Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

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Le Baron
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Le Baron » Thu May 26, 2022 6:27 pm

Dragon27 wrote:
Le Baron wrote:For some probably.

Are these exactly the same 'some' people who have a diphthong in 'cœur'?

I don't know, I haven't interviewed every last person. Are you saying the word isn't spoken as a slight diphthong? If you are, well then I disagree; if you aren't saying that, what is this discussion about?
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Dragon27 » Thu May 26, 2022 6:42 pm

Le Baron wrote:I don't know, I haven't interviewed every last person. Are you saying the word isn't spoken as a slight diphthong? If you are, well then I disagree; if you aren't saying that, what is this discussion about?

I'm trying to figure out what it is that you perceive as a diphthong. Do these words ('cœur' and 'œuf') have the same type of (diphthongal) vowel sound to you?
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Le Baron » Thu May 26, 2022 6:52 pm

Dragon27 wrote:
Le Baron wrote:I don't know, I haven't interviewed every last person. Are you saying the word isn't spoken as a slight diphthong? If you are, well then I disagree; if you aren't saying that, what is this discussion about?

I'm trying to figure out what it is that you perceive as a diphthong. Do these words ('cœur' and 'œuf') have the same type of (diphthongal) vowel sound to you?

But I already said that the words even when similarly spelled don't necessarily sound the same. Or that differently-spelled words have the same sound.

Conside e.g: Parleur and Cœur. The first word doesn't contain 'œ', yet they sound the same. So what does this tell us about the pronunciation of 'eu' in French? Like in e.g. 'il y a eu'? How does IPA help me with this?

* edit: maybe 'same' is strong. I should say 'very similar'.
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Dragon27 » Thu May 26, 2022 7:00 pm

Le Baron wrote:But I already said that the words even when similarly spelled don't necessarily sound the same. Or that differently-spelled words have the same sound.

Yes, you did, I just wanted to hear explicitly whether these similarly spelled words sound the same (vowel-wise) or not. The original assumption was that the 'u' adds an additional diphthongal quality to the vowel.

Le Baron wrote:Conside e.g: Parleur and Cœur. The first word doesn't contain 'œ', yet they sound the same. So what does this tell us about the pronunciation of 'eu' in French? Like in e.g. 'il y a eu'? How does IPA help me with this?

What does IPA have to do with orthography? When I see a new word, I just look it up, and see the phonetical transcription (in IPA, or other transcription system).
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Le Baron » Thu May 26, 2022 7:07 pm

Dragon27 wrote:What does IPA have to do with orthography? When I see a new word, I just look it up, and see the phonetical transcription (in IPA, or other transcription system).

Well then it's solved.
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby tractor » Thu May 26, 2022 7:31 pm

Dragon27 wrote:
Le Baron wrote:Yes, I know what the IPA for cœur is, I stated that it uses œ. The 'u' absolutely changes the sound in that word by appending a brief 'schwa' sound. It's a diphthong.

Is it also a diphthong in 'œuf' or 'bœuf'?

I don't know, but it may well be that it's possible to detect a short schwa sound in cœur but not in bœuf. However, if that's the case, I suspect that the difference in pronunciation is not on the phonemic level, but rather because your tongue and lips have to move in order to produce the next phoneme. The exact realization of the phoneme will depend on both the preceding and the following phoneme.
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby zenmonkey » Fri May 27, 2022 4:48 am

The IPA can be useful for some languages.

But using a pseudo Roman transcription system to learn the pronunciation of languages that are not based on a Roman script doesn’t make sense to me. I’m always trying to move away from transcriptions early on.

Funny thing is, I know the IPA. But it’s not used in most of the learning material I have. In fact, it’s often very difficult to look up any pronunciation guidelines for non FIGSC languages.

I rather learn sounds from listening not reading.

Also apparently there are no diphthongs in modern French (France) while they still may be present in Canadian French (source: early morning coffee with my ex).
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Sprachprofi » Fri May 27, 2022 8:54 am

Le Baron wrote:But I already said that the words even when similarly spelled don't necessarily sound the same. Or that differently-spelled words have the same sound.

Conside e.g: Parleur and Cœur. The first word doesn't contain 'œ', yet they sound the same. So what does this tell us about the pronunciation of 'eu' in French? Like in e.g. 'il y a eu'? How does IPA help me with this?


When you are unsure whether "eu" in French is pronounced /œ/ (as in "cœur") or /y/ (as in "il a eu"), you can look up the IPA transcription and you know. That's how it helps you. Also, when you think you hear a difference between the pronunciation of -an (as in "maman") that you were taught at French school and the pronunciation that you hear from your neighbours in Canada, you can look up "Canadian French phonology" (or even "Eastern Quebec dialect") and get an overview of the differences by reference to IPA symbols: France French pronounces -an as /ɑ̃/ and Canadian French pronounces -an as /ã/, and when you refer to the vowel chart, you see that /ɑ/ is at the back of the mouth while /a/ is at the front. If you did not have IPA, how would you even start to talk about the difference between -an and -an?

Your original point seems to have been that dictionaries' IPA transcription tend to reflect the standard pronunciation and only sometimes refer to regional varieties, but that is not terribly surprising - dictionaries rarely give non-standard spellings either. The point is that IPA can be and is used to teach people about the regional varieties as well.

Zenmonkey seems to have the right of it regarding diphtongisation, see https://forvo.com/word/c%C5%93ur/#fr .

Another practical example of how language learners can apply the IPA: Germans will usually have a strong accent when saying the brand name Apple - or imagine Arnold saying "I'll be back" - the A sound comes out very German. For a German speaker it's hard to even hear the difference between the proper English A and their own pronunciation, so just listening and imitating is not enough. In order to master the correct sound, a German speaker should refer to the IPA, which says that German uses /ɛ/ while the proper sound is /æ/ - with that information, a quick glance at the IPA vowel chart tells us that this German speaker needs to open their mouth slightly more in order to get to /æ/ to achieve a good accent.
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Dragon27 » Fri May 27, 2022 10:01 am

tractor wrote:I don't know, but it may well be that it's possible to detect a short schwa sound in cœur but not in bœuf. However, if that's the case, I suspect that the difference in pronunciation is not on the phonemic level, but rather because your tongue and lips have to move in order to produce the next phoneme. The exact realization of the phoneme will depend on both the preceding and the following phoneme.

Yeah, I was thinking that the perception of a diphthong may be caused by the subsequent /ʁ/ phoneme, which can have a certain retracting effect on the vowel (being a uvular fricative/approximant), not by the presence of the letter 'u' in orthography, that's why I chose these words (without /ʁ/ phoneme, to test the effect). I personally don't perceive any diphthongs there (in the word cœur) in the standard/neutral Parisian-like accent, nor do the phoneticians recognize it (judging by the phonetical descriptions).
I'm not denying that there are accents which do have a phonetical diphthong there (Canadian French certainly likes to diphthongize the vowels in front of /ʁ/, just listen to how they pronounce fer).

I also believe that this perception may be caused by another well-known phonetical detail of French - phonetical length. When the word ends with one of /v, z, ʒ, ʁ, vʁ/, the vowel is pronounced long. For comparison:
https://forvo.com/word/beurre/#fr
https://forvo.com/word/b%C5%93uf/#fr

The letter combination 'œu' is just an orthographical device. Aside from some Greek loan-words, the letter 'œ' nearly always appears in the combination with 'u' (a common exception is 'œil', which rhymes with 'feuille').
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby tungemål » Fri May 27, 2022 10:19 am

I think the IPA system is a great tool in language learning.

One big challenge in learning a foreign language is the sounds that don't exist in your native language. The vowel chart can help. The important thing is not to memorise the symbols, but to understand the principles of the production of the sounds.

The vowel chart has only three parameters:
- front-back
- close-open
- rounded-unrounded

Once you get this you can in theory produce any vowel. But it's not easy to learn. It took a long time before I understood these parameters (but I'm probably slow).

For instance Norwegian has a central or even back "a"-sound. Many languages have a more front "a"-sound, which I still find uncomfortable. For instance Spanish. Dutch has two different shades of "a" - both front and back, according to if the sound is long or short.

Polish has the /ɨ/ which is hard to get right, because I think it sounds more or less like /e/, but it is in fact very different.

Consonants can be even harder to get right, if you can't relate them to something.
Example: the /ɕ/ is a "voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative" and is used in some languages. How to produce it:
wikipedia wrote:- the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth in the area behind the alveolar ridge (the gum line).
- tongue shape is laminal, meaning that it is the tongue blade that contacts the roof of the mouth.
- the middle of the tongue is bowed and raised towards the hard palate.

I don't know about you, but I couldn't learn a sound based on this description. I understood this sound only after learning that it's very similar to a sound that exists in Norwegian: /ç/ normally written "kj". By the way, the /ç/ is a rare sound in the world and some say that it's disappearing from Norwegian. Most young people can't pronounce it.
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