehre as well as in Reise

[@drfudgecookie5800]

The fact that the standard IPA thats shown doesn't feature the epiglottal plosive even though it is used in quite a few languages (mostly in the northern caucasus) infuriates me to a giant degree.

[@zionfultz8495]

As for on minimal pairs, using a single example really isn't enough to know that two sounds aren't distinct. In reality you would need this to be true across the entire language (Or rather dialect/accent)

[@TheMrMe1]

Caveat: In Icelandic, voiceless n, r and l are phonemic and contrast with voiced n, r and l; yet no symbol for those sounds exists. So while your explanation may indeed be the underlying reason, it is not completely correct, as there are languages where those sounds contrast.

[@Idkpleasejustletmechangeit]

2:21 I think that's wrong. Never heard anyone pronounce the "r" in "Ehre" in any abnormal way. Looked it up, at least according to wiktionary (I know, not really best source) it's pronounced with an /ʁ/ like I thought.

[@fariesz6786]

pretty good take on it

[@yackaquacker7992]

You said that t and d is always dental in Spanish, and is that is not true. T is always dental, but d is only dental when it is pronounced after an L or N, otherwise it is pronounced Like the "th" in "The" in English.

[@SunglassOrange]

bro i dont get why you dont have more subs, this video is really profesional

[@SotraEngine4]

Does [u] sound more like o in oter or u in ut? Like the Norwegian words. I hear people pronounce [u] both ways, although to me they sound as different as they can be

[@enricobianchi4499]

English IPA transcription is almost universally dogshit because the English vowel system varies quite a lot between different areas and also has no notion of symmetry so it is impossible to fit on the IPA's neatly ordered characters. It's supposed to be like in oter, while ʉ is for ut. Check out Wiktionary, it has them.

[@SotraEngine4]

@@enricobianchi4499 Thanks!

[@Untoldanimations]

But what about dialects? In my dialect t̪ contrasts with t. It's the difference between "thanks" and "tanks" whether I say it with t̪ or t. I still don't really understand the process of how contrasting phonemes are selected. On an individual language basis, is the idea to take a word and to try replace each phoneme with all possible allophones to see what contrasts and what doesn't? How do they know which allophone to choose? Let's say there's 5 consonants that may be considered allophones of "t". In language A, 3 of there are allophones and the other 2 are contrasting but allophones of each other. In language B, 4 of them are allophones and the last one is contrasting, but is also one of the 2 contrasting phonemes from language A. So then which of these are chosen for the IPA chart? "t" and the contrasting one in language B? "t" and the 2 contrasting ones in language A? Seems really complex when you introduce families of allophones for each language and cross reference that to other different families of allophones in other languages

[@Eron4040j]

Hi! Someone most of the way through a Linguistics degree here. Phonemes are selected *within* languages. For example, aspirated [tʰ] and unaspirated [t] don't contrast in English, so they are both allophones of the same phoneme /t/. But they do contrast in many languages, such as (I believe) Thai and many languages of the Indian subcontinent. So in Thai, /t/ and /tʰ/ are separate phonemes. The IPA, in theory, introduces a new symbol whenever a sound is discovered that is a separate, contrasting phoneme in any language. To use the example in the video, if a language was found where a tapped uvular R contrasts with all other phones, it would get a new symbol. This doesn't always happen though--as evidenced by the fact that some English dialects DO distinguish dental and non-dental /t̪/ and /t/. The official IPA chart is pretty lacking honestly, and a lot of the papers I've read end up using some unofficial symbols. Hope this explanation was somewhat usefulǃ

[@Untoldanimations]

@@Eron4040j I don’t think this addressed the questions I posed at first. Out of a whole family of possible allophones, how do they choose which one to add as a new symbol? There may be 10 allophones of /t/ and more or fewer of them may contrast in various languages. For any arbitrary pair of them you could probably find some language that contrasts them and puts all 10 of those allophones them into 2 or more bins that all contrast in a bipartite way. In that case you still needn’t make 10 different symbols right? You could probably get away with about 6 and then use those as a basis for the bins in all the surveyed language. But then if a new language is discovered where the 6 symbols don’t form a basis for the contrasting bins, they will either have to shuffle around the choice of 6 symbols they already have to find a solution, or probably just introduce a 7th to form a basis for the new bin even though it could be possible to find a more minimal set of symbols to form a basis

[@Eron4040j]

@@Untoldanimations Ohh okay I think I see what you’re asking now, sorry about that. While I can’t say I know all that much about how the International Phonetics Association makes their decisions, I did a little digging and from what I can tell, the adding of symbols is honestly not all that systematic. It hasn’t really been updated since 2005, and an extended version of the chart developed for Speech Pathology is actually approved for use in official IPA publications. Doesn’t seem like there are strict criteria, more just like the people that run it get together and vote on whether to include a new symbol. If I had to guess on some sort of guiding decision-making rule, I would say they probably only make symbols for sounds found to be *underlying* phonemes in at least one language. I.e., the main allophone that all other allophones in that given language are derived from through rules. To use the /t/ example again, English unaspirated [t] is the underlying phoneme, whereas aspirated [th] is derived from a rule (aspirate voiceless stops at the beginning of a word or stressed syllable).

[@galaxydave3807]

2:18 Pronunciation of „Ehre“ is not correct 😅 and the voiced uvular fricativ [ʁ] is mostly used

[@christopherellis2663]

In English, tt brcomes ?

[@edwardclark6731]

THIS MAN IS UNDERRATED\

[@ezzovonachalm9815]

Pusćavin, an alpine raeto- lombard dialect has a terminal retropalatal n that is not represented here, but is frequent in lombard dialects Milaņ maņ ( mano) paņ (pane) saņ ( sano) luntaņ ( lontano) is it Your velar n ? which is different from rañ ( ragno) bañ ( bagno) bañà ( bagnare) corrisponde alla ñ spañola

[@enricobianchi4499]

You mean ŋ, possibly one of the most famous IPA letters? It differs from ɲ which is ñ.

[@ezzovonachalm9815]

@@enricobianchi4499 Milan : il dorso della lingua occlude la colonna d'aria > suono nasale gnagnera : la punta della lingua contro il palato sopra i denti [ ñ].

[@ferudunatakan]

Uvular tap/flap has a symbol but it's not small capital r with breve, it's small capital g with breve.

[@DantetheArtist2024]

tp

[@kirilvelinov7774]

Katsumotonese has the aspirated Kh,Ph,Th,Čh are not in the IPA!

[@David280GG]

whats Katsumotonese?

[@arri6267]

Some dialects of bangla realize retroflex ʈ ɖ as alveolar t and d, but they also have dental t̪ and d̪ as seperate phonemes, so can that be considered a contrastive distinction between dental t̪, d̪ and the alveolar ones?

[@nim64]

yeah, even in hindi in certain cases the retroflexes are realized as alveolars. there are in fact many indian languages (mostly south indian languages) that have three way distinctions between dental alveolar and retroflex. no idea what this guy was on about with 'no languages distinguish those' when that three way distinction is one of the main recognizable features of the dravidian language family lol

[@__bingus]

hey, i wanted to add that there are, in fact, languages which contrast dental t and alveolar t en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayalam#Consonants Edit: just realized that almost every other comment is listing languages like this lmao

[@george0t]

It's funny how you pronounce the 'o' in 'Todd' and 'Nod' as 'ɒ' and yet you annotated it with 'ɑ'. 🙂