"Pronouncing difficult sounds" thread.

[Space60]

A thread to discuss how to pronounce various speech sounds one might have difficulty with, like alveolar trills.

[Ryan of Tinellb]

...alveolar trolls...

These trolls are under the bridge of the nose.

[Linguoboy]

The thread title doesn't really express what the subject of the thread is. I would go with something like "Hard-to-pronounce sounds" or "Pronouncing difficult sounds". "'How do you pronounce X sound' thread' makes it sound like it's for discussion of our idiolectal realisations of particular phonemes.

[Xwtek]

How do you pronounce:

1. Ejective fricative, (Not ejective affricate or ejective stop, I can already pronounce that)
2. Pharyngeal consonant

[Pabappa]

For ejective /s/ i imitate a garden hose with a kink in it. For the voiced pharyngeal approximant I try to say /z/ without moving my tongue.

Not the most professional methods but for me at least I'm pretty sure I'm saying the right sounds.

Although I would say that ejective fricatives are functionally the same as ejective stops and that I feel myself doing the same thing in both. I actually learned /s_>/ first and the stops later.

[alice]

A good old chestnut: Czech <ř>.

[Vijay]

I swear some native speakers sound like they just pronounce that [rʒ].

[Moose-tache]

I have a major pet peeve about IALs and “difficult sounds.”

A very common criticism of any language meant to serve as an international standard is that they contain sounds that do not exist in every other language, and would therefore be unusable. The conlang critic youtube channel literally goes down a list of languages, in order of number of speakers, and if they find a language that does not contain every phoneme in the IAL, the IAL is declared a failure. Discussions on this board and the CBB have gone in similar directions, lambasting conlangs for having such exotic noises as /l/ and /y/.

This is ridiculous. People, by the billions, learn languages that do not have the same phonemes as their L1. When they encounter a sound that is difficult to make, they do one of two things. Either they pull up their big-girl trousers and learn to pronounce it correctly, or they just give up and say it wrong. Either way there are no consequences. A Japanese speaker of English with perfect grammar and vocabulary is not going to struggle to be understood just because they merge R and L, nor would the challenge of learning to pronounce the sounds correctly cause them to give up learning English. Conversely, the people who throw up their hands and say “Mandarin is impossible; the same word can have four meanings!” are not people who can be persuaded to learn a second language, tonal or otherwise.

[Ares Land]

Agreed. And that's mistaking phonology for phonemic inventory. Languages with minimal inventories can have insane amounts of allophony. Long polysyllabic roots could be a pain to memorize.
(If I may plug my own work, you can go check the Passol thread for what IMO could be a reasonable compromise - though I stole a lot of ideas from Justin B. Rye's critique of Esperanto).

[Xwtek]

How do you pronounce /æ/? (Note that English is not my native language.)

[bradrn]

How do you pronounce /æ/? (Note that English is not my native language.)

Start with a plain /a/, then raise your tongue a bit.

Small tip: On its pages for phonemes, Wikipedia has audio samples — here’s the page for /æ/. There’s also http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/, which has audio samples of ‘over 200 languages’ with phonetic transcriptions. I’ve found both resources incredibly useful for learning how to pronounce sounds.

(I also note that from your ZBB Census post, you natively speak Indonesian and Javanese. I don’t know much about either, but it seems that both contain /ɛ/; you can get /æ/ from that by moving your tongue down a bit. As a native English speaker, my impression is that /æ/ is midway between /a/ and /ɛ/.)

[Ryan of Tinellb]

How are the fricatives in Basque/Euskara pronounced? Or, which of <s> and <z> is most similar to the <s> in your English idiolect?

[MacAnDàil]

I would add that AFAICT most varieties of English do not in fact pronounce [æ] but [a]. The phonetics lab archive seems intresting though; I'll go on when I'm on a more advanced computer.

[bradrn]

I would add that AFAICT most varieties of English do not in fact pronounce [æ] but [a].

Do you have a source? That doesn’t sound quite right to me… If anything, I would think /æ/ would end up as /ɛ/ or /e/.

The phonetics lab archive seems intresting though; I'll go on when I'm on a more advanced computer.

It is indeed very interesting! I use it particularly when I want to know how a phoneme sounds in context. It’s all very well being able to pronounce a pure /kʼ/ or /ʌ/ or /ǃ/, but how are they pronounced in context, in a word, in a natlang, by a native speaker? I find the archive helps a lotwith that sort of thing. For instance, right now I’m looking at a ǃXóõ story, and I’ve noticed that the clicks blend into the surrounding word surprisingly well; when I try pronouncing them, they stand out a lot.

[Travis B.]

I would add that AFAICT most varieties of English do not in fact pronounce [æ] but [a]. The phonetics lab archive seems intresting though; I'll go on when I'm on a more advanced computer.

What counts as "most varieties of English"? I have seen this claim made before about EngE, but I have never heard it made about NAE or AusE.

And what do you have for [a] anyways? (Are you literally treating it as a low front vowel, as opposed to the low central vowel everyone uses it for?) I have [a] for PALM, yet the vowel I have for it is lower and more central than the vowel most Americans have in TRAP.

[MacAnDàil]

Well, [a] in the IPA chart is certainly placed as a low front vowel.

I checked it up and it turns out I was wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internati ... h_dialects. I had thought that GA had [a] and I thought this was more common Canadian and irish English as well.

[Linguoboy]

I checked it up and it turns out I was wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internati ... h_dialects. I had thought that GA had [a] and I thought this was more common Canadian and irish English as well.

[a] is rather common in Chicago--in PALM and LOT words. (That's actually how I learned for use in other languages.)

[Travis B.]

I checked it up and it turns out I was wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internati ... h_dialects. I had thought that GA had [a] and I thought this was more common Canadian and irish English as well.

[a] is rather common in Chicago--in PALM and LOT words. (That's actually how I learned for use in other languages.)

Same here; my typical foreign <a> as in how I pronounce German, Spanish, or Italian /a/ is the same as my native Milwaukeean PALM/LOT.

[Linguoboy]

I checked it up and it turns out I was wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internati ... h_dialects. I had thought that GA had [a] and I thought this was more common Canadian and irish English as well.

[a] is rather common in Chicago--in PALM and LOT words. (That's actually how I learned for use in other languages.)

Same here; my typical foreign <a> as in how I pronounce German, Spanish, or Italian /a/ is the same as my native Milwaukeean PALM/LOT.

Plus I based my pronunciation of the Munster Irish diphthong /ia/ (which contrasts with /iə/) on the broad Chicago pronunciation of /æ/. (That was definitely an aha-moment.)

[anteallach]

I would add that AFAICT most varieties of English do not in fact pronounce [æ] but [a]. The phonetics lab archive seems intresting though; I'll go on when I'm on a more advanced computer.

What counts as "most varieties of English"? I have seen this claim made before about EngE, but I have never heard it made about NAE or AusE.

And what do you have for [a] anyways? (Are you literally treating it as a low front vowel, as opposed to the low central vowel everyone uses it for?) I have [a] for PALM, yet the vowel I have for it is lower and more central than the vowel most Americans have in TRAP.

[a] is found in TRAP words (except before nasals) in North American dialects with the Canadian and Californian shifts. These dialects are generally those which have PALM and LOT merged with THOUGHT as a definitely back vowel.

It is apparently also a feature of the dialect of Providence, Rhode Island.