Why these English phonetic symbols are all WRONG

What people said

Strong rec tchrist · 2022-09 · English Language & Usage Stack Exchange · on “The AIR and EAR Sounds”

I must recommend this professor's video [this video] , with the small caveat that "linking R" or "controlled by R" makes no sense except in dialects that drop their Rs otherwise.

Recommends tchrist · 2022-11 · English Language & Usage Stack Exchange · on “How Many Diphthongs Are There In English?”

@DanSheppard There is no [əʊ] vowel in North American English. Except when alone at the end of a word, the *goat* vowel [ow] is often a plain monophthong [o] here the way it is in Scottish English, and most of us have the same vowel in *soul*. Certainly we all have the same abstract phoneme from the GOAT lexical set. But some have pre-L breaking and produce ['sowəɫ] for *soul* instead, something which often sounds like it has two syllables for those of us who don’t have that accent. You might enjoy this [this video] .

Recommends Graham H. · 2022-12 · English Language & Usage Stack Exchange · on “Are /t, p, k/ aspirated when they are at the start of a syllable after another syllable that ends in /s/?”

I think Dr. Geoff Lindsey's video on the subject will be of use: [LINK] Essentially, the answer to your question depends whether a person is treating the two syllables as separate morphemes, and if the second syllable is stressed. If the answers to both questions are yes, the plosive may be aspirated. However, in the majority of situations, the plosives written orthographically as ⟨p⟩, ⟨t⟩, and ⟨k⟩ are realized identically to the phonemes /b/, /d/, and /g/ when following /s/. We should be willing to revise the transcription system to be more accurate. I will be transcribing for a General American accent below, since it's my accent and the one I know best. Thus: skill - /sgɪl/ star - /sdɒɹ/ (

Recommends tchrist · 2022-12 · English Language & Usage Stack Exchange · on “Why are long e and o most prone to be diphthongised by English speakers?”

@JohnLawler I wonder if you could please post an answer for us. It doesn't have to be long and involved, just the basics like you've already outlined in comments. Your point that it’s not just [ej] and [ow] but ***all*** the tense vowels that have semi-consonantal off-glides ***including*** [ij] and [uw] is an important one. Why this key point is so often lost or omitted from most such presentations, I have no idea. It explains pre-L/R breaking and much more [this video] . I'd really love to see this question answered.

Recommends tchrist · 2022-12 · English Language & Usage Stack Exchange · on “Why are long e and o most prone to be diphthongised by English speakers?”

@CannedMan This video of Dr Geoff Lindsey's about how we write and say the English "long" vowels might help [this video] . It explains that the way we these days most often write these "consonantal diphthongs" (vowel + semi-consonant) is extremely misleading and confusing, and that we **used** to write them more clearly. I think this is part of the picture that now seems so confusing . [LINK]

Recommends alphabet · 2023-10 · English Language & Usage Stack Exchange · on “Pronunciation of w at the end of a word - and what does ʊ mean?”

What does ʊ mean? In those examples, like /ʃəʊ/ and /ʃoʊ/, the correct answer is nothing. If you look at the pronunciation guides from your favorite dictionary, say Cambridge [LINK] or OxfordLD [LINK] or Dictionary.com [LINK] , they only describe /əʊ/ and /oʊ/ as single units, representing the vowel in words like "goat." They also use /ʊ/ on its own to represent the vowel in words like "put." But the "ʊ" in /oʊ/ has no independent meaning of its own. So why do they use two letters to represent a single vowel? The answer is that most speakers, in most contexts, pronounce /oʊ/ as a diphthong. The use of the symbol "ʊ" to represent the second half of that diphthong is arguably misleading; I'll

Cites tchrist · 2022-11 · English Language & Usage Stack Exchange · on “Why is ‘Gentiles’ considered a two-syllable word?”

If you are hearing gentiles with three syllables, that matches how you hear denials with three syllables. The spelling doesn’t matter, of course. What’s happening is that in many accents, the /l/ following that diphthong has an epenthetic schwa inserted right before it: [ˈd͡ʒɛntɑjəlz]. So you hear it as having three syllables: [d͡ʒɛn] [tɑ] [jəlz] In other accents the diphthong can even be smoothed into a monophthong, [ˈd͡ʒɛntɐɫz], which means you now have one syllable less there without the [jə] part. You can also find accents where the /l/ is weakened into a semivowel /w/ under L-vocalization [LINK] , producing [ˈd͡ʒɛntɐwz]. Accents where you sometimes hear gentiles pronounced with two syll

Cites tchrist · 2022-11 · English Language & Usage Stack Exchange · on “Why is ‘Gentiles’ considered a two-syllable word?”

@PhilSweet Saying *teal* as ['tʰɪjəɫ], *tile* as ['tʰɐ̝jəɫ], or *tail* as ['tʰɛjəɫ] is called ***pre-L breaking*** [LINK] , and it is not unique to AmE: this video shows it happening [this video] in British versions as well. That said, Southern AmE has more vowel breaking [LINK] than many accents do. Yet they also like to smooth classic diphthongs into monophthongs like *tile* as *tall*, just as you often find in SSBE.

Cites alphabet · 2023-09 · English Language & Usage Stack Exchange · on “Syllable count for apparent monosyllabic words like "child," "wild," and field"”

This confusion is the result of a phenomenon called pre-L breaking, for which I must once again cite a Geoff Lindsey video. [this video] Essentially, when a vowel sound ending in a glide occurs before an /l/ in the same syllable, an extra /ə/ is often inserted before it, turning wild from /wɑjld/ into /wɑjəld/. This explains the possible appearance of an extra syllable when some speakers pronounce such words. (See the aforementioned video for the reason I'm transcribing that vowel with a /j/ instead of a /ɪ/.) This paper by Jánosy [LINK] goes into a bit more detail. Pre-L breaking typically occurs before "dark" /l/ (an /l/ realized as [ɫ]); for this reason, it can occur in a wider range of enviro

Cites alphabet · 2023-09 · English Language & Usage Stack Exchange · on “How is the word "coir" pronounced: like /kɔɪɹ/ /kɔɪɚ/ or /kɔɪjɚ/?”

The difference between /kɔɪɚ/ and /kɔɪjɚ/ is purely one of notation. /ɔɪ/ already ends in a glide, though this becomes much more prominent when it precedes another vowel sound; Geoff Lindsey [this video] covers how this explains the ability of /ɔɪ/ to occur before another vowel without creating hiatus. Dictionaries seem to disagree about whether this is pronounced as a single syllable /kɔɪɹ/ or as two syllables /kɔɪ.ɚ/; Dictionary.com [LINK] provides the former but OxfordLD [LINK] provides the latter. I suspect that both are found but that /kɔɪ.ɚ/ is more common, as your investigation on YouTube shows.