Consonant Pronunciation Tutorial • IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) Consonants

this video was sponsored by the ancient language institute to learn latin ancient greek or hebrew with some of the best instructors and pedagogy out there sign up for online lessons at ancient language dot com in a previous video i told you about the vowels of the international phonetic alphabet and in that video i told you why it's so important to learn this system if you have any interest in dealing with a foreign language and that's because we can talk about oh yeah the sound of e in per k of italian is like the vowel in they in english but this is so inaccurate as to be unhelpful so a way to really understand what's going on in any language is to understand the international phonetic alphabet symbols and so in that previous video i explained to you how to read an ipa international phonetic alphabet vowel chart today though i want to tell you about the consonants how are the consonants arranged in the ipa system this is something that's been especially important to me in my personal research into the practical reconstruction of the sound of ancient latin and greek the way that those languages sounded in antiquity and indeed how they changed in the pronunciations through time but in order to really have a discussion about these things i've discovered over the years working with colleagues is that if we don't actually know what these ipa symbols mean if we are not using them the right way or if we're using similar symbols but with different meanings we get confused so this is extremely helpful to access the pronunciation of ancient languages and to that end i want to thank my sponsor for this video the ancient language institute now i've been working with ali for years it's a wonderful cadre of instructors teaching latin ancient greek and hebrew biblical classical hebrew and doing it in active ways with some of the best pedagogy out there students can sign up for classes at the beginner intermediate or advanced levels or can take courses of a different track that are specific to their interests and also have available to them individual tutored lessons with an instructor i know a lot of students who have actually profited a lot from being able to take a class of say ancient greek but also getting the benefit of additional instruction whether regularly or on an as-needed basis from the same or from different instructors in the ali cadre if you have any interest at all in learning latin or ancient greek or biblical hebrew take a look at the lessons that they have to offer and thanks so much to ancient language.com for supporting this video now let's take a look at the ipa consonant chart now when you see this you might think oh my gosh this is way too complicated i'm out and i'm going to tell you don't go yet because i'm going to break this down and make it perfectly understandable for you we saw this pretty complicated looking vowel chart last time but i showed you that this is actually just a representation of the inside of the mouth an abstraction which shows us that the places that these vowels are articulated corresponds to actual positions in the mouth most significantly that vowels articulated at the front of the mouth on the left and the vowels that are articulated at the back of the mouth are on the right and in just the same way the consonant chart has the consonants articulated at the front of the mouth on the left and at the back of the mouth on the right this chart specifically is for something called pulmonic consonants the pulmonary in latin are the lungs so these are consonants that come from the expulsion of air from the lungs and you might think well how else can you make consonant sounds well you can make them without expelling air by just making sounds with your mouth for example languages that have a click sound nosa is one of these languages and mosa a language in south africa that initial sound i don't know if i'm doing it perfectly right for that language but it's essentially a click sound with the tongue now interestingly these are features we have in our languages that don't usually use these phonemically sounds can be phonemic in a language if they're used to spell words and if they have a kind of specific clear meaning but there are all kinds of sounds that we have in english that aren't phonemic to any of our vocabulary one of them that i use for example when i call a cat i go and that's a clicking sound such a sound like that could be found in words of other languages languages that use non-pulmonic consonants another one that we have in english is and that's a like like eu is another way to describe that sound like something that sort of raises disgust well that is a really important vowel in a lot of slavic languages let's do an overview of the major groups of consonants on this chart we have labial or labial either pronunciation is fine coronal dorsal and laryngeal and like previously mentioned these are referring to the points of articulation in the mouth labial with the lips labia in latin coronal the corona refers to the area from the teeth to the alveolar ridge then we have the dorsal area and these include palatal or velar consonants and then we have laryngeal ones for example say the sound of in english that h sound or the iron sound in arabic unlike the standard roman greek and cyrillic alphabets there are some writing systems in the world that are arranged in a similar way here are the dewa nagari of sanskrit and hindi and other languages in india here is the hiragana chart for japanese and here is where i actually first learned these things from the chart of tengwar which is the writing system used for elvish created by tolkien for his lord of the rings elvish languages as with the vowel chart i'm not going to explain every symbol here i'm going to be concentrating on a lot of the ones that are especially important to me for the languages that i deal with not just latin and ancient greek but also japanese and other languages and to really anchor our sense of what's going on i'm going to start with the plosive row now plosives can also be called occlusives that's a synonym for plosive or stops so plosives or occlusives or stops are just synonyms for the same thing let's start here on the left with the labial plosives and the first one we have here is the sound of the letter p in english and next with the sound of the letter b now in this chart we normally place the voiced variant next to the voiceless variant oh my gosh what does this mean this is actually a really important and fundamental thing to know about consonants many languages contrast between voiceless and voiced consonants some languages though don't have this contrast modern icelandic is such a language which has a contrast of many of these consonants if they are aspirated or unaspirated and this is also true of standard chinese now this does not mean that voicing cannot occur it just means that it's a secondary aspect of the difference between the phonemes so a p sound and a b sound in english their fundamental difference is one of voicing that is the main difference between them is whether or not the vocal cords are vibrating when the sound is made those of you who are very astute about these things though may notice that pa also is highly aspirated when it's in isolation or when it's at the beginning of a word in english or when it comes before a stressed syllable such as in the word apparent or simply the word parent so something that appears or a parent or a pin and so forth in standard english the initial p sound must be aspirated and if it's not it sounds foreign for example if i were to say instead of pin if i were to say bin it almost sounds like bin and that's because our voiced consonants our voiced plosives in english like ba they are not aspirated normally and that means that if i say bin and pin one could say that a voiceless p sound to our english ears sounds like it's in between that's not actually what it is bin is just a voiceless p sound if you're interested in this i recommend a video i've made for my patreon supporters which is about the reconstructed pronunciation of latin it's a course to train you on some of the basics of how to actually pronounce classical latin so see that link in the description since aspiration is something additional this letter p although it looks like our letter p isn't actually pa it's really ba and not pa because pa would have to have a superscript h on it in order to be the actual sound of pa the aspirated p sound so this is if you find the difference difficult you may be a native english speaker or native speaker of german but this difference is absolutely essential if you're not speaking italian or spanish with this in mind if you're trying to speak latin or ancient greek and you're aspirating p the way that we do in english it's simply not the way that those languages work and must be articulated differently one must not do this aspiration and like i said i have a video that is in the description for patreon supporters to teach you how to do this let's move inside the mouth a little bit and we get to the coronal section and here we see a letter t and a letter d and you guess that they don't necessarily represent that the way that they are written so these symbols could be applied to either dental or alveolar or palatal alveolar usually they take some kind of diacritic to describe where they are but these are best represented as the sounds in say latin or as italian that is so they're not like ta and da in english they can be if we add some diacritics to them to indicate that oh we mean specifically that variation but the da and the unaspirated of course for the voiceless occlusive is the standard meaning of these letters so that would be how we would understand them in a narrow ipa transcription a precise ipa transcription now let's go to the dorsal area and we have two areas of interest in particular the palette and the velum otherwise known as the hard palate and the soft palate so palatal consonants that are occlusives we have two of them represented here and these are and they may sound a lot like but they're not they are articulated in the palette now these don't occur in english normally so as english speakers we don't have to deal with them they do however occur in languages like modern greek say the modern greek word for and which is that is the letter c here that's what it represents so ge is that sound and it's not a k plus a y sound it's actually articulated with that part of the tongue which is at the hard palate it's a palatal consonant it took me a while to get used to making this sound and also for the j sound so but with a little practice you can get there too the velar consonants are somewhat more familiar because we have the sounds of k and g in english right we have ka and ga with the caveat that o it can't be ka because it would have to have a superscript h this is in fact respectively the uvular stuff is really fun the letter q for example which we see in transcriptions from arabic is in fact a sound that occurs in arabic the sound of semitic languages traditionally have this sound as do other afro-asiatic languages like ancient egyptian and we have a voice variant of it which is but i don't think that occurs in arabic that i can think of of course there's a lot of variety in arabic and i'd have to find a language which has that one then we get to the laryngeal area and we have the pharynx and we have the glottis this is the sound traditionally made by the semitic letter alef found in the phoenician alphabet as well as hebrew and arabic and to the sensibility of speakers of western european languages it doesn't really seem to be a thing with a phonetic value this is a consonant and yeah and this is sort of the difference of what makes something phonemic or not this is a really important phoneme and say semitic languages because it represents not making a vowel sound and there's no transition it's an ah sound we do have this in english it's just not phonemic such as when we say we hear it between vowels so it's not merely a series of ah because that would be ah it's and that's a really important thing that this does the glottal stop is pretty well known actually because it does occur sometimes in english for example in my normal way of pronouncing american english i say water and in rp it's walter but you can hear plenty of native speakers of english especially in britain say and that is the glottal stop it's interesting that that inter vocalic t sound is linited it goes through lination becomes la nice becomes softer smoother softened to something more like an intervocalic d sound in american english and to a glottal stop in many varieties of british english since we're at the laryngeal region and we're in the glottal column let's talk about these two fricatives or approximants what's the difference between a fricative and approximate well a fricative is where air is allowed to pass through a plosive is also known as a stop because it prevents flow of air when we make a b sound like until we release the sound there is no sound and same with the paw we can't just continuously make a p sound i was trying to do it but it didn't work but i can continuously make an f sound like or s or so let's talk about that that is a fricative an approximate is a sound which is the same articulation point but there is yet more space between the articulating members so it could be the tongue or the glottis or whatever it is that's coming together if it's approximate it means that they're farther apart and here they're both considered either fricatives or approximates because they're essentially the same and it's hard to tell the difference anyway so what are these sounds well the first one which looks like a letter h is it's essentially the sound of breathing out the sound of air passing through the vocal cords without the vocal cords vibrating this is a very important consonant sound in english such as in the word hat or he interestingly there are a lot of english speakers that in front of the e vowel sound they don't use the glottal h sound they use this thing the isla of german and they'll say not he but he it's extremely common if you are using the lucian pronunciation of ancient greek this could be a mistake you are making you might be saying the word for hand for example which is here and that has the sh sound the sound is also found in modern greek and modern greek pronunciation would be about the same for this word and here's another greek word he mation a lot of people though i've heard with this particular characteristic in their english they will say shimatyon and this is incorrect because if we're reconstructing the ancient pronunciation we cannot merge the sound of the rough breathing the equivalent to the h of latin or english with the letter chi sound in front of front vowels so that is a problem that um is something you might be doing so you want to take a clear listen to this and try to distinguish them maybe not in english i mean i distinguish them in english other people don't natively and that's all fine but in ancient greek definitely don't merge things if possible that were not merged ever in the ancient language similarly spanish speakers using various reconstructive pronunciations of ancient greek will very frequently make a similar error where they will use their native hota sound now the sound of hota can sound different in different varieties of spanish it can sound more it can sound alike all kinds of things however i've heard spanish speakers do the same thing where they'll use the same hota sound for himation as well as for and that doesn't work it's creating the same kind of merger a merger which never ever has happened in the history of the greek language so don't do that find a way not to do that it would be better not to pronounce the rough breathing than to pronounce it the exact same way as the letter chi next to the basic letter h sound is a letter h that's curly at the top and this is the voiced variant this can occur in english speech not phonemically but for example instead of saying aha i might say aha and there it's more voiced and this is probably the best approximation of the sound of h for a lot of situations in classical latin especially intervocalically it explains very well why a word like mihi could be changed into me so easily it's not wrong per se to use the true voiceless h sound to say mihi but saying me allows for a lot more acoustic similarity with a long e sound as if there's nothing there at all so that helps to explain a lot of the spelling variations we see next to the glottals we have the pharyngeals and like i mentioned one of them is ein that lovely sound in arabic i in and the voiceless variant is and that's a really fun sound to make let's go to the uvular fricatives the upside down r is the german r and to a lesser extent we could also say this is like the french r so this is the uh uvular trill now if you want to pronounce german in a standard way you need to make this sound well how do you do it well just get some water and gargle and go pro tip if you make this voiceless and round the lips you make this a rounded voiceless uvular approximate trill thing you get the sound of a cat purring but the true voiceless fricative variant of this is that's the uvular and that sound can be heard in a whole bunch of languages let's move forward to the velar fricatives and here we have a couple very important ones to both ancient and modern greek the voiceless the one that looks like an x is so this is different from by a lot so is velar but is uvular those those are different i remember mark okrans talking about this important difference when describing klingon the language he developed for the star trek series the voiced variant of ha is now again this is me in the velum how can you figure out how to articulate this right well that's why i talked about the plosives first because the plosives give us a point to understand this if i want to do the sound then i have to start with a ka so and then i want to lower my tongue to make a fricative sound i'm not going to block the air entirely such as an occlusive a blocker a stop would do i don't want to stop the air i want it to fricativize and make so and i have a good guy it's because i'm not making full contact that i'm not making a stop and thus a fricative sound so those two are critical for greek and if we move them forward we get the other variants variants that are in modern greek and even occurred rather frequently in antiquity of ancient greek specifically in front of front vowels so the voiceless one of the palatal fricative here this is and this is also known as the ich laut of german because the german word ich has this which is different from the ah laut laut means sound in german so these are linguistic terms because is velar but ish is palatal the voiced variation is and this sound is not the same as the letter j that we see beneath the letter j is used to represent the sound of german yah or of latin yah that's a very important consonant sound obviously but with this little curly cue at the bottom it's not an approximate it's tighter the tongue is yet closer to the palette so it's not ya it's ya ya i'm sure you can probably hear the difference but you might not be able to really pick it out and the way to practice this is to listen to modern greeks say ya which means hello ya for example which doesn't sound like ya in german it sounds kinda similar but there's a well both the vowels are actually quite different as well as the consonant sound so these are critical differences if we have a greek person which uses the native ya sound in german well they're going to have a greek accent they're not going to be using the german phoneme if we have a german using the ya sound for ya instead of ya it's going to sound german so these differences are really really important i know they seem subtle but i promise they're really important let's talk about some of the nasal consonants in this group nasal consonants also just like the other things in these columns they have the same relative articulation points but instead of being oral they are nasal sounds so instead of the mouth being open instead of air passing through the mouth it passes through the nostrils so for example the sound of m is m so that's the sound of mamma ma if we make the sound continuously the lips are closed and that's what makes um now it's the sound of the n interestingly it's usually possible with a little practice even through this microphone for you to be able to hear the difference between the dental or alveolar m sound and the bilibial sound they sound a little bit different and i think that's really fascinating because the mouth is opening but there is even passing through it and yet we can hear the articulated difference it's fascinating the the resonance qualities of our various sound articulators the palatal nasal nia such as in the english word canyon this is the end with a tilde over it in spanish words like anyo and it's a critical sound in italian usually represented by g n like company or by gnocchi or by lasagna note that the sound nya in italian is geminated it's always held for about twice as long as other single consonants so that's a really important aspect it's not kambanya it's kampanya the velar nasal is represented often in english by final ng such as in king or sing and it also occurs frequently in languages any time the letter n is placed in front of the velar plosives for example such as in angelus in latin angelus one interesting indo-european exception i can think of is that russian if we see a letter n in front of a velar it doesn't velorize so something like italian angke which means also with a russian accent would be an we have a distinct dental sound to the nasal and then a distinct velar sound they don't uh they don't assimilate to each other i find that very interesting retroflex consonants are super cool these are found for example in the languages of india not all of them but many of them so take the nasal non the plosives and fricatives and so forth these are really cool sounds how do you make them you put the tip of the tongue retroflex you flex it retro flex it back retro so the tip of the tongue is approaching the palate of the inside of the mouth so sure you bring the so if you do this actually you end up getting readily the elements to create a stereotypical accent of someone from india depending on where they're from of course like i said this is a stereotype but but if i bring my the tip of my tongue roof of my mouth and i try to make every sound from it it sounds kind of like that accent right and i'm not trying to make fun of that that accent at all i'm just trying to demonstrate what happens when you bring the tip of the tongue to that part of the mouth so if i keep the tip of my tongue for all the words that i try to say it just sounds like that it sounds retroflex there are a lot of really important retroflex consonants there are four retroflex plosives in sanskrit and hindi for example so that's one reason why that those really cool and beautiful sounds often occur in such accents stereotypical though they might be especially in my simplistic representation of them just a moment ago in the coronal area we have different kinds of fricatives and they're all so cool we actually have all six of these in english so the letter theta from greek is used to represent the th sound which is appropriate because thalassa is that word that's used in modern greek so that works just fine next to it is the eth letter and this is the voiced sound such as in this or that or in the way that i say thank you and thanks standard english varieties around the world will say that the pronunciation of the word is thanks voiceless such as in thesis in other words that we usually get from greek in english keep the voiceless version but the other th version can be voiced like this and these and i say thanks i don't say evasion i say avoision in my smattering of research about this over the years i found that people who say thanks instead of thanks can be found all over the world so it's not geographical it's not an american accent thing though there are people that you can find in america certainly that do that as well as in the uk and in australia and that's really interesting and i don't have a clear explanation for it it might be etymological it might be innovative wherever it comes from it's so common as for me not to feel like i need to change that part of my speech i can say thanks but i like saying thanks my mother says thanks but my father says thanks my sister says thanks and her children say thanks but my sister's husband says thanks voiceless so how this voice thing happens i'm assuming because that word is learned so early perhaps from the mother potentially for example that at least in this situation from my you know just sort of anecdotal observation it seems like that word can be transmitted with a voiced pronunciation and kind of stay under the radar like people usually don't even notice that i say thanks until i point it out unless someone has a really good linguistic ear and they might notice it so i think it's really interesting if you say thanks with the voice sound instead of thanks or if you know other people who do the voice one let me know my anecdotal observation is it's like five to ten percent of the english-speaking population which mostly comes in just you know listening to whoever i've ever met and also to actors on tv and so i don't really have any statistical data for that but that would be really interesting as a study so the dental fricatives are tha and the the alveolar fricatives are sa and za and i've talked pretty often about the variant that is apical or retracted making these sa or za the sound that they would have in latin and ancient greek as they do in modern greek behind that the palato alveolar fricatives sha and ja we have two important r sounds here the one that looks like a regular r this is this is the trilled sound and this occurs initially in spanish and italian for example roma but intervocalically we get the one that is just the tap or the flap for example ara an alter that's actually a latin word but you get the idea initially though da can happen in japanese which is why japanese can sound kind of fun and unusual japanese pronounces the city of rome as doma doma and it's the same sound as in ara or in other words where the r is intervocalic underneath it we get to the lateral approximant and we get la la la la so that is the l sound now it's not la because that would have to be modified with some diacritics la that's a more velarized l sound but la la the bright l of british english like in the word light or the la of italian and spanish and so forth is this letter the libiodental or labyodental fricatives are and now if you speak english which is great because you're listening to this you probably do then labial dental labiodental sound we have contact with the lower lip and the upper teeth and we also have the voiced variant of it there exists an approximate sound and this is where what's an approximate it's like a fricative but there's more space [Music] and the sound occurs in certain varieties of dutch and also hindi so this also can explain sometimes why one can hear something that sounds like ma like wha in in certain examples of an indian word but it sounds like v other times and that's because it's a constant sound that's in between and that the vowels end up making it sound more like an more like a v sound or more like a w sound w by the way could be put in the bilabial one but uh it's um it also velarized it's something more like this velar approximate but labialized so it's sort of two things at the same time again this is the simple consonant chart a couple of my favorite fricatives are these represented by these greek letters the greek letter phi representing the bilabial fricative which is found in a the transition of a classical greek into koine and later modern greek and i incorporate this into my lucian pronunciation of ancient greek so this is also the same sound found in japanese represented in japanese transcriptions by an f normally like mount fuji is fuji fuji the voiced version of it represented by the greek flasher beta this is it took me a while to get used to making these but you can do them too you definitely need to do them if you're going to use the lucian pronunciation of ancient greek which of course i broadly recommend and do all of my ancient greek recordings in that pronunciation normally and it's simply you just don't use any teeth just keep the teeth from being in there and make a bilabial and one trick you can do is to really push your lower lip forward you can like look in a mirror and then make sure the lower lip is not contacting the teeth so you're not saying but you're saying and that's one way to get used to that so now having watched this video about ipa consonants along with the previous video about ipa vowels you can get an overview of what any languages phonology is doing so i hope you found this interesting and thanks again so much to ali for supporting this video check them out at ancient language dot com and thank you as always most of all to my patreon supporters [Music] so [Music] and to that end i want to thank and thanks and thank you

Channel: polýMATHY

Views: 54,797

Keywords: polýMATHY, luke amadeus ranieri, luke amadeus, luke ranieri, polymath, polymathy, international phonetic alphabet, ipa, ipa symbols, vowel space, vowel articulation, italian pronuncation, spanish pronunciation, greek pronunciation, pronunciation, french pronunciation, english pronunciation, german pronunciation, polyglot, linguistics, language learning, phonology, ipa consonant chart, ipa consonants, international phonetic alphabet consonants, japanese pronunciation, ipa consonant

Id: olM1mm66YPw

Length: 36min 52sec (2212 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 17 2022