BY CAROLINE STEURY
STAFF WRITER
Afternoon, everyone. Might I interest you in a linguistics lesson? Too bad. It’s really interesting to some people, trust me. If you, like me, enjoy going down weird Wikipedia rabbit holes, then this is the article for you. After all, it’s about learning languages–the REALLY hard way.
To start, this article discusses the basics of using an IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet Chart). The gist of the chart is to model all the different ways a human can manipulate their tongue, teeth, larynx, and breath to make sounds.
So, what exactly do the charts represent? There are actually several different charts for pulmonic consonants, non-pulmonic consonants, vowels, and diacritics. I will only be covering consonants and vowels for now. Happy reading!
Pulmonic consonants are the ones we speak in English–all of them are caused by air going out of the lungs, rather than into our lungs or in clicks. They’re written on the top of the chart, from left to right, as bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, postalveolar, RETROFLEX, UVULAR, PHARYNGEAL, and glottal. The capitalized sections are ones that do not exist in English.
So what are these scary names? It’s simple. They’re just the types of consonants made, starting at bilabial at the very front of your mouth, to glottal at the very back of your mouth. Try saying these consonants in order to see what I mean: p, b, t, d, k, g. Those are the hard plosive consonants!
On the right column, there are the types of consonants that, as far as I can tell, tell you how to restrict air flowing out of your mouth with your tongue. Plosives have no interference with the tongue in the front, but as your tongue rises to meet the t, d, k, and g sounds, less air gets through. So, we’ve got plosive, nasal, trill, tap or flap, fricative, lateral fricative, approximant, and lateral approximant. I truly wish I could explain what it meant, but I can’t. I have no idea. I think it has something to do with which side of the mouth the air is escaping through. Fricatives are formed at the center of the mouth; that’s all I know.
Moving on to non-pulmonic consonants! The fun ones, if you will. These are mainly clicks, voiced implosives (made by drawing air into your mouth and producing sound), or ejectives. They’re very hard to explain, and they’re hard for English speakers like me to form. A large number of indigenous languages from the Americas use these consonants, that’s really all the information you need. For more information, look them up online!
Now, vowels. Nice and simple, except there are also a lot of them. To summarize: open vowels are easy, as there’s hardly anything stopping them like the teeth or tongue, like the long Aa in ark. Mid-open vowels, on the other hand, are a touch deeper in the throat, somewhere between a schwa (that upside-down e thingy) and an Ae sound. Mid-closed vowels are, ah, tricky to figure out if you’re not using a dictionary or context. If I truly dove into everything on this chart, we’d be here until spring, so I’ll wrap this up briefly–closed vowels are in the back of the throat, like I and U sounds. There is a front, center, and back side of the chart, for tighter I-sounds and U-sounds in the back of your throat.
Okay, we’re done. Thank you for at least skimming over my article. Happy language learning!
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet