The Cardinal Vowels with Daniel Jones

[matikorn]

Can Anyone tell me why there are weird symbols that doesn't correspond to the english language? I mean I'm a bit confused because i've learned all of the phonemes but there are like a bunch of phonemes that are not english in the cardinal vowel system, why's that?

[Apolonietzscheanizad]

@matikorn Though English has a large vowel system, some languages has:

1. More vowel sounds (like French, with 16 vowel sounds -with nasales, 12 without nasals) as [oe].

2. Less vowel sounds BUT DIFFERENT (Spanish has 5 vowel sounds, but his [a] sound is not in English -something between [ae] and [α]).

I hope my English is understable.

[yurismir1]

@Apolonietzscheanizad "...[a] sound is not in English..."

Well, it depends on what you mean by "not in English". There are many accents of English. Many people in the British Isles do actually use the phone [a] as a surface realization of the phoneme in words like "hat" and "stack". Many people in the United States and especially in the Great Lakes region, use [a] as a realization of the vowel in "hot" and "stock". So this sound and many others aren't as foreign as people like to think.

[Apolonietzscheanizad]

@yurismir1 Maybe I risked too much by comparing with English phonetics, that I don't know very well. Anyway, it's important to know the basic difference between "phonem" and "sound": the phonems are the sounds that (in a standard speech) make differences between word pairs. In Received Pronounciation, [α] and [ae] are distinctive.

It's true that we can replace [ae] and [α] with [a], as we can replace [3:] with [oe], but we need to have a standard symbol (in this case, [3:]). (next message...)

[Apolonietzscheanizad]

@yurismir1 (...) In other languages, the sounds that in English are just "sounds" (and not phonems, so they can replace each other) are phonems. Just imagine that in a language [3:] and [oe] are distincitve sounds (phonems): we should have two standard symbols to note them, not just one.

Greetings!

(I re-apologize for my English).

[yurismir1]

@Apolonietzscheanizad I understand what you're saying. All I was trying to say was why can't a person use a sound that is only phone in their native language as a phoneme in another language they are learning?

"...we should have two standard symbols to note them, not just one." Well, we already have a way of distinguishing between allophones and phonemes using the IPA. We write them as [ɜː] and [œ], respectively, if they are allophones, and /ɜː/ and /œ/, respectively, if they are phonemes.

[Apolonietzscheanizad]

@yurismir1 Every speaker can produce every sound: we get used to some of them, and take the other as "non-defined" sounds. If you pronounce the Span. for "house" = "casa" with the Eng. /æ/ phonem, we'll transcribe like this: /kasa/ [kæsæ], and it will be understandable, because [a] and [æ] are not distinctive in Span. If they are distinctive in language X, you shouldn't neutralize them or produce a non-defined sound instead. If I neutralize /i:/ and /ɪ/, lots of Eng. words will became ambiguous.

[matikorn]

@matikorn yeah it's just that I thought that daniel Jones created the diagram to locate ENGLISH vowels... so I saw those phonemes that are not english and it kinda made me feel confused...

[MrJasonSmarts]

how do you make the cardinal [ʌ] like in the video? I can't make it, it sounds like [a] still...

[yurismir1]

@MrJasonSmarts Listen to the similarity between [ɔ] and [ʌ]. Try to start hearing [ʌ] as an unrounded version of [ɔ]. Then try to imitate it. That's what I did. I tried to find similarities between the vowels. You can go to double-u(x3)(dot)sil(dot)org/c­omputing/ipahelp/ipahelp_downl­oad(dot)htm and download IPA Help 2.1. You can use that to quiz yourself on the vowels.

[Radonradium]

the guy in the video is making porn noises

[himura0071]

linguists sound like idiots while producing vowels

[puntoclave7]

are similar¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡

[Edwgers]

"e" (Number two) I have doubts with the pronunciation of this video.

for example, in the French word:

maugréer [mogree]

the double "e" sounds very different from that of Mr. Jones.

Could someone explain that?

[amanda13val]

I actually did wake up saying "Hey, I should probably master the IPA vowel system."

I have an oral exam on the IPA ...

[MrBelaid123]

goooooood

[Eve23666]

lol))))))

[yurismir1]

How does he pronounce all these sounds? I don't understand.

[amanda13val]

@yurismir1

It's just practice.

I'm almost there, just need to work on a few small details.

[yurismir1]

@amanda13val So even after all these years it's still "just practice"? There's still no magical method to learn all these sounds.

[amanda13val]

@yurismir1

If you go here: yorku . ca/earmstro/ipa/

then you can hear all the sounds of the IPA chart, including all the vowels that Jones went through on here (and more). If you were to spend about ten minutes a day mimicking them, you'd probably know each sound by heart in a few weeks. I learnt these about three years ago, and if memory serves me correctly it only took a month or so to get right.

The tricky part is using all the diacritics and suprasegmentals correctly.

[snackajack117]

he had perfect pitch, so probably

[DonKhoi]

I pronounce /a/, /ɛ/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /ɔ/, /u/, /ɯ/ correctly, me a native Vietnamese speaker. /ɐ/ and /ə/ are the only two vowels that aren't cardina in Vietnamesel. French "u" and Swedish "y" are phonetically, viewed from outside, one same vowel, but slightly phonemically different. I heard French and Swedish speaker pronounce it before.

[marcoxyzxyz]

You maybe meant they are phonemically equal, to say, they count as the same phoneme in two different languages, but still they are phonetically slightly different. Sure: French /y/ is backer than its Swedish counterpart.

[koffiegast]

The y sounded different from the y in my language (dutch) and the central i... it sounds different and easier than when a russian try to say it for me...

[soundbomb1]

Thanks for posting this, I'm doing a Linguistics degree, so I did wake up thinking I should master the IPA vowel system!

[jfreijser]

8-12 seconds shows x-ray stills from a film of Daniel Jones' mouth while speaking. I once saw this movie, and was hoping to find it on Youtube. Anyone seen it? I found this movie amazing for its portrayal of the tongue (lingua) in its dance performed to create the flow of speech. Truly awesome!

[soundbomb1]

Thanks for the vid, but now my neighbours think i'm a mentalist....

[parseErrors]

Wow. Thank-you for posting this - very valuable!

[bluecod]

I'm trying to learn the IPA-- I'm just getting into both linguistics and conlanging-- and this has been INDISPENSABLE. *hugs orbitingteapot* Thanks so much!

[DisIzRiz1]

wanting new friends

ANY GUYS UP? eE

[enter19]

how can he pronounce all these vowels ? there are many vowels that don't exist in English ?

[gajulo]

I don't know, but I can say, at least, that he pronounces most French sounds quite well, since it is my mother tongue. Impressive. He may somewhat work on his "y", but that's it... Anyway, it's very difficult for any English-speaking person.

[skfln]

That's not the FRENCH y he's pronouncing, but CARDINAL y!!! And of course, he wouldn't have to work on it, he pronounced it perfectly.

[gajulo]

The only reason I mentionned French is because like the Germans or Finns, we have this cardinal [y], which anglophones don't. His pronounciation of the [y] is almost perfect, but I just had to mention it was not as perfect as his pronounciation of the other vowels I know from my mother tongue [œ], [ɔ], [ø]. Since [y] is a close front rounded vowel, it should be just a little more "closed". That's all... :)

[skfln]

Well, I speak Hungarian, which also has an [y]-type vowel. I studied French for a few years with a native instructor, and I think there is no difference between French [y] and Hungarian [y]. However, I think neither of them are identical to the cardinal [y] sound. In my opinion, it is not that his pronunciation was not perfect, and this is why it differed from your French [y], but because French [y] differs from the cardinal sound.

[mafto]

absolutely - similarly someone could say that [i] was too front and too close in comparison with English /i/ but the reason's that cardinal [i] is not the same sound as English (or any other language's that has a phoneme transcribed as /i/) /i/. cardinal vowels are made with the tongue in the most extreme positions and i don't know about any language (though i don't take interest in many)that would have at least one vowel of the quality of a cardinal vowel.

[marcoxyzxyz]

Italian has seven vowel phonemes: /i, e, ɛ, a, ɔ, o, u/; all of them but /a/ are cardinal vowels. Unfortunately, we merely have five vowel graphemes to represent them all: i, e, a, o, u. Open /ɛ, ɔ/ are somtimes written 'è' and 'ò', but in general you are supposed to learn by heart where to use /ɛ, ɔ/ and where /e, o/.

[skfln]

I would dispute, based on the little Italian I heard, that Italian /ɔ/ would be cardinal. I percieve it as being decidedly opener than C [ɔ]. (Or maybe it's more centralized)

[BEJ073]

Thaks for posting this!

[SMZaidism]

It was great to hear the Cardinal Vowels from Mr.Jones. Thank you for posting it online.

[mafto]

what a singer professor Jones is!

[bratfink74]

Classic - thanks!

[crouchtig]

So much fun to 'sing along' to :P

[Slamentan]

Thx a lot, that's imporatant stuff for linguistic studies!

^^

[Yotaro82]

I didn't think I would be able to see the video of D. Jones the inventor of the cardinal vowels vid. Very interesting. Thak you! iiiiiii iiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

[detomoylomo]

eeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

[orbitingteapot]

aaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa­aa

[detomoylomo]

it's a bit funny the voice of this profesor, but it's been helpfull to me cause i study english a a second language

[Alex34623]

thanks for posting! you helped me a great deal with my current research paper by posting this. and also it is really interesting to see what our famous d.jones actually looked like and how he spoke. thanks!

[orbitingteapot]

Thanks! I just threw this together, the editing program I used wasn't cooperative. Maybe I'll do something better- example english words, or maybe multi-lingual charts.