[HN Gopher] The Vowel Space [video]
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The Vowel Space [video]
Author : gus_massa
Score : 74 points
Date : 2023-04-25 14:38 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| pohl wrote:
| I have sometimes wondered if a poet or lyricist could use the
| maps of how consonants and vowels are laid out to compose under
| some constraints, so that the sounds danced around the mouth in
| some deliberate way, and what that might sound like.
| resters wrote:
| GPT-4 could probably do a pretty decent job of this.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Seems completely feasible.
|
| Somewhat related: In the 30s Gilbert Adair wrote a novel in
| French without using the letter e. It was translated under the
| same constraint into English, in which it's called A Void.
|
| He was part of a group of artists who reveled in putting
| strange constraints on their work. They have a name but I can't
| remember what.
| ucarion wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo
| totetsu wrote:
| This tool is a fun way to play with vowels sounds and mouth
| position. https://dood.al/pinktrombone/
|
| And here is a mechanical vocal tract robot.
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HmSYnOvEueo
| acadapter wrote:
| The "sbeech" video that Geoff Lindsey did is really interesting:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U37hX8NPgjQ
| meeuwer wrote:
| Appreciated this video too.
|
| It helps one understand that the lenis/fortis opposition is
| broader and arguably more useful than the voiced/unvoiced one
| even in English.
| akavi wrote:
| The revelation that I could generate a vowel that sounded awful
| close to /y/ with unrounded lips by centralizing /u/ slightly is
| blowing my mind...
| jihadjihad wrote:
| In French class I was taught that /y/ can be made simply by
| doing /i/ while the lips are fully rounded.
| meepmorp wrote:
| /y/ is the rounded version /i/, so that makes sense
| akavi wrote:
| Right, that's the canonical way to produce the vowel.
|
| But what the video explains is the fact that the _rounding_
| is actually less fundamental than the length of the
| resonating tract. It means that you can keep your lips
| _unrounded_ and produce a vowel _very, very_ similar to the
| canonical /y/
|
| Edit: I made a typo in my original comment, I meant to say
| "by centralizing /i/ slightly" (not "/u/")
| int_19h wrote:
| This is why it's pretty hard to distinguish [y] from [u]
| and [i] from [W]. Indeed, as I understand, in many cases
| the distinction is strictly phonemic, not phonetic.
| vinc wrote:
| The video has a link to the following page where you can listen
| to the sounds of the vowels on the chart at the bottom:
| https://www.englishspeechservices.com/blog/the-vowel-space/
| mcswell wrote:
| And this is how Henry Higgins listened to vowel sounds a
| century ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN0wXFN0GO0
|
| (Well, he would have, had he been real.)
| totetsu wrote:
| He talks about making a set of references values for vowels in
| this video. This is something I had thought of too in the past,
| but limited in scope of teaching English to Japanese native
| speakers. It struck me that instead of teaching to target
| prononciations of words using the whole vowel space of american
| or British English, which has some differences that are hard to
| understand for native Japanese speakers, a vowel space could be
| made that was optimized listener understandability, but having
| enough differentiation of sounds, and ease of articulation.
| svat wrote:
| I ran into some videos on this channel (Dr Geoff Lindsey) a few
| weeks ago, and they are really good IMO. If you glance at the
| video thumbnails they appear like low-quality clickbait, but the
| content inside is solid linguistics and very informative.
|
| Examples:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt66Je3o0Qg ('"Schwa is never
| stressed" - FALSE')
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaXYas58_kc (Weak forms)
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfCsiF80TX0 (Iambic pentameter
| with the Pink Panther)
| seanalltogether wrote:
| The lack of unique letters to describe the wide array of vowels
| seems like a failure of the Latin alphabet. Diacritics just
| aren't as good as clear and unique letters. Maybe there just isnt
| enough design space left to create more unique glyphs but it sure
| would be nice.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Related, a matrix with playable audio of all the vowels:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio
| broof wrote:
| His video was mainly about how that chart is inaccurate and
| outdated. For example, 12:50 in the video. From what I
| understood, one of the main downsides of the chart is it
| focuses on tongue position, but not lip position. There are
| different vowel sounds that have identical tongue positions but
| different lip positions.
| meepmorp wrote:
| The IPA vowel chart does show lip rounding - the positions in
| the chart have pairs of vowels, the first is unrounded (e.g.
| /i/) and the second rounded (e.g., /y/). And, tbh, it's a
| binary feature unlike tongue positioning.
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(page generated 2023-04-25 23:01 UTC)