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Phonemic awareness: transcriptions | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4620 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 33 of 37 23 October 2012 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I'm sorry I don't know what "phonemic opposition" means, unless you mean that it contradicts the obvious reading of the standard orthography. About the phonemic inventory, it seems we have a bit of a bootstrap problem here: where does one start, knowing nothing (or very little) about the language? In what language will this inventory be couched? Taking Danish as an example, since I have a book handy - TYS - maybe not the acme of courses, but they seem to be regarded as reasonable basic linguistic workhorses to get going on, even by the Prof. For the consonants, it's full of things like "b" as in "bed", "d" like "dog" (with an additional slightly worrying paragraph about the exceptions to that) - interesting, only 2 letters are said to be "identical" to English (m and n) but it doesn't expand on the identical-ness of 2 letters, and only the "like-ness" of the others. For dipthongs, it lists them by sound: sound "ai", as in "fine", example "mig" (me) "au" as in "how", example "hav" (sea) It doesn't tell me what to do with the "v" "eu" like "eu" in the Spanish word "Euro", but example "peber" (pepper) a bit more closed. It doesn't tell me what to do with the "b" ... although on the consonant page, one of the examples is "købe" (buy), and since this is on the same line as "b" as in "bed", I would assume this and other & nbsp; medial "b"s should be pronounced, but I'm guessing it shouldn't be in "peber", but it's all far from &n bsp; clear. Short of IPA (possibly slightly simplified) I don't see how it could be clearer though.
OK, that makes a lot of sense. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Victor Berrjod Diglot Groupie Norway no.vvb.no/ Joined 4901 days ago 62 posts - 110 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese, Korean, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 34 of 37 23 October 2012 at 7:18pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
They don't work so well on computers, sadly. It helps if the symbol doesn't stick anything down, though. We could transcribe Norwegian <u> as [ʉ̘], <y> as [ʏ̜], at least when they are short.
Indeed, there are many different degrees, too. You can basically make it as broad or narrow as you want. Let me illustrate with the sentence <eg vil bare heim>, which means "I just want to go home", as pronounced by me just now: Very narrow: [ɛ ˈʋɪ́l̠ ˈbɑ̘̀ːʁə̆ ˈɦǽ̝ɪ̯m] Less narrow: [ɛ ˈʋɪ́l ˈbɑ̀ːʁə ˈhǽɪ̯m] Phonemic: /æ ˈʋíl ˈbɑ̀ːʁe hǽi̯m/ Idealized phonemic: /æɡ ˈʋíl ˈbɑ̀ːʁe ˈhǽi̯m/ Practical phonemic: /æ 'víl 'bà:re ˈhǽim/ It's possible to add all kinds of diacritics, but unless they distinguish different phonemes, it's not really useful. Especially on a computer. The less narrow phonetic transcription (the ones in brackets are phonetic) is the one I usually use to show the sounds without complicating things for the sake of it. The first phonemic one is more or less a standard phonemic transcription. My idealized one shows the <g>, which disappeared in this running speech utterance. The last one uses as many symbols as possible that are found on normal keyboards instead of the more technically correct IPA symbols. It's normal practice to use /r/ instead of /ʁ/ and /a/ instead of /ɑ/, because they don't contrast, so it's more practical to use the most easily accessed ones. Edit: I see the tone marks jump all over the place... They're supposed to be on i, a, and æ.
I agree. I don't think Danish dictionaries contain transcriptions, like English ones tend to. At least Norwegian ones don't. Many of my Chinese friends would've had a much easier time if there were. I'm considering making a list of a few thousand words with phonemic transcriptions, but then again, it's obvious how to read Norwegian words most of the time.
Yes and all of them. You'd find where the vowel begins and ends in the recording, mark the area, and get the value of formant 1 (by pressing F1) and 2 (F2). In Excel, you would then put them into a coordinate system where the x-axis corresponds to the F2 value and the y-axis to the F1 value. You would take all the relevant vowels and put them into this coordinate system. If the language distinguishes long and short vowels, you should include both. The result will resemble the IPA vowel figure (which is of course idealized; your mouth is much less square!). Formant values can vary a lot from one speaker to another, but this should give you an idea of what to aim for. With Praat, you can also check tones and consonants. I use it mostly for studying tones, because that's all my crappy equipment is good for.
Consonants are a bit more difficult to study than vowels, but I find they are usually easier to reproduce when you do discover how to make them. I usually follow Ladefoged's advice and try to reproduce the sound I think I'm hearing until a native accepts it, but the danger is that natives may get bored with your attempts and just accept an inaccurate pronunciation. You could try finding linguistic studies of the relevant language to help you.
You're spot on. My microphone is not very good, so I can't use it for very detailed studies of much other than tones, which it picks up just fine for some reason. Even the legendary recording of Daniel Jones's cardinal vowels is better than my microphone (so I actually made a coordinate system with the unrounded ones; maybe I'll do the rounded ones too). If you have high-quality recordings, you will probably get much better results. Edited by Victor Berrjod on 23 October 2012 at 7:21pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6495 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 35 of 37 23 October 2012 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Phonemes are like the 'letters' of pronunciation, and sometimes the two systems are parallel, sometimes not. But the definition of phonemes doesn't depend on writing. Instead it is based on 'phonematic oppositions': if you can find two words with different meanings which differ in one and only one sound, then you have an opposition. And then the two sounds which differ represent two different phonemes. If you can't find such word pairs then the two sounds represent one phoneme, even though they don't sound the same.
There is a language somewhere in the Kaukasus called Kabardian) which sounds like it has two or three different vowels (some say four). But it has been claimed (by Aert Kuipers) that each sound variant is tied to a certain set of surroundings and apart from loanwords you can't find words that differ by just having different vowels. If this was/is true then there would only be ONE single vowel phoneme in Kabardian. However the data behind this claim have been questioned and other sources accept two, maybe three vowels in Kabardian. And then there are other candidates for the language with the fewest vowels. But the discussion in itself illustrates that phonemes are defined by semantic oppositions - not by the sounds in themselves.
The idea is simply that you will be told if there is a phonemic opposition somewhere in your target language, because that means that there are at least two words which only differ by that opposition ... and you'd better learn to separate the resulting phonemes. And any decent textbook or grammar will point out that there is something you need to be aware of. Btw: "Nudansk Ordbog" has pronunciation directives - but it is a monolingual dictionary, and the latest editions have unfortunately dropped the etymological explanations. Edited by Iversen on 25 October 2012 at 2:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Victor Berrjod Diglot Groupie Norway no.vvb.no/ Joined 4901 days ago 62 posts - 110 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese, Korean, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 36 of 37 24 October 2012 at 5:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I take it you mean something like this one: http://ordnet.dk/ddo/ ? It looks like a wonderful resource, and it even has audio! Not all entries have pronunciation information, but I think the ones that don't have it are compounds and phrases. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6495 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 37 of 37 25 October 2012 at 2:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Actually the homepage of Nudansk ordbog is www.ordbogen.com/products/politiken/nudansk-ordbog.php, which in principle cost money, but it seems you can use it one year for free. And the online version has both pronunciation and etymologies. I didn't know that because I never have used that homepage before.
So http://ordnet.dk/ddo/ is a different product, but I have used it and also recommended i here at HTLAL in an old thread somewhere. Edited by Iversen on 29 October 2012 at 3:54pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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