Comments on: That's some voiceless epiglottal fricative you've got there.

That's some voiceless epiglottal fricative you've got there.

kenko — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 13:38:44 -0800

Hear the International Phonetic Alphabet. Voiced by one Paul Meier. One of the coolest things ever. [via languagehat]

By: blahblahblah

blahblahblah — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 14:04:43 -0800

This was neat. Now we just need MeFi to offer the full range of phoentic marks so that we can better express ourselves.

By: saladin

saladin — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 14:38:14 -0800

That was really cool. My roomate and I just spend the last 20 minutes trying to make every sound on the chart.

By: fatllama

fatllama — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 14:59:23 -0800

Great link but about four years too late; this could have come in handy while I was preparing for a surreal phonetics exam where the instructor made what would otherwise be called a series of random noises and expected the students to dutifully transcribe "alveolar lateral flap, velar trill, dental click." So to you I offer what might be called a voiceless bilabial trill (:-P).

By: ism

ism — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 15:02:21 -0800

this is SO good. as a former linguistics student, i've had professors who couldn't reproduce a lot of these sounds. hearing them changes everything. what's interesting is that babies can and do make all of these sounds in their babble, and lose the ability to pronounce (and hear) the differences between them as their native language takes over their brain.

By: mragreeable

mragreeable — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 15:10:38 -0800

Surely this calls for a My Fair Lady quote. Higgins : Now, how many vowell sounds do you think you heard altogether? Pickering : I believe I counted 24. Higgins : Wrong by a hundred. Pickering : What? Higgins : To be exact, you heard 130.

By: sciurus

sciurus — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 15:11:20 -0800

This is far too cool for my own good.

By: gesamtkunstwerk

gesamtkunstwerk — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 15:24:23 -0800

Amazing. I've actually been looking recordings of different clicks for years. I'd love to hear them in a real language. It's odd, though. I don't expect linguists to shill accent reduction software.

By: 23skidoo

23skidoo — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 15:34:21 -0800

Consonants (Pulmonics) > crossed h Hit that a billion times in a row to hear Butthead laughing. If Butthead was a cyborg Hugh Grant.

By: Dr. Wu

Dr. Wu — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 16:57:29 -0800

This is very cool. Thanks, kenko (and languagehat). Did anyone else get great pleasure out of clicking multiple letters in rapid succession, so that it sounds like Mr. Meier is singing some sort of weird one-man diphthong aria? .... or was that just me?

By: Alison

Alison — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 17:12:29 -0800

I've needed this for so long. It's the one thing that I'm terrible about when doing field work. Thanks!

By: clockzero

clockzero — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 17:28:28 -0800

Awesome. ...their native language takes over their brain. Awesome also.

By: scruss

scruss — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 17:42:24 -0800

Don't forget the UCL Phonetics resources, which include an IPA for the Web tutorial, and The Sounds of The International Phonetic Alphabet CD. Yes, this CD has been played at a lexicographer's party. Hear this extract (mp3, from May of the 365 Days Project), and find out why not many people go to lexicographers' parties in the first place. Accent reduction? Phooey. My accent beats your accent up, and steals its lunch money.

By: thirdparty

thirdparty — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 17:42:42 -0800

So cool. Thanks. And Dr. Wu, I did too.

By: devetron

devetron — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 17:45:23 -0800

As I played around, I tried to guess at the sounds and make them based solely on their names. I hit several of them dead on. Proud of self now.

By: Jairus

Jairus — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 17:45:34 -0800

I would like to make a song out of this.

By: Turtle

Turtle — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 18:01:12 -0800

Very cool, lovely interface, very fun. Still, I don't mean to be ungrateful, but (obligatory Flash gripe) it would be even nicer, and more useful, if you could link to individual sounds. Then someone could link hard-to-pronounce words with their sound prototypes, and vice-versa. And, can someone tell me where the nasals are? If that's the right name. I mean the sounds in the French words "long", "lent", "lin", "l'un".

By: ao4047

ao4047 — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 18:38:18 -0800

IPA is a blast. We had to learn it in acting school for dialects. Plus you can try and create fake dialects like ones where every vowel is converted to a schwa.

By: ao4047

ao4047 — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 19:59:26 -0800

I think you mean the retroflex nasal continuant. Looks like an 'n' with a long stem. The best is people who flip this to a pure n so they say I was singeen and danceen. We were haveen such a good time! Or even better is sing-geen.

By: moonmilk

moonmilk — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 20:08:36 -0800

ao4047, my grandma used to sing me a song in that dialect! And then the same song in the dialect where every vowel is converted into an 'e' sound, and so on. "Oo oo look froot! Oo oo look froot! Look oopools oond boonoonoos, look oopools oond boonoonoos."

By: ao4047

ao4047 — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 20:14:27 -0800

That's awesome - one of my friends and her brother used to do the same thing with the 'a' sound as in have, cat and hat. So I want some ice cream! becomes Aa want sam ass cram!

By: QIbHom

QIbHom — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 22:04:43 -0800

Very cool. IPA is one of those things I've been trying to learn for years, and have repeatedly given up in frustration, because I couldn't get the sounds in my head (I learn languages by hearing, not by reading). Confused my dog, too.

By: klausness

klausness — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 00:40:14 -0800

This is totally cool. Check out the non-pulmonic constants and the dipthong & tripthong animations.

By: Prince Nez

Prince Nez — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 03:44:17 -0800

Anyone know if Victor Borge's phonetic punctuation routine can be found on these internets?

By: RavinDave

RavinDave — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 04:14:30 -0800

Very nice. (Dropping a comment here so that I can find it later.)

By: Turtle

Turtle — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 07:51:25 -0800

To answer my own question, the French nasalized vowels are not represented in the posted IPA chart (not very international!). For more info, the Wikipedia's entry on the International Phonetic Alphabet has a link to Peter Ladefoged's UCLA Course in Phonetics. Though less slick than the Flash chart, it has a far more complete collection of sounds, and is highly linkable. For example, the four different nasalized vowels in the French phrase un bon vin blanc are pronounced as follows: un ~œ (lundi) bon ~? (long) vin ~? (lin) blanc ~? (lent) (Note IPA symbols are difficult to represent on some browsers and some fonts... tant pis.)

By: Turtle

Turtle — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 07:55:00 -0800

Oops: un ~̃œ (lundi) bon ̃ɔ (long) vin ̃ɛ (lin) blanc ~̃ɑ (lent)

By: Turtle

Turtle — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 12:57:47 -0800

Here's another IPA Chart with sound (HTML, but only works with IE?), part of these IPA resources from the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Sorry for the messed up IPA characters in the previous posts. They're truly hard to display properly on the web (and MeFi's buggy Preview doesn't help).