Added: 2 years ago
From: Glossika
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  • Just so you know: There's a job waiting for you at Yale whenever you want it.

  • I personally don'y understand the reasons for the symbols for some of the diphthongs, like /ɔɪ/ sounds like the end of "boy" only in a deep Southern drawl, while I thought that word normally ended in /oj/

  • Swedish and Norwegian also have the letter "å", which is pronounced /ɔ:/ (sometimes it is short, but /ɔ/ is generally covered by the letter "o"). Danish "å" is pronounced somewhere between /ʌ/ and /ɔ/.

  • Can you draw the symbols bigger?

  • Thank you very very much sir! This really helped!

  • I like your mandarin pronounciation, could you make another video about cantonese phonology please. i'll be waiting for it so much!!!

  • it's really useful! thank you

  • my native language is spanish and I speak english as my second language, i have a lot of problems saying some vowels, but im starting to recognize some, so how i can practice my pronunciation, what methods have you used to learn all these vowels? thx

  • Very nice and informative video!

    But as a proud speaker of Norwegian, where we have a rich variety of both vowels and consonants, I'd like to point out the very obvious occurrence of the vowel ʉ in our language. (It probably has some variants, but in Norwegian it is much more compressed than how it is pronounced in this video.) It's very fascinating how we use both the ʉ and the y sound, whereas in the rest of Europe they only use "y" (written in for example German as "ü").

  • Hello, Mike! You're surprising me with your videos! Very useful jobs! You should watch Torbyrne here on youtube,he doesn't deal with fonetics,but he's a true polyglot. Also, I wanted to say that the "î" sound is met in Romanian, too.(in the middle of words is written "â"). See you soon on Youtube! ;)

  • Hello, Glossika! I'm 15 years old, and I'm an aspiring linguist. This is the first video of yours that I've seen, and I'm very grateful for your help in getting a better understanding of the IPA vowel system. I've generally got a lot of it down by instinct, but things like the inverted a and the actual phonology of central vowels was escaping me. I'm in Spanish class (easy for me), learning Russian and German on my own, and dabbling in other languages (Catalan, North Germanic languages) for fun.

  • @phenethylaminedreams

    Sorry, comment got a little wordy. I guess I just have a lot to say :P

    Well, regardless, glad to know there's people on youtube willing to provide information on the IPA in-depth for free. Also, is it true that some of the North Germanic languages (At least in dialectical variations) have an "Over-long" vowel? I know you said Estonian does, and that makes me wonder if it also exists in Finnish, and in turn has carried over into other Scandinavian languages.

  • Vowel length creates minimal pairs in English and German. But I believe these are different if you count length as mora, like you find in Estonian and Finnish. These are not Indo-European languages, so you will not find their phenomenon in other Scandinavian languages (Finland is not officially "Scandinavia" either). The triple-mora vowels in Estonian are quite unique.

  • @Glossika Vowel length is not distinctive in English if it were then /go/ and /go:/ would contrast--thbey do not. geminitive disctinction is salient in Japanese, however)

  • Thanks for this Mike.

    I think I actually understood some of the relationships you describe with this vowel map. Though i do wonder whether you might still be trying to present to much detail in such a short time. Like Fasulye I had to watch this a few times.

    You might consider backing up a little to do a series on the terms you use like voiced/unvoiced, africates, retroflex, covering how they appear across some languages.

    Another topic idea is the difference between phonetic and phonemic.

  • That's a really excellent idea. Thank you for your input.

  • ..... I 'm sitting here taking notes like a university student....

    The English vowel system seems to be much more comples than the vowel systems of my Romance languages Italian, French and Spanish. Fasulye

  • @Fasulye2009

    It's true. Germanic, Finnic, and Balto-Slavic languages tens to be pretty vowel-heavy, when it comes to the importance of the vowel sound you make in relation to the meaning of a word. In Spanish, though it's not proper, you can flub your consonants pretty badly, ignore a trill or two, and you're still pretty well understood. In Russian or Danish, however, you'll be looked at like a crazy foreigner. French, thogh a Romance language, has this distinction too, which carried to Eng.

  • English vowels are no easy matter. If I listen to English and tune out the semantics and just listen to the sounds, I've discovered lots of places where vowels are strung together in clusters which makes it very hard, sort of like some Polynesian languages.

  • That's an excellent lesson here, Glossika. It's helpful for me that you give so many examples of how similar German vowels are differently pronounced, which allows me to learn the IPA-symbols. If you give examples from Romance languages, this would also be useful for me. It will remain a bit abstract for me personally, if your examples are only taken from Asian languages (which I don't speak). Fasulye

  • I always Germanic and Chinese languages as examples for vowels because of their rich vowel inventories. I know it's not helpful for some people, but let's say it's coincidence you know German so this relates to you. I did mention the Romance languages in the first half. Perhaps I could do another video touching on the phonology of each language, Romanian, French and Portuguese may need some special attention. Call me Mike.

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