Why [ɧ] is NOT REAL 

why don't you like macrons?

Which ancient language?

What is "ancient language"?

@@kacperwoch4368 Ancient Language

pin of shame

I'm convinced the Swedish government pays linguists to keep it in the the IPA

Relatable

So true

>not to mention >mentions it [Pepe the frog looking at your soul]

¿[ɧʌt]

1:14

It's kind of fascinating how similar linguistics look to math sometimes

It's only pronounced that way in the lower regions, mainly Skåne. Elsewhere it's pronounced with a very specific tongue shape.

@@Berniebud - I'm not convinced... I rarely hear anything different... Both on TV and in real life. Unless you mean 'anything South of Stockholm' by 'lower regions'

I don't know which strange dialect you have listened to where sh makes a hw sound, but in most dialects it makes a ɧ sound.

@@Tasorius the first 3 examples given at 1:30 all have xw like sounds, only the last one sounds like sh.

​@@jimmychan. I guess this is like talking to a Japanese person about the difference between r and l, except the difference here is even greater... You just don't know what you are talking about.

HAHA NOO definitely still upload it!! Tag me and i'll watch it :)

I'd still watch it

Rip

^ agreed. any extra content on [ɧ] helps, and other perspectives are always super important

You should still do it! More attention on this as well as a native Swedish speaker's perspective would be good!

We Swedes respectfully decline this proposal because we are neutral in this dilemma and thus can’t be held accountable. We will also like North Korea to pay us back pls

Only if all English speakers are forced to make their spelling and pronunciation consistent.

@@Tasorius yesss!! yo'r seiyin it, ai'm seiyin it, meni pipl hav bin seiyin it for quait a long taim!! laik, get on uid it olredi, yu self-centerd faks

@@felipeopazo8375 while harder to type out i'd much more appreciate if the pronounciation was changed instead to meet a minimal set of rigid rules for how each letter is pronounced. No more "tough thoughts though" but "toff thoffts thoff"

@@felipeopazo8375 This proves that consistency is the worst...

LOL

@@SundrobroccXD

was about to comment the same thing, no way we're all still pretending this bs phone is a thing

Well both must be real then, Swedish, Kölnisch, Wutun and Bahing (last two are in the Himalayas) all use it, although Swedish is the most notable one

Oh yeah, and I saw Santa at the mall last December

This is why I love reading comments. I would've pinned this if it wasn't for the one I already had pinned, that was an awesome read. Thank you so much :) Here's what I think: • Yes, consistency would argue that we should also use ‹β͡ɰ›instead of [w], but I think an exception can be made here because of how common [w] is cross-linguistically like you mentioned • Indeed, [t͡ʃ] is an affricate, not necessarily both sounds happening at the same time. That was my bad, though my point still stands since [ɡ͡b] IMO doesn't need its own symbol since it's effectively represented with what we currently have in the IPA, just like all realizations of sj-ljudet • I think the symbol derivation you talked about with [c] and [ɲ] is just something that came from accessibility. At that point, [c] hadn't been used for anything else, and deriving a hooked ‹k› would introduce yet another symbol that could potentially be hard to type in many cases. I think using [c] was an okay decision when it comes to just being able to produce IPA more efficiently, but I see what you mean. Thanks again for ur amazing comment!!

@@Sundrobrocc You make a valid argument. Personally I feel it could actually be practical to have a distinct symbol for [ɡ͡b], as the current one seems to imply (to me at least) that one sound occurs before the other, and it could theoretically also be written ; there's no practical reason, to my knowledge, that the 'g' should be before the 'b' (Although it does look a bit better, imo.), and it seems a bit impractical to have two ways of transcribing the same sound, although at the same time it's not a big problem, it's an uncommon sound, and easily differentiated from [gb] by the presence of a tie bar, And ʃ͡x] is even less common, if it occurs at all, So it certainly doesn't need its own symbol. (Unrelated, but I hate how I can no longer delete what a combining character (such as the tie bars) is combined in my browser with without deleting the combining character anymore, It used to work but at some point they changed it, Now in order to add it to a new character I need to paste the one combined with a placeholder like ◌͡ into a .txt file, then copy just the combining character from there, then paste it into the place I actually want it.)

I'm not sure a new symbol that's hard to type would be a terribly big problem, though, a significant amount of IPA characters, not to mention all the diacritics, don't appear on a standard keyboard, so you basically need to make a custom keyboard or copy-paste anyway. Or we could theoretically use X-SAMPA, which is specifically designed to encode the IPA into ASCII characters, although that is in my opinion less easily-readable than the IPA proper.

1. I think writing the [g] first is just convention. The bar in this case serves the purpose of indicating coarticulation AKA 2 sounds at the same time, so it would not matter if we wrote [b͡g]. Thing is, the coarticulation bar's meaning can change based on what it ties together like in the case of [t͡ʃ] (not a coarticulation but rather an affricate) and in cases like [a͡i] (which is a way some people write diphthongs). That's why I don't think its own symbol is necessary, though perhaps this shows we should shift our attention to the "coarticulation" bar 2. About the weird .txt stuff, have you tried using this website: schwa.dk/filer/ipacharpick/?font=Times%20New%20Roman&sc= ? Has worked wonders for me

Fair, I think I agree with that

took me like 26 tries lmao

Isn't [ɕ] a variant of the tj-sound, though? Anyway, I believe I would use [ʂ] in both 'sju' and 'usch'.

Maybe one day! LOL

Yeah, that Thumbnail really looked like h bar at first

Same man

I pronounce it /¹ɧaŋˈhaj/ (in my case [xʷ-]), and frequently hear others do so as well. I'd dare say that 'sj-' is the traditional native Swedish pronunciation, while 'tj-' is a more recent (anglicised) one-cf the spelling 'Sjanghaj' in some older sources. Same thing as the older /ɧoː, ɧɔv/ for 'show' versus the modern, virtually English-sounding pronunciation, or how some say 'Beijing' instead of 'Peking'.

That pronunciation of Shanghai is simply a somewhat old-timey one

@@felix6 Oh, interesting. I just had never heard anyone use that pronunciation before. Turns out I'm wrong there.

glad you enjoyed it :) and i agree-i tried getting in contact with some of their staff but it seems to be very difficult to be noticed unless you have some sort of academic connection. maybe one day!

tysm:) it means so much-i'm working on my next vid rn which i'll release sooner or later (once finals end prolly lol) that's gonna talk about vowels and demonstrative stuff thanks so much again for the comment!

t d ŧ đ?

thank you so much!! i have more on the way :) this seriously means so much

LOL that's cool af, what does it represent phonetically?

Hah! I was about to say "So you're saying there's a symbol that can be free-to-assign? ::laughs in conlang::"

@@Sundrobrocc you mean the letter? Mostly f̣, but in Tengu it's fh, but my languages also have their own scripts

Fair argument and really cool points. I'll keep it in mind

AWW TY BANE:)

thanks so much! people either love it or hate it lol so i'm gonna experiment with different types of music/maybe no music in the future :)

Huh? Swedish knowledge of German isn't dependent on the dialect.

Talks about why a sound in a language he is bad at pronouncing doesn't exist...

@@Tasorius *talks about why this symbol should not be used as if it represented a specific sound, because it does not

@@junovzla Just because you can't pronounce the sound or even hear it apparently, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Since I actually speak the language, and don't use one of those other weird dialectal versions of it, I can tell that it does exist. There might be another way to write it in IPA, but the "hw" sound he gave in the video is certainly not correct.

@@Tasorius I'm not trying to be aggressive or anything but I'm just wondering: what manner and place of articulation would you assign to the sj-sound if not something like [xʷ] or [ʂ]? It can't simply be nebulous and inexplainable, y'know?

​@@Tasorius you are misunderstanding the point the symbol should not be used for a sound because it doesn't represent any specific sound, it just represents a phoneme specific to swedish that has a variety of different dialectal realisations note that in actual linguistics phonemes and sounds are two different concepts, a sound is what you actually produce when you speak, a phoneme is a language-specific concept linguists use to talk about a group of sounds that in a given language behave as a single element despite being physically distinct; the symbol in question represents the latter, a group of distinct sounds that all are considered equivalent of each other but only in swedish, and therefore doesn't apply to literally any other language that exists on planet earth the symbol should not be used as if it represented one singular sound because it represents a variety of different sounds that phonetically have nothing to do with each other even if they are considered equivalent *in swedish only*, and it was conceived for the sole purpose of making it easier to talk about these specific *swedish* sounds and not sounds in any other language, because if they used an actual phonetic symbol they would have to set one of the various realisations as the default and that's generally not good practice in linguistics (all the "weird dialectal variants" as you say are equally as valid as the standard, which probably didn't even exist at the time the symbol was created) don't try to argue if you don't even know what you're talking about

awwwww dude this was such a nice comment :)) thank u so much it really means a lot and yeah i've also always heard it as [xʷ] too, though I've never heard anything that sounds like the IPA's proposed coarticulation. do u have some kinda link to a recording of that realization? and maybe i'll make a soft d video! (off topic but someone's comment got flagged earlier because of the mention of "soft d" which was pretty funny lol) i'd be glad to look into it!

@@Sundrobrocc sadly, i can't find a recording :( it seems rare and everyone just represents it with [ɧ] and uses the [xʷ] sound as the default. It's hard to tell if they even use [ʃ] in its full form at all, because it seems to be approximated and articulated with or without [x], which is... weird, when you're trying to represent it. Maybe im not swedish enough to hear it clearly, who knows :p i'll try to keep you updated if i find anything! as for danish, i could perhaps help if you want (although idk how we'd even talk lol). The sound is very weird both phonetically and historically. I've always wanted to make linguistics videos, but i've never been able to since the algorithm only favors what my channel is known for - GD

i'll have to look into that stuff then! bc that does sound cool and dude if you want you could totally send me an email (on my channel page) and we could get in contact!

@@Sundrobrocc sent :)

Hmm I think all consonants assimilate to whatever vowels they precede to different extents. The /k/ in "keen" for example is almost always [cʰ] as in [cʰi(:)n]-it's actually very difficult to pronounce "keen" with the same /k/ as you would "car" because of the following [i].

Jaa det kan vara ganska svårt! Have you tried comparing it to how some old Americans would say words like "where" and "white" with the [hw]-like sound? That sound is super close to sj-ljudet and most Americans would know how to replicate it (since it's pretty common in old movies + /hw/ is not a terribly difficult sequence to pronounce). Look at the first audio pronunciation in this page -> en.wiktionary.org/wiki/when#Alternative_forms (the one in accents without the wine-whine merger)

@@Sundrobrocc I haven't, but that's brilliant! I will definitely use that comparison going forward, thank you!

@@jackrogalla1076 Jag har hjälp flera (med Engelska som modersmål) genom att dra referensen till Family Guys skämt när Stewie uttalar "Cool Whip", med ett uttal av just "whip" med nästintill ett sje-ljud. Nu vet jag att två av dem sätter uttalet mycket bra. Vet inte om det hjälper alla, men tycker att referensen borde flyga ganska bra i USA i alla fall.

I worked on my pronunciation a lot by listening to a Swedish for Beginners Audio CD set that I got several years prior. before I saw written Swedish I was listening to the people on the CD say "åka skidor" and "Jag skulle vilja ha ett cigarettfodral av läder" and also "sju". hearing the sounds and repeating them over and over again before seeing them written as "sk-" or "sj-" "lj-" makes it MUCH easier as an English speaker. We Anglos tend to work within the confines of our own alphabet, so hearing the foreign noises first and then seeing how the foreign people write said noises is easier than reading and mispronouncing the foreign words and then hearing people pronounce them correctly later. it is easier to learn it right the first time. deprive the neophytes of written materials for the first two weeks and just make them repeat after you: "Jag skulle vilja skicka ett telegram till new york city" "tesked, soppsked, matsked" they needn't see how those words are spelled at first. Swedish orthography is what it is, your students' linguistic intuitions are another thing entirely. just coach them so that they can pronounce the words better each day and go over the alphabet over and over and then you can start writing and showing them written Swedish after maybe two or three weeks.

maybe 👀

Interesting! Like I said, [xʷ] is only one of the many realizations of sj-ljudet, which is what makes it so fascinating

eat See original (Translated by Google)

we gardena in gear dagum

Thank you so much! My next one's gonna be up in a few days :)

Glad you liked it! What I *really* would love to talk about is the funny Swedish /i:/ actually-I'm sure you know what I'm talking about

@@Sundrobrocc @Sundrobrocc Indeed I know it. The famous Viby-i or Lidingö-i. I'd read a very enlightening article on this topic: "Heavens, what a sound! The acoustics and articulation of Swedish Viby-i" by Fabienne Elina Westerberg of the University of Glasgow. She has bring the status quæstionis to a new level (it is in public domain).

@@Sundrobrocc By the way, there is a stir around the subject. Many Swedish teachers advise against imitating this sound because it is seen by the more liberal public as an affectation of an upper middle class that has long dominated the Swedish intelligentsia. Which is in fact a preciousness of anti-nationalist liberals, given that it is a typical sound of the language and not a mere idiosyncrasy of a wealthy class.

thanks! your music stuff is really cool :O

@@Sundrobrocc thank youu :DD

aww thanks so much dude :)

thanks for letting me know! i'll look into it :)

I actually have heard of ɧ being used for Wutian and agree with what you're saying about eurocentricity. Great points!

me too! thats why i decided to make it lol

Super interesting! I think I know what you mean with the whistle actually Also tysm! It is actually pretty much just a sign wave, just with some extra noise; people either love it or hate it lol Do you post your music anywhere? I'd love to listen :)

​​@@Sundrobrocc I'd say sine waves work great here since they don't have much 'acoustic content' (aka they don't have harmonics; they're one frequency and one frequency only), so they're less likely to interfere with your voice. Though I can see how they're a bit of an acquired taste. And yeah, I do post some remixes (I'm fairly new, so I'm not proud of most of them besides the last few), but I haven't released any originals ever since I don't think they're finished yet. If I do get around to uploading ambient stuff, I'll let you know. It'd be cool to hear it in one of your videos!

@@SkyceEM That'd be awesome!

Interesting! I don't know if I'd make a video on this though just because of how amazingly good Geoff's video is (I watched it too). He said everything pretty much perfectly and I wouldn't honestly know what to add. Thanks for the suggestion though!

Interesting!

I LOVE FINLAND

lmao that's actually exactly the conditions i recorded the video in, but i recently got my own room so hopefully that won't happen again thanks :)

LMFAO

Thanks so much! That's something I plan to fix in the next video and onward :)

I believe the affricate ligatures are no longer official.

Hej! jag har studerat lingvistik i nästan 3 år

that goes hard

What do you mean by distinct/necessary? I'd have to look into that!

You note how it is realised in several different ways in modern speech. Could its sound have been more specific in prior generations? Sweden has numerous regional dialects and a few minority languages. Might any of those have a need for this symbol as distinct from the others you displayed?

Not sure about previous generations, I'll have to look into it. About the last question, I've been able to transcribe every instance of sj-ljudet from the samples I've personally heard, and perhaps that'll change one day, though I doubt it.

The *Czech* voiced alveolar fricative trill which is represented by ‹ř› in Czech :)

@@Sundrobrocc Oh, Czech ř? It's pronounced slightly differently, what you said sounded more like a mix between ž and ř :) I was unsure whether I heard Czech right in the sentence because what followed was not a sound present in the language. (I am Czech, the sound is notoriously hard to pronounce so it's understandable)

You didn't trill the trill enough, the consonant isn't that soft ^^

@@peacefulexistence_ thanks for the heads up! the audio was also kinda bad (it's gotten better now tho!) so maybe that contributed lol but yea

@@Sundrobrocc Haha fair! I enjoyed the video nonetheless and you got a new subscriber ^^

thank you!! more to come for sure

aww

They should provide phonetic definitions, not phonemic.

Do you know the difference between phonemic/phonetic? Phonemic sounds are ones that are contrasted in a language. For example, we know that /r/ and /l/ are phonemes in English because in the words "cram" and "clam", all the sounds are the same except for /r/ and /l/. The choice of /r/ and /l/ makes different words, and therefore creates a contrast. Additionally, what appears in // are unique representations of their source languages. Phonetic sounds are the precise descriptions of the sounds. Both "cram" and "cram" start with [kʰ], pretty much a K-sound with a puff of air after it. However, when writing the words phonemically, you would only write /k/, since there is no word in the English language where the inclusion of [ʰ] or not makes a different word. It does not make contrasts, and is therefore not a phoneme. What appears in [] does not depend on the language, since we're just talking about precise sounds. The IPA, which is a phonetic alphabet, should not make symbols that only apply to specific languages. Lmk if that makes sense or if you have other questions :)

@@Sundrobrocc thanks! just got into linguistics, and I'm looking forward to see more videos with niche topics like this from you Edit: also, I didn't know phonetic is used to refer to phones instead of phonemes, I thought it could refer to both and those words can be used interchangeably. Turns out it's different. It's phoneme=phonemic and phone=phonetic Similar to your example, if you pronounce pot, it produces /pʰ/, and spot produces /p/ which is unaspirated, the aspiration doesn't make a different meaning. Not a phoneme, but an allophone. Now, in Korean, when you make the those sounds in words like 풀 /pʰul/ (meaning 'grass') and 불 /pul/ (meaning 'fire'), they change the meaning of word respectively. Now it's different phonemes. Now I really get your point ☺️

@@tiffanyorchard6489 So glad it helped, and keep having fun with linguistics!

Yeah you're right-someone else brought that up and we talked about it for a bit in a different thread. Try looking for "affricate" in the comments

Agreed!

Elaborate 👀

tried my best! czech is wild lol thanks:)

Perhaps, but I'm not too sure. Many IPA symbols do follow some sort of graphical derivation (like a rightward bottom hook for the retroflex series) but I don't know if this one follows any specific logic, especially as the direction of the hook varies across many fonts (rightward on the youtube font but leftward in the font I used for the thumbnail)

LMAO maybe math videos will come one day 👀

the IPA is definitely a great tool, but it does have many flaws. possible upcoming video 👀

Interesting! I still stand with removing the symbol but this is a cool new perspective

As someone born in Cologne and living in Sweden I can't really support this. I never noticed ɧ in Kölsch but it immediately jumped out to me as an odd sound in Swedish. Even if the sound occurs in Kölsch it hardly merits its own symbol there because it occurs in a continuum between χ, x, ⁠ɕ, ʃ. But many Swedish speakers (not all) pronounce ɧ _very_ distinctively, and IMO it totally deserves it's own symbol there as it doesn't sound like anything else.

Do you have a link to a recording of an example of ɧ being pronounced *very distinctively* as you say? I'm curious!

I generally use /xʷ/ or /ʍ/ because I think they effectively represent sj-ljudet, but I wouldn't prescribe them

I don’t nessecarily think they fully represent the sound, while rounding the lips is common - it isn’t mandatory (in my dialect we don’t), they also sound much harsher than the sj.

@@The_Flexiloquent_Frog Hence why I also included /ʍ/ and also why I wouldn't prescribe them-I'd need more research to know what the true best symbol would be. What do you think would work well?

YES

someone else did actually point that out! it's pretty cool and it's why i love reading comments :) 1. when you asked about the word for the point of friction, the term is *place of articulation* 2. IPA is supposed to document possible phones* not phonemes since that would mean specific symbols for each language which is very unrealistic imo thanks again for ur comment!

LMAO I SWEAR

What do you mean?

Are you asking about all the different ways to spell the sound? It's due to Swedish sound shifts and historical palatalization, and such. I don't find it any more strange, than how in English /f/ could be spelled as f, ph or gh.