I majored in Linguistics and had a few courses on phonetics and phonology and NONE of them mentioned sign languages. Thank you for including them in your videos!
This was really important to us! Stay tuned for more in the upcoming phonology video! (though not in the vowels video, I think it's the only video in the series that doesn't mention signed languages)
when I was 14 and studying for a spelling bee, I learned the IPA for English so that I could learn how words are pronounced and try to guess the spelling. I got second place.
I really, really liked the "too-cluttered" diagram and how it moved with the sounds. I would definitely prefer just the chart as a reference but as a learning tool I could sit and watch that diagram make noise all day.
Given that this is targeted toward English speakers, I'm hoping there's a video in the future that helps people to realise the difference between an aspirated and non-aspirated sound, and how much the difference informs how they're heard in other languages.
Man, talking - and just the idea of being able to do it without even really thinking about it - is remarkable when you really think of it. And this video really helps to illustrate that for me. Excellent work.
I just had lectures on Phonetics and it is honestly so interesting. However, I suck so hard at transcribing lol. :(.. Anyway, sending bilabial clicks to those who read this haha
Fav crash course series yet! Props for making this very clear and concise when lots of talk around language is fuzzy. It's as though you think about language very carefully or something
Thank you so much for explaining all these difficult-to-grasp concept in such a easy-to-understand manner. Great help to a person currently taking on a linguistic course like me :3
along with the IPA chart i also learned to use feature matrices and we called Bilabial Labiodental Alveolar and Velar (along with the unmentioned ones, like Palatal and Uvular), just three things: Labial (anything to do with the lips) Coronal (anything to do with the tip of the tongue) and Dorsal (anything to do with the blade of the tongue.) other features include [consonant] [sonorant] [nasal] [voice] and [continuant]. some of these might not be familiar, some are. something else useful from feature matrices is that we can describe natural classes- which are groups of phonemes with a number of the same features. phonological processes can act upon entire classes instead of just one phoneme.
Great video! I spent a year doing a comparative phonological study of ellipsis in Russian, German, and Bulgarian, and it’s refreshing to see I haven’t forgotten the basics yet, even though I mostly just work with neural networks now.
Now, ʎ is only tangentally meant to invoke 'y'. It was intended to invoke lambda in the Greek alphabet and only tangentally invoke 'y', given that 'j' and 'y' are often symbols of palatalisation. IPA has _tonnes_ of issues, such as the prominence of voicing over other means of articulation, but the system as a whole has surprisingly little bias given when it originated, even if that's only because some conflicting inherent biases of the originators were useful. (And I say this as somebody who thinks that there should be a distinct dental series rather than it being relegated to a diacritic.)
IPA has issues, indeed. But the prominence of representations of sound symbols in the tables also coindice with frequency effects: almost all languages distinct voiced sounds from voiceless sounds, but only a few languages utilize things like palatization, injectives or clicks, just to name a view. The only thing i really miss from IPA is a standardised way to represent pitch in tonal languages.
Thank you so much for this series crash course! I've been interested in the IPA and the unique sounds in different languages for years, but all the resources explaining it were intimidating as heck. Glad to see it explained from the ground up as is done here! Please make this series a long one.
Being a student of MA Linguistics .... I love your videos ... Really really helpful ... Especially I Love PHONETICS ..... and you explained it wonderfully. Eagerly waiting for the next part !!
This video reminds me of what I dubbed a MORE, a moment of realization/enlightenment, during a communications course in my freshman year of college. Imagine how different our relationships, society in general, would be if we learned how to communicate at an early age. I believe adding the IPA chart during this critical phase would have a synergy effect. Learning how to better communicate through knowing the proper use our words and learning how speak clearly by understanding the mechanics for proper pronunciation of our words should be as equally important as learning how to spell words.
thank you, this was an extremely interesting video!! and also thank you for bringing a bit of the South African languages in! keep up the excellent work!!!
Brilliant, my favourite part of linguists is here! Great video, it hit all the notes I've seen and heard before elsewhere, (even down to the "also there's /x/ like in the English Loch"), but also included articulators of sign languages. Also, I know you had to cut out a lot for the sake of time, but you cut out affricates entirely? The "Tsunami" example is as cliché as the Loch example. But still, great video, looking forward to the one on vowels, as they have always given me trouble.
"Some '-ng' words like 'hang-ger' don't have an '-ng' sound." Who pronounces "hanger" with a hard G in the middle? It _definitely_ has the n and g smushed together (which I learned today is called an "engma") sound!
Loving the course so much so far! Hoping we can have a whole episode on Sign Language, super interesting! Also, would love to have merch with Gav on it!
Are there any languages with consonants that combine points of articulation, like a fricative in the back of the mouth and then a plosive near the front? I'm having trouble making a sound like that, but it seems like it should be possible
The fact that meat like us can speak is nowhere near as mindblowing as the fact that meat has somehow convinced stones to perform a reasonable facsimile of maths, and fast enough that it can can sometimes look like thought.
I've been trying to study linguistics on my own for a while now and it's so hard to find good resources that clearly explain things as well as these do :)
5:29 👇 All the sounds demonstrated in this video, Are Hindi Swaras and *Vianjans*. प ब ढ ट ड ढ क ख ग व फ And are always taught with demonstrations like how and from where they're produced and spoken.
I totally understand why she's putting a vowel at the end of each consonant when demonstrating what it sounds like, but it's still making the linguistics major in me cringe. My phonetics professor would have never let me get away with that. Pronouncing consonants in isolation without any surrounding vowels can be difficult, and can sound weird to people who aren't used to it (which I'm sure is why she's doing it, not because she can't), but it definitely emphasized in my classes that's how we needed to do it.
