# Affricates [transcription in IPA]



## Ben Jamin

For Polish speakers the very idea of affricates as consisting of two separate sounds is completely incomprehensible. Polish has a number of consonants for example *c* (IPA t͡s) and *cz* (IPA t͡ʃ, Czech *č*) perceived by Polish speakers as ordinary, unitary plosives. They are in phonemic contrast to ts (t+s) and trz (t + ʃ). The distinction is preserved in careful speech, and merging them is regarded as vulgar and uneducated.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Ben Jamin said:


> For Polish speakers the very idea of fricatives as consisting of two separate sounds is completely incomprehensible. Polish has a number of consonants for example *c* (IPA t͡s) and *cz* (IPA t͡ʃ, Czech *č*) perceived by Polish speakers as ordinary, unitary plosives. They are in phonemic contrast to ts (t+s) and trz (t + ʃ). The distinction is preserved in careful speech, and merging them is regarded as vulgar and uneducated.



Are there dialects in Polish that have these possibilities:
a) pronunciation of cz and ć is the same as in Standard Polish
b) only ć is realized no matter if it's written as cz or ć
c) only cz is realized no matter if it's written as cz or ć
d) pronunciation of cz an ć differs a lot from Standard Polish


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## Ben Jamin

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Are there dialects in Polish that have these possibilities:
> a) pronunciation of cz and ć is the same as in Standard Polish
> b) only ć is realized no matter if it's written as cz or ć
> c) only cz is realized no matter if it's written as cz or ć
> d) pronunciation of cz an ć differs a lot from Standard Polish


As far as I know most Polish dialects uses the alternative a). I haven't heard of any Polish dialect merging those two phonemes, so the alternative d) is probably not an option. Poland has, however a minority language called Kashubian, where *ć* does not exist and uses consistently *c* instead.


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## Hulalessar

Ben Jamin said:


> For Polish speakers the very idea of affricates as consisting of two separate sounds is completely incomprehensible.



I think that that is probably the case for speakers of all languages with affricates. I doubt many native English speakers with no knowledge of phonetics think of the initial sound in _jam_ as anything other than a single consonant not least because it is represented by a single grapheme. They will also think of the initial sound in _chat _as a single consonant even though it is represented by two graphemes. On the other hand, unlike a native Russian speaker, they will not think of /ts/ as a single sound because of the phonology/phonotactics of English.

Linguists do not agree how affricates should be analysed. In part it depends on whether the question is approached from a phonetic or phonological angle. The best you can say about an affricate is that it is something which starts as if it is going to be one thing but ends as another. Analysing the initial sound in _chat_ as /t͡ʃ/, that is a plosive followed by a fricative, seems to work, but the same sequence is found in the middle of _hotshot _which is felt to be qualitatively different and not even a consonant cluster. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to ask if there is any justification in designating some sequences affricates and some consonant clusters. We tend to think of phonemes as some sort of minimal unit of speech, but spectrographic analysis has shown that a sound which may be perceived consciously as a phoneme will vary according to what comes before and after it. Speech is continuous and any division of it is arbitrary, though that is by no means to say that the concept of the phoneme is not useful.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> Analysing the initial sound in _chat_ as /t͡ʃ/, that is a plosive followed by a fricative, seems to work, but the same sequence is found in the middle of _hotshot _which is felt to be qualitatively different and not even a consonant cluster.


Not only "felt". There are minimum pairs that rely on this difference being audible, like _dual core chip_ and _dual courtship_.


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## elroy

berndf said:


> There are minimum pairs that rely on this difference being audible, like _dual core chip_ and _dual courtship_.


 Those two don’t have the same stress, so they’re distinguishable anyway.  Are there examples where the stress is the same?


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## berndf

elroy said:


> Those two don’t have the same stress...


Do they? _Dual *core* chip_ and _dual *court*ship_. How else would you pronounce it?


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## elroy

dual core *chip*
dual *court*ship


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## Ben Jamin

Hulalessar said:


> I think that that is probably the case for speakers of all languages with affricates. I doubt many native English speakers with no knowledge of phonetics think of the initial sound in _jam_ as anything other than a single consonant not least because it is represented by a single grapheme. They will also think of the initial sound in _chat _as a single consonant even though it is represented by two graphemes. On the other hand, unlike a native Russian speaker, they will not think of /ts/ as a single sound because of the phonology/phonotactics of English.
> 
> Linguists do not agree how affricates should be analysed. In part it depends on whether the question is approached from a phonetic or phonological angle. The best you can say about an affricate is that it is something which starts as if it is going to be one thing but ends as another. Analysing the initial sound in _chat_ as /t͡ʃ/, that is a plosive followed by a fricative, seems to work, but the same sequence is found in the middle of _hotshot _which is felt to be qualitatively different and not even a consonant cluster. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to ask if there is any justification in designating some sequences affricates and some consonant clusters. We tend to think of phonemes as some sort of minimal unit of speech, but spectrographic analysis has shown that a sound which may be perceived consciously as a phoneme will vary according to what comes before and after it. Speech is continuous and any division of it is arbitrary, though that is by no means to say that the concept of the phoneme is not useful.


In my opinion the IPA notation is misleading for users that don't have particular "affricates" in their mother tongue, and are not familiar with the correct pronunciation of them. Let's take for example the consonant which exists in all Slavic languages, German, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian and Greek, and represented in IPA as *t͡s*. A French, English, Spanish, Finnish or Swedish learner will then have an inclination to pronounce it as "t+s", and produce words like pit-sa, t-sar, t-sahn, pint-ser, rot-si, and the like.


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## berndf

As for _pizza_, the correct pronunciation in Italian is /'pit.t͡sa/ (a long [t͡s] is [tt͡s]). The de-composition does make sense but the it needs to be annotated as a joint phoneme and so it is. BTW, are you aware of any language that maintains a phonemically significant difference the between [t͡s] and [ts] within a syllable? I don't.


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## Hulalessar

Ben Jamin said:


> In my opinion the IPA notation is misleading for users that don't have particular "affricates" in their mother tongue, and are not familiar with the correct pronunciation of them. Let's take for example the consonant which exists in all Slavic languages, German, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian and Greek, and represented in IPA as *t͡s*. A French, English, Spanish, Finnish or Swedish learner will then have an inclination to pronounce it as "t+s", and produce words like pit-sa, t-sar, t-sahn, pint-ser, rot-si, and the like.



The IPA is a pretty good practical system and enables both broad phonological and narrow phonetic transcriptions according to what is needed. There are some ultra precise systems but they are hopelessly impractical for general language teaching. In one system what in the IPA is /n̩/ is:

_M_aIlDe_C_VoeIpvnnAP_p_a_a_t_d_tl_t_n_r_ansnsfS_p_v_a_v_d_tlv_t_n_r_anss_s_fT_p_g_a_g_d_tlwv_t_itv_r_ansn_s_f_S_rp_F_Ss​
The IPA allows a distinction to be made between /ts/ and /t͡s/ if desired. The difference is probably going to depend on whether the analysis is phonetic or phonological. The sound at the end of <cats> is going to transcribed as /ts/ in a phonological analysis because it is influenced by the phonotactics and grammar of English.

Even if the IPA does not feature in a German course a French, English, Spanish, Finnish or Swedish learner still needs to know what <z> represents and is going to be told that it is a <t> followed by an <s>. That leaves you with the same scope for misunderstanding - which a teacher will correct so that with practice the learner will hopefully eventually get it right. Language learning is full of these difficulties.  Pronouncing <cats> will be tricky for the native speakers of a language which does not allow final consonants or consonant clusters.


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## Ben Jamin

Hulalessar said:


> Even if the IPA does not feature in a German course a French, English, Spanish, Finnish or Swedish learner still needs to know what <z> represents and is *going to be told that it is a <t> followed by an <s>*. That leaves you with the same scope for misunderstanding - which a teacher will correct so that with practice the learner will hopefully eventually get it right. Language learning is full of these difficulties.  Pronouncing <cats> will be tricky for the native speakers of a language which does not allow final consonants or consonant clusters.


I don't understand what you mean by the part of the text marked by bold script.


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## Red Arrow

Most Flemish students pronounce German z as [z], so this topic feels like nitpicking 

Is it possible that I can only say the affticate /t͡s/ and am unable to say /ts/? How to know? Is Dutch fiets [fit͡s] or [fits]? It feels like one consonant with just one place of articulation. What about Dutch pizza, [pid͡za] or [pidza]? (It is the only word I know with dz. Strange that we don't say /t͡s/)


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## Hulalessar

Ben Jamin said:


> I don't understand what you mean by the part of the text marked by bold script.



When teaching the sounds of a language to a beginner you have to come up with a way of explaining or demonstrating sounds which do not exist in the beginner's native language or a language he knows. The easiest way to explain German <z> to a native English speaker is to say something like: _It is a "tee" quickly followed by an "ess"._


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## AndrasBP

Do German speakers perceive the affricates /ts/ and /pf/ differently?
I wonder if the spelling influences them so they would say that "*Z*ug" has three sounds but "*Pf*ad" has four. 
Is that so?


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## berndf

No that makes no difference. But there is an oddity about the /p͡f/-affricate: It is native only in about 1/3 of the German speaking area and is a loan from Upper German in other parts (_Pferd_ is _Perd_ in the native dialects of the remaining 2/3). Where it is non-native it is virtually always de-affricated to /f/ except in the most over-articulate pronunciations (I.e. in non-dialectal speech, _Pferd_ is pronounced as if spelled _Ferd_ or _Verd_).


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> As for _pizza_, the correct pronunciation in Italian is /'pit.t͡sa/ (a long [t͡s] is [tt͡s]). The de-composition does make sense but the it needs to be annotated as a joint phoneme and so it is. BTW, are you aware of any language that maintains a phonemically significant difference the between [t͡s] and [ts] within a syllable? I don't.


I was wondering too if any language has minimum pairs distinguishing [t͡s] and [ts].  


AndrasBP said:


> Do German speakers perceive the affricates /ts/ and /pf/ differently?
> I wonder if the spelling influences them so they would say that "*Z*ug" has three sounds but "*Pf*ad" has four.
> Is that so?


I would doubt that.  It's like saying that English speaker view "th" and "sh" as two sounds.


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## Hulalessar

Red Arrow said:


> Is it possible that I can only say the affticate /t͡s/ and am unable to say /ts/? How to know? Is Dutch fiets [fit͡s] or [fits]? It feels like one consonant with just one place of articulation. What about Dutch pizza, [pid͡za] or [pidza]? (It is the only word I know with dz. Strange that we don't say /t͡s/)



/t͡s/ and /ts/ are essentially the same thing - or at least are perceived by most people to be the same thing. Which one you use is going to depend on either (a) whether your analysis is phonetic or phonological and/or (b) which language you are transcribing, (a) and (b) often being related.

For any particular language a phonological transcription can be influenced in part by the way it is written. That is partly because there can be an underlying assumption that the writing system has already made a correct phonological analysis.

How difficult it is to articulate any sound in a given position is very much influenced by the phonotactics of your mother tongue, that is the rules which set out how the sounds are ordered. English allows soe consonant clusters but not others


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## Red Arrow

Hulalessar said:


> /t͡s/ and /ts/ are essentially the same thing - or at least are perceived by most people to be the same thing.


But they are in phonemic contrast with each other in Polish, so there has to be some kind of difference?


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## berndf

Red Arrow said:


> But they are in phonemic contrast with each other in Polish, so there has to be some kind of difference?


Where?


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## Hulalessar

I lost my internet connection while writing post 18. Not quite sure how it came to be posted. Anyway, to conclude:

English allows some consonant clusters but not others. "Strengths" is not a problem for a Londoner, but is a nightmare for a Thai. On the other hand the Londoner will find Russian "mgla" tricky.


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## AndrasBP

berndf said:


> Where?


czy /t͡ʂɨ/ vs. trzy /tʂɨ/


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## berndf

AndrasBP said:


> czy /t͡ʂɨ/ vs. trzy /tʂɨ/


Right, the constrast is quite striking, even for someone not familiar with Polish.


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## Ben Jamin

Hulalessar said:


> When teaching the sounds of a language to a beginner you have to come up with a way of explaining or demonstrating sounds which do not exist in the beginner's native language or a language he knows. The easiest way to explain German <z> to a native English speaker is to say something like: _It is a "tee" quickly followed by an "ess"._


It is the easiest way, but it is wrong. The pupil will then continue to say "t-sug", "t-sahn", "zit-sen", and so on during all life. It is practically impossible to delete bad habits in pronunciation.


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## Ben Jamin

Red Arrow said:


> But they are in phonemic contrast with each other in Polish, so there has to be some kind of difference?


But there is a difference! The difference is not perceived by speakers of foreign languages that don't have the sound, just like most foreigners don't hear the difference between aspirated and unaspirated consonants in English, or between the English sh /ʃ/  sound and the /ʂ/ sound in their own language. The Scandinavians don't hear the difference between /w/ and /v/ in English, and between  /ʃ/  and /ʒ/ in French. Thence their pronunciation "Wery vell" in English and "Chaque Chirac" in French.


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## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> Right, the constrast is quite striking, even for someone not familiar with Polish.


I suppose that being a native German speaker you have no problem with distinguishing between Polish "c" and "ts", but it is not the case for people speaking other languages.


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> I suppose that being a native German speaker you have no problem with distinguishing between Polish "c" and "ts", but it is not the case for people speaking other languages.


For me as a German, Polish /ts/ sounds more like /ds/ while /t͡s/ sounds like our /t͡s/ (ignoring the difference between s, ʂ and ʃ for the purpose of this discussion).


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## Red Arrow

On Forvo, I also hear a slight difference between czy and trzy. I don't hear /d/ though, but the t is more clear in trzy. I am not able to reproduce this difference.


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## berndf

Red Arrow said:


> On Forvo, I also hear a slight difference between czy and trzy. I don't hear /d/ though, but the t is more clear in trzy. I am not able to reproduce this difference.


Wow, for me it is like day and night. In _trzy _I hardly perceive any stop at all, If I had to transcribe it without knowing what it is I might have written [ʃə].


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## merquiades

I have listened to both *czy* and *trzy* on forvo.  The two sound very different but I do not hear any /ts/ sounds in either of them.  I hear _/ʧɨ/ _and _/ʧɹɨ/_  or written out in English chy and chry.  The r-sound is for me key in distinguishing them.




Ben Jamin said:


> most foreigners don't hear the difference between aspirated and unaspirated consonants in English,


English speakers don't hear the aspiration or lack of aspiration in English or in other languages either.  When they learn foreign languages the difference has to be pointed out to them by a teacher.  It's not evident.


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> but I do not hear any /ts/


Here:


berndf said:


> ignoring the difference between s, ʂ and ʃ for the purpose of this discussion


They are certainly different sounds but in the specific context of this discussion, all sibilants behave essentially the same.


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## merquiades

I see.  The difference is in the (s, ʂ and ʃ), though I must admit it is an important one for me.  I believe Polish has all of them.

So if we disregard the sibilant and [ʧ] is rather the same as [ts] for Polish, then the r is pivotal.  I'd spell the second word tzry rather than trzy.


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> I see. The difference is in the (s, ʂ and ʃ), though I must admit it is an important one for me. I believe Polish has all of them.



I did not say the difference wasn't important but that any sibilant can be preceded by a stop and any sibilant can be part of affricant. When you say a certain difference does not matter in a specific discussion this doesn't mean there is no important difference in other contexts, just not in this specific context.

When I wrote /ts/, this was meant as a generic for _t_+any unvoiced sibilant.


merquiades said:


> [ʧ] is rather the same as [ts] for Polish


I did not mean to imply that they are the same in Polish. But only that the difference does not matter for our discussion.


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## Piotr_WRF

merquiades said:


> [...] then the r is pivotal. I'd spell the second word tzry rather than trzy.


Funny you hear a /r/ in there. There's no /r/ at all in _trzy_. <rz> is a digraph, pronounced [ʐ] on its own, but due to the voiceless <t> before it's devoiced in _trzy_, so as said above, the pronunciation is [tʂɨ].


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## Sobakus

merquiades said:


> I have listened to both *czy* and *trzy* on forvo.  The two sound very different but I do not hear any /ts/ sounds in either of them.  I hear _/ʧɨ/ _and _/ʧɹɨ/_  or written out in English chy and chry.  The r-sound is for me key in distinguishing them.


Then you understand the protest felt by those of us whose language has /t͡s/, when we read your:


Hulalessar said:


> /t͡s/ and /ts/ are essentially the same thing - or at least are perceived by most people to be the same thing.


Saying that /t͡s/ is essentially the same as /ts/ as exactly equivalent to saying that /t͡ʂ/ is the same as /tʂ/. When berndf says that s vs ʂ is immaterial, he means that we're talking about the difference between /t͡S/ and /tS/, where S = [s, ʂ, ʃ, ɕ...].

I'm probably being impolite (I hope not overly so) when I say I find it rather amusing how a person who's clearly linguistically informed can inadvertently confirm the exact phenomenon they're trying to deny. It shows how you can't trust any theoretical linguistic description whose author doesn't have a native-like subconscious understanding of the phenomenon. As soon as one's brain latches onto the phonetic input and successfully maps it onto a phonology by segmenting it into phonemes, it becomes entirely "unreasonable to ask if there is any justification in designating some sequences affricates and some consonant clusters".

The /r/ you hear in _trzy _is simply your brain mapping [ʂ] to the English phoneme /r/, since that is its allophone after /t/ in words like _tree_, especially prominent in British English with its stronger devoicing. With _czy_, it's probably the durational queues primarily that exclude this interpretation.


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## Ben Jamin

Sobakus said:


> Then you understand the protest felt by those of us whose language has /t͡s/, when we read your:
> 
> Saying that /t͡s/ is essentially the same as /ts/ as exactly equivalent to saying that /t͡ʂ/ is the same as /tʂ/. When berndf says that s vs ʂ is immaterial, he means that we're talking about the difference between /t͡S/ and /tS/, where S = [s, ʂ, ʃ, ɕ...].
> 
> I'm probably being impolite (I hope not overly so) when I say I find it rather amusing how a person who's clearly linguistically informed can inadvertently confirm the exact phenomenon they're trying to deny. It shows how you can't trust any theoretical linguistic description whose author doesn't have a native-like subconscious understanding of the phenomenon. As soon as one's brain latches onto the phonetic input and successfully maps it onto a phonology by segmenting it into phonemes, it becomes entirely "unreasonable to ask if there is any justification in designating some sequences affricates and some consonant clusters".
> 
> The /r/ you hear in _trzy _is simply your brain mapping [ʂ] to the English phoneme /r/, since that is its allophone after /t/ in words like _tree_, especially prominent in British English with its stronger devoicing. With _czy_, it's probably the durational queues primarily that exclude this interpretation.


Excellent response!


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## Swatters

berndf said:


> For me as a German, Polish /ts/ sounds more like /ds/ while /t͡s/ sounds like our /t͡s/ (ignoring the difference between s, ʂ and ʃ for the purpose of this discussion).


That's interesting, the most salient feature of the Polish stop+fricative onsets to me is the very audible release of the stop (it feels like there's a phonological word boundary separating t and  ʂ to my franco ears). But this audible burst doesn't seem to be (quantitatively or qualitatively) sufficient to be recognisable as a /tʰ/ in German.


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## berndf

Swatters said:


> But this audible burst doesn't seem to be (quantitatively or qualitatively) sufficient to be recognisable as a /tʰ/ in German.


That's it, yes. I hear the gap between the stop and the sibilant as well but not long and especially not forceful enough to make it a fortis stop (in German it makes more sense to describe the t-d contrast as fortis vs. lenis than as unvoiced vs. voiced).

By contrast, I hear the affricate as fortis stop plus sibilant because the sibilant itself replaces the aspiration. In German there is no concept of distinguishing between fortis stop plus sibilant on the one hand and affricate on the other.


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## Hulalessar

Ben Jamin said:


> It is the easiest way, but it is wrong. The pupil will then continue to say "t-sug", "t-sahn", "zit-sen", and so on during all life. It is practically impossible to delete bad habits in pronunciation.



It may not be ideal, but it is is a bit harsh to describe it as wrong. Teachers of foreign languages need a way in to get pupils to utter sounds or combinations of sounds which do not exist in their native language. As you go on to point out, what are allophones in one language may be phonemes in another. That is challenging for both teacher and pupil. However you go about explaining, what is required is constant practice.


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> It is the easiest way, but it is wrong. The pupil will then continue to say "t-sug", "t-sahn", "zit-sen", and so on during all life. It is practically impossible to delete bad habits in pronunciation.


I don't think it is necessarily true, certainly not for speakers of Germanic languages. We are used to pronouncing consonant clusters as a single unit and asked to pronounce t+S, a speaker of a Germanic language will automatically produce something closer to the Polish t͡S than to the Polish tS, which sounds unnatural to us because of the clear gap between the two parts. Such a gap happens only at syllable boundaries. (S again stands for any unvoiced sibilant, [s, ʂ, ʃ, ɕ...]).


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## bearded

berndf said:


> in non-dialectal speech, _Pferd_ is pronounced as if spelled _Ferd_


Is that a really sure thing?  I'd never even dream of contradicting a native expert like you, but I've been so many times  both in Northern and Southern Germany, as well as in Austria, and I can't remember ever hearing the pronunciation _ferd _without p.


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## merquiades

bearded said:


> Is that a really sure thing?  I'd never even dream of contradicting a native expert like you, but I've been so many times  both in Northern and Southern Germany, as well as in Austria, and I can't remember ever hearing the pronunciation _ferd _without p.


I think he means in dialect.  I have heard a lady from West Germany pronounce "appel".  I thought it was weird cause it sounded English.  I know dialects have disappeared in the north and east, but I have the impression it's not the case in the west, and it can even affect their standard German.  So many some people say "ferd" somewhere.  Are there mininmal pairs in German for /pf/ versus /f/ or /p/?  I have the impression that during the medieval consonant change all the p's became pf or not depending on the zone.  If that is true maybe maintaining this affricate combination is not paramount.

As far as the /t͡s/ I think it's reasonable to teach non-natives to pronounce t-s and then to work to integrate them.  I mean we have to have a starting point.  I remember a book that said pronounce "adds up" quickly.


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## berndf

bearded said:


> Is that a really sure thing?  I'd never even dream of contradicting a native expert like you, but I've been so many times  both in Northern and Southern Germany, as well as in Austria, and I can't remember ever hearing the pronunciation _ferd _without p.


Listen here how the narrator, who has certainly undergone professional speech training, pronounces _Pferd _and how the young woman, who speaks non-dialectal colloquial German with a natural northern accent, pronounces it at 0:48.


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## bearded

Thank you for the video.  It seems to me, though, that a quiet p (ein leises P) is audible in both cases. Or perhaps it's just my brain that is 'prepared' to hear it (darauf eingestellt).


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## merquiades

I hear something in between:  pFerd, the F receiving the emphasis of this affricate combination.  It is certainly easier to pronounce that than Pferd with the emphasis on the p, which is the way I have been trying to do it.
Otherwise it is facile to understand the people in this video.


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## berndf

bearded said:


> Or perhaps it's just my brain that is 'prepared' to hear it (darauf eingestellt).


Most likely. You would probably have to ask a northern speaker to say things like _Sie ritten auf _*Pferden*_ nach _*Verden* and watch out for differences. In the linguistic environment I grew up in, the two words are perfectly homophone in natural colloquial conversation.


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## Red Arrow

I also simply hear Pferd.


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## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> I don't think it is necessarily true, certainly not for speakers of Germanic languages. We are used to pronouncing consonant clusters as a single unit and asked to pronounce t+S, a speaker of a Germanic language will automatically produce something closer to the Polish t͡S than to the Polish tS, which sounds unnatural to us because of the clear gap between the two parts. Such a gap happens only at syllable boundaries. (S again stands for any unvoiced sibilant, [s, ʂ, ʃ, ɕ...]).


Do you include Scandinavian languages here?


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> Do you include Scandinavian languages here?


You mean because of the phenemic contrast between long and short consonants? I briefly thought of if this would make a difference but in the end I don't think so.


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## berndf

Red Arrow said:


> I also simply hear Pferd.


0:43 viel
0:48 Pferd
1:05 Pflastersteine

All the same initial sound.


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## Hulalessar

To expand:

I said: /t͡s/ and /ts/ are essentially the same thing - or at least are perceived by most people to be the same thing.

I made a statement and then immediately qualified it. It is a way of making a point. As I said above, not everyone agrees on how to characterise affricates. I am inclined to think, at least when it comes to /t͡s/ and /ts/, that any distinction is quantitative rather than qualitative, which is why I say “essentially” the same thing. It is not for nothing that <цар> is transliterated as <tsar>.

It is also necessary to consider whether one’s approach is phonetic or phonological. By “phonetics” I mean the study of the sounds used in human language. It is a “hard” science as ultimately the sounds of language can be described in quantities such as frequency and duration which can be measured objectively. By “phonology” I mean the study of sounds as used in human language which includes describing the sound systems of given languages. It is rooted in phonetics, but veers towards a “soft” science because it involves value judgements. A phonetic analysis of a stream of speech aims to describes the phones used, whilst a phonological analysis aims to describe it as a series of phonemes. In practice any given analysis may be a compromise.

Spectrographic analysis of speech has shown it is more complex than is capable of being perceived consciously by the human ear. For example, in /kʌp/ (<cup>) /k/ is “/k/ followed by /ʌ/”; /ʌ/ is “/ʌ/ preceded by /k/ and followed by /p/”; /p/ is “/p/ preceded by /ʌ/”. However, in /kæp/ (<cap>) /k/ is not “/k/ followed by /ʌ/”, but “/k/ followed by /æ/” and so on. This reminds us that, whilst we may think of a speech as a series of distinct phones, it is in fact continuous. Any division of the continuum is in the final analysis arbitrary.

A spectrogram is better at representing speech than a series of symbols which necessarily has to involve division into segments. Precisely how the segments are chosen and described is a matter of nomenclature on which not everyone is going to agree. An injection of pragmatism is required. Speech is a human thing and context needs to control your description. Once you start to move away from the level of detail afforded by spectrographic analysis you are going to get differences of opinion. Accordingly, asking if there is any justification in designating some sequences affricates and some consonant clusters is not unreasonable.

Without involving a native speaker, it is perfectly possible for a linguist to make a phonetic transcription of an utterance in a language he does not understand and then for another linguist who also does not understand the language to realise it. If the system is sufficiently accurate and the linguists sufficiently skilled, a person who speaks the same language as the person who made the utterance will consider the realisation to be native like.

No human is capable of appreciating consciously all the minutiae of speech. A trained linguist or someone with an acute ear can pick up subtle differences. As for the rest, they will typically not realise that what they consider to be a single sound in their own language may have two or more allophones and also may not be able to perceive that what are allophones in their own language may be distinct phonemes in another. The whole thing is relative. Each language needs to be described in its own terms, but an untrained native speaker’s analysis of his own language runs the risk of being unreliable.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> I said: /t͡s/ and /ts/ are essentially the same thing - or at least are perceived by most people to be the same thing.


The elephant in room is that we have at least one language with a clearly audible phonemic opposition between /t͡s/ and /ts/ and I am afraid you are failing to address this appropriately.


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## eamp

Could the opposition in _czy_ and _trzy_ not also be analyzed not as the opposition between /t͡S/ and /tS/, but between /tS/ and /tZ/? Or does Polish also maintain a contrast when the sibilant is voiceless?
For Russian the example of _царь_ [t͡sarʲ] < _цьсарь _at least seems to suggest that here no difference between /t͡S/ and /tS/ was preserved.


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## berndf

eamp said:


> Could the opposition in _czy_ and _trzy_ not also be analyzed not as the opposition between /t͡S/ and /tS/, but between /tS/ and /tZ/? Or does Polish also maintain a contrast when the sibilant is voiceless?


I don't quite understand what you mean. The initial consonant cluster in _trzy _*is *completely voiceless. Irrespective of whether it is phonemically or "only" phonetically voiceless, the difference has to be elsewhere as the difference is clearly audible.


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## eamp

Well, I was thinking mainly about the need for the ligature when talking about phonemic analysis and transcription. It seems to me the Polish words might be just as accurately represented by /tʂɨ/ and /tʐɨ/ if we assume the perceived length contrast is an expression of the phoneme's underlying voicedness? (At least I perceive a clear contrast in the length the sibilant is held). This is assuming there is no word *_tszy _or the like also contrasting with _czy _and _trzy_. 
True though, phonetically I don't know how the difference should be expressed if not by /t͡S/ and /tS/. One could double the sibilant, but that might be misleading, I am probably also missing other relevant phonetic cues.


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## berndf

Phonemically, /t͡S/ and /tS/ is probably all you need. Phonetically, maybe [t͡S] vs. [tSS]? I agree that there is a length difference.


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## Hulalessar

berndf said:


> The elephant in room is that we have at least one language with a clearly audible phonemic opposition between /t͡s/ and /ts/ and I am afraid you are failing to address this appropriately.



But I think that that makes my point. If there are languages which distinguish between the two then your analysis points out the distinction. However, that does not stop the two sounds being treated as the same in a language which has them without a phonemic opposition.

The sound at the end English <cats> is, so far as I can tell, the same as sound at the beginning of Russian <tsar>, German <zeit> and Italian <zio>, but I have never seen /t͡s/ listed in an inventory of the phonemes of English.


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## berndf

What you are describing is a peculiarity of English and other related languages and the way these languages treat consonant clusters but you make it sound as if it were natural. But even for English it doesn’t seem to be so easy: While the German z as in _Katze_ generally pose no problems to English speakers, they seem to be all but incapable of pronuncing it in _Zeit_. Even English speakers who pronunce German almost perfectly still usually can't get that right.


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## bearded

berndf said:


> they seem to be all but incapable of pronuncing it in _Zeit_


What do they utter instead?


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## berndf

They pronounce it like _seit_, i.e. with [z]. And that regularly even occurs with English speakers who know German extremely well and without a shadow of a doubt know how the German _z_ ought to be pronounced.


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## Sobakus

_*sound of typing*_ So I am ⬇con⬆_fushion_!

if you're denying the phonological reality of the phoneme, you've already proved its reality when you were able to phonemically map _czy _and _trzy _onto English phonology and by this virtue hear a clear distinction
if you're approaching this in the most linguistically naive way, then every single person in this topic maintains that they can clearly hear a difference between /t͡S/ and /tS/, *including yourself* - even if you didn't know about languages that distinguished them before, you can no longer believe that they're "perceived by most people to be the same thing"
I don't imagine that you mean to say that there's a universal, fundamental difference between /s/ and /ʂ/ in this respect, because the only difference involved is that English happens to possesses no appropriate phonemes to map the difference in the case of /s/
What's more, you first highlight the difference between phonetics and phonology and _*fingers the screen*_ demonstrate good awareness of how both are scientifically investigated, only to finish with this:


Hulalessar said:


> The sound at the end English <cats> is, so far as I can tell, the same as sound at the beginning of Russian <tsar>, German <zeit> and Italian <zio>, but I have never seen /t͡s/ listed in an inventory of the phonemes of English.


You haven't seen it because no such phoneme exists in English!! _*fingering intensifies*_ The /ts/ in _cats_ is two phonemes, two segments, like a sequence of any two consonants! Describing a phoneme /t͡s/ means describing a single phonological segment, that belongs to one syllable, undergoes phonological processes such as intervocalic voicing like any other consonant (whereas a /ts/ will typically escape it because none of the two segments is intervocalic), and if you ask a Polish speaker to change the last sound of _kac_, possible results will be _kat, kap_, but never _kata, *katw_; in German Z_eit > seit, weit_* but never* *_treit, *dreit_.
Hulalessar*, **eggzblain**!!*​


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## elroy

berndf said:


> And that regularly even occurs with English speakers who know German extremely well


I've _never_ heard an English speaker who knows German _extremely well_ do this!  
It is common among beginners, yes (although not even all beginners do it).


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## berndf

elroy said:


> I've _never_ heard an English speaker who knows German _extremely well_ do this!
> It is common among beginners, yes (although not even all beginners do it).


It might be that to you it doesn't stick out quite as much. But when I hear an English speaker, who speaks German almost accent free, say _Ich habe keine seit_, that sounds really, really strange.


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## elroy

Believe me, it sticks out.  It's quite possibly the most grating, nails-on-chalkboard pronunciation mistake among English speakers.  I notice it all the time. What I strongly disagree with is your observation that this is common among English speakers whose German is _extremely good_ and whose pronunciation is _almost perfect_.  This does not match my experience at all, not in the least (and I know / have known quite a few English speakers with excellent German).  To my mind, this mistake is consistently associated with numerous other pronunciation mistakes and/or basic language errors.


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## merquiades

bearded said:


> What do they utter instead?


I don't believe it is difficult for English speakers to pronouce z in German. There are many more difficult sounds such as r, ü, ch.
In Italian the difficulty is knowing when it is voiced or unvoiced. I admit I guess sometimes. The other difficulty is doubling the zz.
Polish is rich in affricates. I don't doubt that English speakers would find it daunting to distinguish c, ci, ć, cz.


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## elroy

@berndf is right that many English speakers pronounce it [z].  My only disagreement with him is that I don't think it's common among those who are very advanced.


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## berndf

@elroy, I have been thinking, you might help us: For speakers of Germanic languages, it is normal to pronounce /ts/ as in cats like an affricate because we analyse CVCC as one syllable words with the final cluster forming a single coda. If I am not completely mistaken, Semitic languages work differently, they analyse CVCC as two syllables with a null vowel as the nucleus of the second syllable. If there were an Arabic word كَتس, would that be pronounce more like [kat͡s] or like [kats]?


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## Hulalessar

Sobakus said:


> Hulalessar*, **eggzblain**!!*



What I am trying to get over is that a phoneme is an abstraction.

Consider the English phoneme /l/. It can be realised as either [l] (as in "lit") or as [ɫ̪] as in "eagle". It can only be realised as one or the other, but never as /l/. [l] and [ɫ̪] are classed as allophones of /l/ because they do not serve to distinguish between words.

Russian, as you of course know, is different. It has two distinct phonemes /l/ and /ɫ̪/ which distinguish between words. as in "ugol'" and "ugol".

The point is that both English and Russian have the same two sounds but the phonological analysis is different for each language.

(The above assumes for illustrative purposes that the "l" sounds in "lit" and "ugol'" are the same and that the "l" sounds in "eagle" and "ugol" are the same.)

So, when I say that the sound at the end English <cats> is the same as sound at the beginning of Russian <tsar> I am not denying the validity of a phonological analysis that says that in English the sound is two phonemes while in Russian it is one. What I am saying is that a phonetic analysis will show that the two are the same or nearly the same, that is that when the sound is uttered the organs of speech are engaged in the same way and the disturbances in the air are identical.


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## Sobakus

Hulalessar said:


> What I am trying to get over is that a phoneme is an abstraction.


I'll recast your argument - drawing on several of your posts in this topic - by transferring it from the level of the phoneme to the level of the word. A word is an abstraction. There's no way to tell from a spectrogram whether it's _la torre, l'atorre_, or even _lato *orre_ etc. They're all perceived by most people as the same thing - even the natives are liable to reinterpret them, I'm sure you've come across such examples (+ all those Arabic borrowings in al-). Not everyone agrees on how to define a word - actually, most linguists disagree on it, it's one of the most tortured definitions in the whole of linguistics. It's also necessary to define whether your approach is phonological, lexical, syntactical or even something else. Therefore asking whether it makes any sense to call some segment of speech a word and another a phrase is not unreasonable.

Now, clearly it's not possible to use the fact that something doesn't show up on the spectrogram to deny its structural reality. Most of what makes up a language doesn't show up on spectrograms. In order to interpret speech, one must segment it into abstract unities, under many analyses all branching (even down to the level of the mora, perhaps below). All of these are abstractions, words, syllables, phonemes, sentences, even texts and intertextual literary traditions. Their reality and validity is not put in question by the fact they're abstract and not always easy to put definitional shackles on. Well, until the cognitive science gives us better tools to do it, that is.

Your position that


> What I am saying is that a phonetic analysis will show that the two are the same or nearly the same, that is that when the sound is uttered the organs of speech are engaged in the same way and the disturbances in the air are identical.


is clearly plausible, but it has absolutely no bearing on phonemic analysis. Therefore your reasoning


Hulalessar said:


> at least when it comes to /t͡s/ and /ts/, that any distinction is quantitative rather than qualitative, which is why I say “essentially” the same thing.


clearly cannot be right. The most fundamental *phonological *difference between /t͡s/ and /ts/ is one vs two phonemes, which is like the distinction between one or two words, sentences etc. A quantitative distinction of phonetic duration only makes sense on the level of *physical production*. Therefore you seem to be confusing two entirely different levels of language, one of which simply doesn't deal with abstractions at all, and the other which only deals with abstractions; and you're trying to deny the reality of an abstract phenomenon by appealing to it not being visible in physical production.

I can flip this confusion around using your allophones of /l/ analogy: you're saying that since [ɫ̪] may be a phoneme in one language but an allophone in another, and since most people perceive them to be the same, therefore it's questionable whether it makes sense to distinguish [ɫ̪] from [l] on the phonetic level - the articulation and the disturbance of air are different, but they represent the same structural element.

Now even if we put aside this confusion, the abstract structure (phonology etc) of a language has clear implications on its physical manifestation (production), and consequently on sound change. What in both Italian and Polish can be phonemically represented as /an.na/ is pronounced entirely differently; similarly Polish _oddychać_ vs Russian _отдыха́ть__. _Polish has a structurally-specified constraint prescribing the release of every consonant, the very idea of which seems otherworldly to Italians and Russians. That is to say, not only does it make sense to distinguish a sequence of phonemes from one phoneme - it even makes all the sense to distinguish two identical sequences of phonemes, since the IPA phonemic notation captures only the tip of the iceberg of the actual language-specific phonological entity it represents.

Russians (not Russian phoneticians!) are able to distinguish (not spectographically!) between _атса_ /at.sa/, _аца_ /a.t͡sa/, ацца /at.t͡sa/ and even ацса /at͡s.sa/ (the latter two thanks to Russian possessing geminates, in contrast to most Slavic languages). And my impression is that the difference between /t͡s/ and /ts/ in Russian exists on the articulatory level even apart from duration.


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## Ghabi

Red Arrow said:


> Is it possible that I can only say the affticate /t͡s/ and am unable to say /ts/?


Guilty ... Cantonese speakers have great difficulty pronouncing /ts/, although /t͡s/ exists as an initial in it. And I would ignore you (and probably hate you) if you ask me to pronounce words like "ghosts", "lists" ...


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## Awwal12

AndrasBP said:


> czy /t͡ʂɨ/ vs. trzy /tʂɨ/


That's due to the fact that in /t͡ʂɨ/ and /tʂɨ/ the stop has different places of articulation (the usual dental in /tʂɨ/, which prevents the instant shift of articulation, but retracted towards the sibilant in /t͡ʂɨ/). In Russian /tɕ(:)/ is actually contrasted to /ʨ/ in a similar manner even despite the length of /ɕ:/ being facultative (e.g. подсчитать [tɕ(:)] vs. почитать [ʨ]).


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## berndf

Awwal12 said:


> That's due to the fact that in /t͡ʂɨ/ and /tʂɨ/ the stop has different places of articulation (the usual dental in /tʂɨ/, which prevents the instant shift of articulation, but retracted towards the sibilant in /t͡ʂɨ/).


Yes, that is what I realized too when I tried to reproduce the difference.


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## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> That's due to the fact that in /t͡ʂɨ/ and /tʂɨ/ the stop has different places of articulation (the usual dental in /tʂɨ/, which prevents the instant shift of articulation, but retracted towards the sibilant in /t͡ʂɨ/). In Russian /tɕ(:)/ is actually contrasted to /ʨ/ in a similar manner even despite the length of /ɕ:/ being facultative (e.g. подсчитать [tɕ(:)] vs. почитать [ʨ]).


While this is true for Polish and Russian, in English _tree_ the stop is retracted while in _chee_ it isn't, yet Hulalessar heard _~tr_ in _trzy_ with its dental stop.


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## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> While this is true for Polish and Russian, in English _tree_ the stop is retracted while in _chee_ it isn't, yet Hulalessar heard _~tr_ in _trzy_ with its dental stop.


It's just difficult not to hear it if there is a long transient state of articulatory organs, so isolating /t/ is not a problem, no matter how it behaves in your own language in similar positions.
In Russian /t/ is also positionally retracted before /ʂ/ and /ʐ/. Does it make any difference? It doesn't seem so.


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## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> It's just difficult not to hear it if there is a long transient state of articulatory organs, so isolating /t/ is not a problem, no matter how it behaves in your own language in similar positions.
> In Russian /t/ is also positionally retracted before /ʂ/ and /ʐ/. Does it make any difference? It doesn't seem so.


Yes, which is precisely why I disagreed that the place of articulation plays a major part in distinguishing them, which you seemed to be suggesting here:


Awwal12 said:


> AndrasBP said:
> 
> 
> 
> czy /t͡ʂɨ/ vs. trzy /tʂɨ/
> 
> 
> 
> That's due to the fact that in /t͡ʂɨ/ and /tʂɨ/ the stop has different places of articulation (the usual dental in /tʂɨ/, which prevents the instant shift of articulation, but retracted towards the sibilant in /t͡ʂɨ/). In Russian /tɕ(:)/ is actually contrasted to /ʨ/ in a similar manner even despite the length of /ɕ:/ being facultative (e.g. подсчитать [tɕ(:)] vs. почитать [ʨ]).
Click to expand...

As I've said before, I think it's primarily the durational queues that Hulalessar's ear latched on to. Only I don't believe the Russian /t/ is positionally retracted in Russian (like it isn't in Polish), in fact my tongue literally sticks out of my mouth when I say отшить, with an almost interdental release.


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## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> Yes, which is precisely why I disagreed that the place of articulation plays a major part in distinguishing them


The place of articulation contributes to the fact that the "long transient state" is present, simply because it makes the instant shift between [t] and [ʂ] physically impossible.


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## Hulalessar

Let's go back to the original post which was all about how affricates are represented in IPA:

"For Polish speakers the very idea of affricates as consisting of two separate sounds is completely incomprehensible. Polish has a number of consonants for example c (IPA t͡s) and cz (IPA t͡ʃ, Czech č) perceived by Polish speakers as ordinary, unitary plosives. They are in phonemic contrast to ts (t+s) and trz (t + ʃ). The distinction is preserved in careful speech, and merging them is regarded as vulgar and uneducated."

Does the last sentence not somewhat undermine the first? Is the last not an admission that there is a connection between ts and t+s. If it is, then it has to be admitted that the analysis implied by the way that the IPA represents affricates is correct, or at least not unreasonable. In this respect we can note that the orthography of another Slavic language, Russian, which does not have the affricate appearing at the beginning of <John>, represents the sound by two symbols equivalent to the IPA symbols. I could be wrong, but I have to doubt that Russian <Джон> has been influenced by the IPA. That goes some way to suggesting that the IPA standard of representing affricates by two symbols cannot be dismissed out of hand. Equally, the perception by native speakers that the affricates in their language are not in any sense different from consonants not regarded as affricates has to be respected.

That these two contrasting analyses are possible is neatly explained by the first two sentences in the Wikipedia article on affricates:

"An *affricate* is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair."

The second sentence is what this discussion has been all about. What I have been trying to get across is that any analysis has to depend on the degree of precision you are aiming for and the purpose of your analysis.

At one extreme is a phonetic analysis which explains what is going on in terms of how the organs of speech are engaged over time and/or the disturbances in the air. Such an analysis needs to decide on its minimum unit and those units when identified will be given symbols and descriptions so that the analysis can be communicated. The units, though ultimately arbitrary, are real things.

At the other extreme is a phonological analysis which concentrates on the phonemes of a language. A phoneme, whilst a useful concept, is an abstraction; that is the case even though a given phoneme may (at your level of analysis) have only one realisation.

An analysis can be a compromise on a continuum between the two extremes. There is no hard and fast distinction between phonetics and phonology, though it must always be borne in mind that phonology depends on phonetics. There are going to be differences of opinion not least because not everyone agrees on definitions. Apart from that, speech is messy and personal opinion interferes as in "merging them is regarded as vulgar and uneducated".


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## Ben Jamin

merquiades said:


> Polish is rich in affricates. I don't doubt that English speakers would find it daunting to distinguish c, ci, ć, cz.


Quite correct, but the fact that speakers of languages that don't have those phonems in their language deny their existence is politely speaking "peculiar".
By the way, some languages have allophones that are clearly separate phonems in other languages, for example Spanish oficially has no "z" sound, but uses it regularly as an allophone od "s" (for example _mismo_).


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## Awwal12

Ben Jamin said:


> By the way, some languages have allophones that are clearly separate phonems in other languages


Yes, but trouble is, it's actually hard to objectively analyze affricates as "sounds", they look more like a phonological phenomenon indeed. Which doesn't make them any less "real", of course.


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## gburtonio

Awwal12 said:


> Yes, but trouble is, it's actually hard to objectively analyze affricates as "sounds", they look more like a phonological phenomenon indeed. Which doesn't make them any less "real", of course.


I think this depends on your starting point when analysing them. If you start from the point of view that an affricate has two elements and these two elements can also exist as separate phones, then I can see the temptation of not considering them as a single 'sound'. But with homorganic affricates especially, where the release has the same place of articulation as the stop, I don't think it's sustainable to insist on seeing them as simply a combination of two separate elements. Who's to say what the neutral or standard method of release is after a stop: in a plosive, it's plosion, in an affricate it's a frication. Why must we analyse hold + plosion as 'one sound', but hold + frication as 'two sounds'?


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## Awwal12

gburtonio said:


> But with homorganic affricates especially, where the release has the same place of articulation as the stop, I don't think it's sustainable to insist on seeing them as simply a combination of two separate elements


In fact, affricates most typically have the same place of articulation for the stop and the fricative. Does it give us any reason to consider them as some special kind of sounds? Hardly, considering that in two different languages the identical articulatory sequence may correspond to different number of phonemes (e.g. Polish /č/ and Russian /tš/ are articulated in a nearly identical manner, though it isn't the case for Polish /č/ vs. Polish /tš/). Introducing "affricates" on the phonetic level just complicates the description with no clear benifit. Cross-linguistic typology and phonologies of particular languages hardly should bear any relevance for general phonetics.

The problem with affricates is basically the same as with such phonological units as diphthongs; there's just no purely phonetic basis behind them - they always can be decomposed into more elementary segments, and from the general phonetic perspective such segmentation would be simpler.


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## gburtonio

Awwal12 said:


> The problem with affricates is basically the same as with such phonological units as diphthongs; there's just no purely phonetic basis behind them - they always can be decomposed into more elementary segments, and from the general phonetic perspective such segmentation would be simpler.



But a plosive can be easily divided into two elementary segments, hold and release (and you can also add approach). There may also be aspiration and voicing. These are all separate elements, but nonetheless you have no problem considering that these elements come together to make a single phone. I don't see why affricates should be treated so differently, especially homorganic affricates; everything is the same in an affricate except the fact that the release stage involves frication instead of plosion.


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## Awwal12

gburtonio said:


> But a plosive can be easily divided into two elementary segments, hold and release


Given the positional distribution (any release is necessarily preceded by a hold; any non-final hold is necessarily accompanied by some sort of release) that wouldn't lead to simplification of the overall system, would it?

Basically, in plosives the hold is a constant and the release is positionally predefined. It doesn't work like that for affricates, though.


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## Sobakus

@Awwal12 Quick check: how would you phonetically transcribe the last sound in _быть?_


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## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> @Awwal12 Quick check: how would you phonetically transcribe the last sound in _быть?_


The necessary part is a palatalized stop (pre-alveolar laminal). Usually it's accompanied by a brief release, possibly resulting in a sibilant-like stage (though perceptionally the influence of the palatalized stop on the preceding vowel may be sufficient).


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## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> The necessary part is a palatalized stop (pre-alveolar laminal). Usually it's accompanied by a brief release, possibly resulting in a sibilant-like stage (though perceptionally the influence of the palatalized stop on the preceding vowel may be sufficient).


Well, a Pole will probably tell you the same thing about the last consonant of _być_. This came to mind when you mentioned Russian /tš/, Polish /č/ and Polish /tš/, because Polish has cz /t͡ʂ/ and tsz~trz /tʂ/ (among other things), while Russian has ч /t͡ɕ/, тщ /tɕ/ and тш /tʂ/; so I couldn't figure out which sounds you were comparing. The Russian palatalised ть /tʲ/ corresponds to Polish ć, which, while often sounding very close to the Russian ч /t͡ɕ/ is nevertherless different and other times will sound almost exactly like the Russian ть. This latter is in fact very clearly affricated in the northern prestige pronunciation, and is almost to exactly the same sound that Belarussians spell as ць = palatalised [t͡sʲ].

This is to say: even if we accept simplification as a more important criterion than accuracy (which I don't), we will still find it impossible to consistently implement it in practice using the IPA alphabet as it currently exists.

And come to think of it, what about palatalised and palatal consonants? If we follow your reasoning, won't we end up transcribing нь as [nj], for example? I hear the Spanish ñ as clearly containing a [j], even as a Russian!


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## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> Well, a Pole will probably tell you the same thing about the last consonant of _być_.


I'm not sure if the release is obligatory here, but for certain the tongue is normally grooved in process, so it isn't a simple release and there are more reasons to analyse it as a sibilant segment.

The IPA is imperfect, no one will argue about that.


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## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> I'm not sure if the release is obligatory here, but for certain the tongue is normally grooved in process, so it isn't a simple release and there are more reasons to analyse it as a sibilant segment.


Again, the same is true about the northen standard pronunciation of Russian ть. I'm convinced the issue is down to you not hearing that phonetic peculiarity of Russian, while noticing it in the case of Polish. A Polish speaker hears exactly the reverse, and if they were you, they would be arguing for the exactly opposite simplification (Russian complex, Polish simple). In fact, that's about the essence of Ben Jamin's original message.

I continue to stress the importance and inescapability of the phonemic, structural analysis and its priorty over the phonetic one when using IPA, a system developed for the former that is frankly inadequate for the latter purpose. I believe this whole discussion would be much shorter if we were sticking to that principle and excluded the interference of our native phonologies.


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## Sobakus

PS: for those wondering, here's an example of microphone-destroying affrication from central Russia as opposed to the more Slovak-type pre-palatal stop with slight affrication from Siberia. Here's a discussion of the phenomenon on the Russian forum.


----------



## Awwal12

Sobakus said:


> for those wondering, here's an example of microphone-destroying affrication from central Russia


I'd describe that pronunciation as really atypical, though. It does resemble Polish, but not the usual range of articulations for /tʲ/ in Russian ([tʲ]>[tˢʲ]).
Note that Russian also usually doesn't reach the digree of assibilation we frequently see in Belarusian (which can be fairly well described as [tʲsʲ]).


----------



## Sobakus

Awwal12 said:


> I'd describe that pronunciation as really atypical, though. It does resemble Polish, but not the usual range of articulations for /tʲ/ in Russian (/tʲ/>/tˢʲ/).


It's the type of affrication that's atypical, since in northern standard Russian it's the very sharp dental sʲ-type, like in Belarusian, while here it's a mushy pre-palatal ɕ-type, kind of like in Polish.

But what we're discussing is presence or absence of affrication as a phenomenon; which illustrates that these consonants need to be described separately for the type of hold and the type of release. To make this question more friendly to Germanic language speakers, one can adduce aspiration. To me, the English aspirated /k/ has all the right in the world to be transcribed as [kh]; in those American varieties with a "strong h" it even sounds like [kx] in emphatic speech, with (post-)velar friction. Certainly [kh] is required to make a speaker of, say, Italian, pronounce it correctly. Then this topic can be reduced ad absurdum to "is /k/ one or two sounds in English".

I'd prefer we stick to quantitative descriptions like "yes-somewhat-no" than to get stuck on which type of friction it is. The point is, articulation can always be broken down into smaller articulatory events, and where to draw the line seems to be arbitrary.


----------



## Kevin Beach

berndf said:


> They pronounce it like _seit_, i.e. with [z]. And that regularly even occurs with English speakers who know German extremely well and without a shadow of a doubt know how the German _z_ ought to be pronounced.


You surprise me. I was taught to pronounce -z- it as -ts- from the outset, when I started learning German at school in South London in 1963. I have never deviated from that.


----------



## Sobakus

Hulalessar said:


> Let's go back to the original post which was all about how affricates are represented in IPA:
> 
> "For Polish speakers the very idea of affricates as consisting of two separate sounds is completely incomprehensible. Polish has a number of consonants for example c (IPA t͡s) and cz (IPA t͡ʃ, Czech č) perceived by Polish speakers as ordinary, unitary plosives. They are in phonemic contrast to ts (t+s) and trz (t + ʃ). The distinction is preserved in careful speech, and merging them is regarded as vulgar and uneducated."
> 
> Does the last sentence not somewhat undermine the first? Is the last not an admission that there is a connection between ts and t+s. If it is, then it has to be admitted that the analysis implied by the way that the IPA represents affricates is correct, or at least not unreasonable. In this respect we can note that the orthography of another Slavic language, Russian, which does not have the affricate appearing at the beginning of <John>, represents the sound by two symbols equivalent to the IPA symbols. I could be wrong, but I have to doubt that Russian <Джон> has been influenced by the IPA. That goes some way to suggesting that the IPA standard of representing affricates by two symbols cannot be dismissed out of hand. Equally, the perception by native speakers that the affricates in their language are not in any sense different from consonants not regarded as affricates has to be respected.


Here's a parable: nobody denies the connection between tea and sugar on the one hand, and tea with sugar on the other. A laboratory analysis will reveal that both together and separately, there's the same amount of carbohydrates. For purposes of calory intake, you shouldn't care how you ingest them; but no human is going to mistake one for the other.

дж /dʐ/ is simply the closest thing Russian has to /d͡ʒ/ (which exists only as an allophone of /t͡ʃ/ before voiced consonants). It stands for two segments.

Russian represents English /ð/ as /z/, and both the vowels of _mat_ and _met _as /mɛt/. Nobody doubts that these pairs of sounds are connected, whether you ask a Russian (they sound the same) or a phonetician (they share most of their features). This fact cannot be used to justify failing to differentiate between them.


Hulalessar said:


> That these two contrasting analyses are possible is neatly explained by the first two sentences in the Wikipedia article on affricates:
> 
> "An *affricate* is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair."


I disagree and think this is a linguistically naive statement. Here's a statement that I think summirses this well:


> Superficially, affricates look like a cluster of a stop and a fricative. However, closer examination reveals that they must be single segments.


This paper offers many diagnostics to determine how many segments one is dealing with.


Hulalessar said:


> The second sentence is what this discussion has been all about. What I have been trying to get across is that any analysis has to depend on the degree of precision you are aiming for and the purpose of your analysis.


Are we talking about phonemic or phonetic analysis? I would dismiss any phonemic analysis that fails to distinguish between them as I would dismiss one that fails to distinguish between the vowels of _met_ and _mat._


Hulalessar said:


> An analysis can be a compromise on a continuum between the two extremes. There is no hard and fast distinction between phonetics and phonology, though it must always be borne in mind that phonology depends on phonetics. There are going to be differences of opinion not least because not everyone agrees on definitions.


Phonology is an abstract representation, ideally a mental state that exists in one's head, but practically a scientific theory and its practical manifestations. Phonetics is the sound waves that come out of one's mouth. Ideal phonology gets converted into sound waves via an muscular-articulatory programme; from this point of view, it's phonetics that depends on phonology. I'm not sure in what sense the reverse is true - you can postulate a phonology based on written evidence alone, or make it up alltogether; you can't have articulated speech without a system that controls its production.

I believe you're being mislead by the fact that IPA is used to represent acoustic data at varying degrees of accuracy, broad vs. narrow transcription that can be broader or narrower depending on the need. The underlying reason for this is because what a person hears is always phonology; humans cannot hear speech in absolute acoustic terms. The IPA alphabet is a system of language-independent approximations of phonemes, which include different degrees of in-built allophony, the uncharted space between the symbols. Most phonologists, on the other hand, agree that phonemic segments can be represented in terms of a finite set of distinctive features.

I've also just come across this: Clements 2006, Quantal phonetics and distinctive features - the basic premise seems to be that phonology tends to exploit certain regions of the articulatory tract where differences in articulation produce the best audible results, thus reconciling the acoustic and the articulatory approaches to defining distinctive features.


Hulalessar said:


> Apart from that, speech is messy and personal opinion interferes as in "merging them is regarded as vulgar and uneducated".


Merging sounds may be a feature of allophony, which is a part of phonology. Russians (and indeed most of the world) merging English _met_ and _mat_ - this is phonemic merger; the French only use the clear /l/ when speaking English - violating allophony. English natives perceive this as foreign accent, and that's all that is. Again, this cannot be adduced to justify failing to differentiate between them on any level of analysis, either structurally or acoustically.

What's happening in Polish is most likely a feature of sloppy pronunciation, or may be a case of phoneme substitution. It might be the exact same thing as the /tyoo~choo/ merger in English, where two segments coalesce by combining their distinctive features, in this case coinciding with an existing segment, but potentially creating a new one. But saying that two distinct entities are being substituted or coalesce is logically incompatible with failing to distinguish these two entities.

All in all, the distinction between /t͡s/ and /ts/ _can_ be quantitative on the level of physical production, but any confusion between them should be rigidly avoided if one wishes to have a coherent discussion of phonology. Likewise, I believe that failing to distinguish between levels of language (phonology vs. phonetics in this case) leads to confusion and lack of understanding. In your initial reply in this thread you said that speakers distinguish them very well, while linguists disagree. I believe that the best way to disagree is to mix everything together so that nobody knows what the other party, or even they themselves, are talking about any more. Which is why I'm so perplexed that anyone would argue that linguists should be more confused than native speakers themselves.

Here, Gouskova & Stanton 2020. Learning Complex Segments seems to be just what the doctor ordered to disentangle this discussion; indeed I could rewrite the entirety of this reply by referencing to it - but I'll have to read it first :•)


----------



## Forero

berndf said:


> 0:43 viel
> 0:48 Pferd
> 1:05 Pflastersteine
> 
> All the same initial sound.


What I hear at 0:48 is an affricate that is labiodental from beginning to end.


----------



## berndf

"[L]abiodental from beginning to end" is precisely the point. The (German) affricate starts with a very clearly audible *bi*labial release and that is missing.

Compare the pronunciations by the narrator, e.g., at 0:37 and 0:41.


----------



## Forero

berndf said:


> "[L]abiodental from beginning to end" is precisely the point. The (German) affricate starts with a very clearly audible *bi*labial release and that is missing.


That's what I thought. My German teacher was American, but he never pronounced German "pf" any other way than the way you are describing. (And he pronounced _Tage_ with a [ɣ], as in Modern Greek, which is not something an American would do "spontaneously", so I assumed he knew what he was doing.)

But I can also see why others are saying they hear more than just /f/ at 0:48.


----------



## berndf

Forero said:


> But I can also see why others are saying they hear more than just /f/ at 0:48.


Do you hear a difference between the initial consonants in
0:43 viel
0:48 Pferd
?


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## Forero

berndf said:


> Do you hear a difference between the initial consonants in
> 0:43 viel
> 0:48 Pferd
> ?


Yes.

I wish we could see her as she pronounces the words in question, though. I can't tell whether she pronounces _Pferd_ the way she does at 0:48 because that is how she always pronounces "pf" or whether she is just smiling so much when she says it.


----------



## berndf

It is more or less how I say it. I maybe pronounce the initial consonant in _Pferde_ a slightly more forcefully than in _viele_ but I can't detect any difference in the way I pronounce them and I am born in Hamburg as well and I have lived in Münsterland as a child.

I am able to pronounce _Pferd_ like the narrator does but this feels horribly bookish. But for an Upper German speaker this is natural.


----------



## Red Arrow

berndf said:


> 0:43 viel
> 0:48 Pferd
> 1:05 Pflastersteine
> 
> All the same initial sound.


Pflastersteine is just Flastersteine, but Pferd really does have a pf. It's very clear when you listen to it in slow-motion.


----------



## Forero

Red Arrow said:


> Pflastersteine is just Flastersteine, but Pferd really does have a pf. It's very clear when you listen to it in slow-motion.


I hear "mit Pflasterstein" (with a labiodental affricate).


----------



## berndf

Red Arrow said:


> Pflastersteine is just Flastersteine, but Pferd really does have a pf. It's very clear when you listen to it in slow-motion.


If you listen to it in isolation, there is indeed a bilabial start but that is too weak for a phonemic /pf/. It is more like [bf] and this bilabial onset is ignored. Phonemically it is /f/. If I listen to the sound in isolation I can perceive the bilabial onset but not if played in connection. I have cut out the narrator's and her version of _Pferde _to demonstrate the contrast:





Audio.


----------



## berndf

Forero said:


> I hear "mit Pflasterstein" (with a labiodental affricate).


That might be. But as said, German does not have a labiodental affricate. Phonemically, there is only /p͡f/ (spelled <pf>) and /f/ (spelled <f> or <v> and in Greek loans also <ph>) but no /p̪͡f/.

Wikipedia states in the article about the voiceless labiodental affricate: "German has a similar sound /p͡f/". Key here is _similar_. The true voiceless labiodental affricate can be phonemically /f/ or /p͡f/ depending on how forceful it is pronounced.


----------



## Forero

berndf said:


> That might be. But as said, German does not have a labiodental affricate. Phonemically, there is only /p͡f/ (spelled <pf>) and /f/ (spelled <f> or <v> and in Greek loans also <ph>) but no /p̪͡f/.
> 
> Wikipedia states in the article about the voiceless labiodental affricate: "German has a similar sound /p͡f/". Key here is _similar_. The true voiceless labiodental affricate can be phonemically /f/ or /p͡f/ depending on how forceful it is pronounced.


The claim was made that this particular young woman does not distinguish /p͡f/ from /f/, but my observation is that she pronounces /p͡f/ labiodentally (at least sometimes) and does not (always) merge it with /f/.

The sample at 1:05 seems to be telling us that she would have to be very, very careful how she pronounces /f/ if she means to distinguish it consistently from (her version of) /pf/.

Or maybe she just gets careless when she smiles.


----------



## berndf

Forero said:


> The claim was made that this particular young woman does not distinguish /p͡f/ from /f/, but my observation is that she pronounces /p͡f/ labiodentally (at least sometimes) and does not (always) merge it with /f/.


It might been argued, that the realisation is not a clean [f] but it is definitely a valid realization of /f/. If she had *tried *to distinguish /p͡f/ and /f/ only she herself can tell but had she produced this realization in a context where disambiguating minimal pairs like _Pferden_ and _Verden_ would be important, she would have failed.

What do you hear here? It is from the same speaker and I have on purpose left only one sound before and after to make sure context doesn't fool you as to what you ought to hear.


----------



## Forero

berndf said:


> It might been argued, that the realisation is not a clean [f] but it is definitely a valid realization of /f/. If she had *tried *to distinguish /p͡f/ and /f/ only she herself can tell but had she produced this realization in a context where disambiguating minimal pairs like _Pferden_ and _Verden_ would be important, she would have failed.
> 
> What do you hear here? It is from the same speaker and I have on purpose left only one sound before and after to make sure context doesn't fool you as to what you ought to hear.


It might be "u fo", but both the beginning and end are so abrupt I don't feel confident about anything but that there is at least an [f] somewhere in it. Is the one sound before an "u"? Is the one after an "o"? If so, I'll call the part in between [f]. Otherwise I just don't know.

I have to admit that I don't understand much German and I don't have the jist of what the video is about. I think she says _aber_ around 0:43 or 0:44 with a labiodental "b" (or is it a [v]?), _em_ (is that a word?) around 0:53 with [ɱ] instead of [m] (you can even see her say it), and "ich liebe" around 0:56 with another labiodental "b", so now I am almost certain that it is her smile that alters her bilabial sounds to labiodentals.


----------



## berndf

Forero said:


> It might be "u fo",


Almost. It is _ə fo_ (_wusst*e vo*rher_). I guess that is as precise as it can possibly get with such a short fragment. Just wanted to check you didn't hear all her /f/s as affricates.



Forero said:


> around 0:56 with another labiodental "b"


Bilabial approximant, [β]. The regular realisation of intervocalic /b/ in casual speech, especially but not only in northern varieties. But [β] can easily be confused with a voiced labiodental approximant. Such mergers happened in the past; e.g., that is why the English verb is _have_ and not _habe_. But we are getting off topic now.


----------



## Hulalessar

Sobakus

You attribute to me views which I do not have. I do not think that really we are very far apart. The main difference is that you think things are simple while I think they are, if not complex, then liable to confusion. I tend to take a fuzzy view of things. That does not rule out clear thinking, but is an acknowledgement that many things are not as straightforward as they first appear.

I think that this subject is complex/liable to confusion for the following reasons:

· Speech is continuous. What segments you divide it into is ultimately arbitrary. That does not mean that some units are not useful or that an analysis is impossible.
· Linguists do not agree on definitions.
· A clear distinction is not always made between something which actually exists and a useful abstraction.
· A native speaker's ideas about the sounds of his own language need to be treated with caution. The ideas are likely to be motivated by the language's orthography.
· A speaker's ideas about the sounds of any language which is not his native language need to be treated with caution. The ideas are likely to be motivated by the phonology and phonotactics of his native language.

The assertion on Wikipedia that "It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair" encapsulates the problem. It all depends on who is doing the deciding.

I pose this question: Suppose you are teaching Russian to a native speaker of a language which does not have affricates or consonant clusters. In lesson three he asks: _Why is it that you have one sign for the sound at the beginning of "tsar'" but two for the sound at the beginning of "stul"? They are the same sounds in a different order._ What will you say?


----------



## Sobakus

Hulalessar said:


> Sobakus
> 
> The main difference is that you think things are simple while I think they are, if not complex, then liable to confusion. I tend to take a fuzzy view of things. That does not rule out clear thinking, but is an acknowledgement that many things are not as straightforward as they first appear.


Things are not simple, and their liability to confusion is obvious. My point is that things appear confusing in reverse proportion to the amount of information one possesses about them, which is a general truth about epistemology, and I possess no evidence that phonology/phonetics constitutes an exception to this generalisation. Things normally follow the Dunning-Kruger distribution: they appear incomprehensible with no knowledge, simple with some knowledge, and complex again with a lot of knowledge, but this discussion is not about the minutia that confuse even the experts. Most importantly, with adequate theory and enough information, i.e. approaching the right extreme of the distribution, things should again acquire definiteness and clarity. If they don't, it's a good indication that your theory is flawed. While language is not maths, it's not magic either, and most of modern linguistics is grounded in clear formal logic.


Hulalessar said:


> · Speech is continuous. What segments you divide it into is ultimately arbitrary.


What does the last sentence mean? Can you closely rephrase "arbitrary" while explaining how it differs from its closest rephrasing?


Hulalessar said:


> I think that this subject is complex/liable to confusion for the following reasons:


I think these reasons do not constitute a unity and should not prevent a coherent discussion from taking place. What does prevent one is a confusion between phonology and phonetics. I'm certain when I say that you were adducing this apparent complexity/uncertainty in part because of your own lack of clarity on the distinction between phonology and phonetics. It is this that I've been trying to banish from this discussion: in the abstract, what you're saying is reasonable, but when used to justify a mere and wholly separate confusion, it becomes an obstacle to be removed.

I found this post especially misleading and indefensible: theoretically it's at the left extreme of the Dunning-Kruger curve where lack of detailed knowledge makes two different things simplistically look the same; and practically, because "perceived by most people to be the same thing" contradicts every testimony in this topic.

Further, this post illustrates the type of thinking that leads to people being taught to pronounce Russian soft consonants as a sequence with /j/, which sounds abhorrent, like a recorder tape chewing up. The result is wrong, therefore the justification used to arrive at it is either erroneously adduced, or wrong itself. I'm not talking simplistically when I say there's no difference between saying that a sequence and an affricate is the same thing, and saying that a sequence and a palatalised consonant are the same. In both cases a complex segment is being equated to a sequence of two simplex ones. It's possible to extend this to aspiration, as I've mentioned.

To use your own words as an illustration, pronouncing <cats> will be easy for the native speakers of a language which does not allow final consonant clusters, but does have an affricate /t͡s/. Their pronunciation will likely sound weird to English natives, but not as weird as the vowel epenthesis they will hear from the same speaker in <caps>. This is in principle the same phenomenon as Russians easily pronouncing the "vowel" of _bate_ (by substituting a vowel-consonant sequence for it), but being unable to distinguish the vowels of _bat _and _bet_.


Hulalessar said:


> · Linguists do not agree on definitions.
> · A clear distinction is not always made between something which actually exists and a useful abstraction.
> · A native speaker's ideas about the sounds of his own language need to be treated with caution. The ideas are likely to be motivated by the language's orthography.
> · A speaker's ideas about the sounds of any language which is not his native language need to be treated with caution. The ideas are likely to be motivated by the phonology and phonotactics of his native language.
> 
> The assertion on Wikipedia that "It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair" encapsulates the problem. It all depends on who is doing the deciding.


To reiterate what I've said above, these are disparate and separately valid considerations, but they cannot be adduced to justify anything I'm arguing against. At best they are warning lables on consumer electronics whose purpose is to make the consumer think twice before opening them, but that are irrelevant to a technician who knows what they're doing. The Wikipedia statement is just that.

You haven't conceded that my objections to your earlier statements are valid, or that the confusion I highlight did indeed take place. This makes me very wary of everything you continue to write, because no matter how reasonable on its own, I take it to be a continuation and justification of a line of reasoning that I find erroneous.


Hulalessar said:


> I pose this question: Suppose you are teaching Russian to a native speaker of a language which does not have affricates or consonant clusters. In lesson three he asks: _Why is it that you have one sign for the sound at the beginning of "tsar'" but two for the sound at the beginning of "stul"? They are the same sounds in a different order._ What will you say?


I imagine the same thing you'd say to an English learner asking why the first two sounds _chair_ aren't a combination of and have nothing to do with the first sounds of _care_ or _hair_. Firstly, I'd say that how a language is written is a convention that can't always be correlated with the facts of the language - this was the best spelling that renaissance English typographers could come up with because they couldn't financially afford to add separate letters, but had to use the ones that Latin was spelt with.

Secondly, I'd say that the first letter of _царь_ is counted by the speakers as one sound that consists of two sounds pronounced together or as quickly as possible, and not two separate sounds as in _стул_, and give them a task to train their pronunciation of that sound using various near-minimal pairs, including pointing their attention to the fact that in principle, _Ц_ can contrast with _ТС_ which is considered two separate sounds. Language is sound that encodes meaning, and so differences in meaning is the best way to teach differences in sound. People habitually go years learning Russian while totally unaware that it contrasts _ся, сья_ and _съя_ and it takes hearing and reproducing the difference for them to get it. The core meaning that's being encoded by these contrasts (including the contrasts this topic is about) is moprheme boundaries.

This is true of morphology and word order and everything else, incidentally, and when people answer questions like "why is the subjunctive used here" with something like "just because, it's arbitrary, just remember it" instead of explaining what meaning a contrasting (opposite) option would result in, they're erring in the most fundamental way by forgetting what language is all about. This one's at the top of language learning/teaching mistakes for sure.


----------



## berndf

Forero said:


> The claim was made that this particular young woman does not distinguish /p͡f/ from /f/, but my observation is that she pronounces /p͡f/ labiodentally (at least sometimes) and does not (always) merge it with /f/.


I speak a similar accent I can only tell you that for me the merger is perfect. At the age of 62 I still make spelling mistakes. I caught myself yesterday spelling _Pfanne_ (_pan_) as _Fanne_ in a text message. I don't know what you are hearing there. It is my natural /f/ phoneme and I can't detect anything in the wave form that would qualify as a plosive onset. It might be a failed attempt to produce an affricate on her side or it might just be /f/-variant you perceive as an affricate. The pronunciation of /f/ in _Faust_ here by user friedrich sounds more like a labiodental affricate to me than her version of _Pferde_. And that certainly was not a failed attempt to pronounce <pf>.


----------



## Forero

berndf said:


> I speak a similar accent I can only tell you that for me the merger is perfect. At the age of 62 I still make spelling mistakes. I caught myself yesterday spelling _Pfanne_ (_pan_) as _Fanne_ in a text message. I don't know what you are hearing there. It is my natural /f/ phoneme and I can't detect anything in the wave form that would qualify as a plosive onset. It might be a failed attempt to produce an affricate on her side or it might just be /f/-variant you perceive as an affricate. The pronunciation of /f/ in _Faust_ here by user friedrich sounds more like a labiodental affricate to me than her version of _Pferde_. And that certainly was not a failed attempt to pronounce <pf>.


I don't hear any [p] here, labiodental or otherwise.


berndf said:


> Do they? _Dual *core* chip_ and _dual *court*ship_. How else would you pronounce it?


"Dual core chip" has three stresses, and stressing "core" a little more is certainly a possibility, especially if contrasting it with "dual <something else> chip".

"Courtship" ends in an unstressed syllable, and it is kind of unnatural (though not unheard of) to pronounce "-ship" as "ship" — except in a song.

If I suppose these are words in a song, I can make "dual courtship" and "dual core chip" sound very similar, but the contrast between "tsh" and "ch" never goes away.

I pronounce "courtship" with an unreleased "t", so there is no aspiration in the "tsh", the tip of my tongue curls back a little between the "t" position and the "sh" position, and there is lip rounding for the "sh".

On the other hand, the "ch" of "chip" is aspirated, the tongue tip releases but does not curl back at all, and there is little to no lip rounding.

I wish we had a better minimal pair.

The "r" in "trip" is usually unvoiced, and the "tr" combination usually aspirated, so I see no reason not to call it affricate. Unfortunately, there is no syllable-initial unvoiced "r" in my English.

The words "trip" and "chip" contrast in my version of English, though I think I hear a merger between the two in some people's speech.

The American "r" sound is complicated to describe, but my "r" in "trip" sounds even less like a "sh" than the last part of "ch" does.


----------



## Sobakus

Forero said:


> The "r" in "trip" is usually unvoiced, and the "tr" combination usually aspirated, so I see no reason not to call it affricate.


Consonant assimilation (progressive devoicing of /r/ or retroflexion of /t/) does not make a cluster an affricate. The easiest diagnostic for an affricate is inseparability as a segment, in the same way /ch/ cannot be separated into /t/ and /sh/. I've seen no evidence to suggest that /tr/ behaves differently from /kl/ or /sm/ in this respect, or in a task like shuffling around the first and the last consonant (> _prit_ and not **_pitr_), or in the _rootay_ dialect of Igpay Atinlay (_trip > riptay_ but not _chip > **shiptay)._


----------



## berndf

Forero said:


> I pronounce "courtship" with an unreleased "t"


This reminds me of a difference between (American) English and German (at least northern varieties) that might explain our different perceptions: AmE has stops, Gm has plosives. An unreleased /t/ would be a contradiction in terms in Gm. Without a release a /t/ wouldn't be a /t/. Same with /p/. I have taken a closer look at the recording in a audio workstation and there is indeed a stop but no release and that must be why I don't relate it to the /f/. However this stop is to be analysed in German phonology (if at all), it doesn't form a segment together with the subsequent fricative. That would require an audible release.


----------



## Sobakus

berndf said:


> This reminds me of a difference between (American) English and German (at least northern varieties) that might explain our different perceptions: AmE has stops, Gm has plosives. An unreleased /t/ would be a contradiction in terms in Gm. Without a release a /t/ wouldn't be a /t/. Same with /p/. I have taken a closer look at the recording in a audio workstation and there is indeed a stop but no release and that must be why I don't relate it to the /f/. However this stop is to be analysed in German phonology (if at all), it doesn't form a segment together with the subsequent fricative. That would require an audible release.


But isn't the German <pf> an affricate, and the [f] its release? Surely you don't mean there's a separate release of the [p], making it a cluster? Not to mention that to me it seems like it behaves like a single segment throughout, I even hear it no different from an /f/ in words like _Dampf._


----------



## berndf

Sobakus said:


> But isn't the German <pf> an affricate, and the [f] its release? Surely you don't mean there's a separate release of the [p], making it a cluster? Not to mention that to me it seems like it behaves like a single segment throughout, I even hear it no different from an /f/ in words like _Dampf._


Of course,  yes. The f *is* the release. My point was that there must be an audible release at all.


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## Sobakus

berndf said:


> Of course,  yes. The f *is* the release. My point was that there must be an audible at all.


If there's only one release in it, and if you've found a stop component in the audio workstation, then doesn't it mean it's an affricate? I personally also hear it as indistinguishable from her /f/ in _viel_; but our sample size is so minute that a genuine difference cannot statistically be told from accident or free variation, and so I don't believe searching for it makes sense.


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## berndf

I think I have found a wave pattern that corresponds to a closure but none that corresponds to a release. AmE indeed has unreleased stops. German doesn't. That's why I am not thinking that @Forero's perception of a [p] (his language does not have [pf] as a single segment,  so his perception is probably triggered by different events for the [p] and the [f] component) might be triggered by the closure while this is meaningless to me (and probably also to you) and only an audible release would trigger the perception of a affricate.


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## Sobakus

berndf said:


> I think I have found a wave pattern that corresponds to a closure but none that corresponds to a release. AmE indeed has unreleased stops. German doesn't. That's why I am not thinking that @Forero's perception of a [p] (his language does not have [pf] as a single segment,  so his perception is probably triggered by different events for the [p] and the [f] component) might be triggered by the closure while this is meaningless to me (and probably also to you) and only an audible release would trigger the perception of a affricate.


B-bbut the standard German affricate [p͡f] has no separate release of the [p] - the [f] is its release! So if there's a [p] released with an [f], it should be the standard affricate (which it certainly doesn't sound to me). For this reason I don't think it's about the release, but about the length: and not necessarily of the stop portion either!

What I'm coming to think after listening to some other excerps with her talking towards the end of the video is that there does exist a difference, but it's perceptible mainly intervocalically, and not as an affricate vs. fricative, but as a fortis fricative vs. lenis fricative, with a tension and a length component.

Since English typically has pre-glottalisation of voiceless stops but not fricatives, English speakers might be hearing a longer vocal fold closure or lip closure in the fortis <pf>, interpreting it as a stop portion; this might also be what you're seeing in the wave-form.


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## berndf

Sobakus said:


> B-bbut the standard German affricate [p͡f] has no separate release of the [p] - the [f] is its release!


Yes, of course. The Important thing is that there is a release at all.

A stop consists of two events: closure and release. In some languages a stop/plosive is detected if the closure is audible and in some only if the release is audible. AmE has unreleased stops, i.e. stops where only the closure is audible but not the release.

In that lady's pronunciation there is an audible closure but no audible release. Without an audible release it cannot be an affricate. But @Forero as an American English speaker detects the audible closure while we ignore it.

I guess this has to do with final obstruent devoicing. In AmE unreleased stops regularly (though not exclusively) happen in words ending in a voiced stop. In your and in my language, final voiced stops don't exist.

I think we mean the same thing and just express it differently.


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## Forero

berndf said:


> Yes, of course. The Important thing is that there is a release at at all.
> 
> A stop consists of two events: closure and release. In some languages a stop/plosive is detected if the closure is audible and in some only if the release is audible. AmE has unreleased stops, i.e. stops where only the closure is audible but not the release.
> 
> In that lady's pronunciation there is an audible closure but no audible release. Without an audible release it cannot be an affricate. But @Forero as an American English speaker detects the audible closure while we ignore it.
> 
> I guess this has to do with final obstruent devoicing. In AmE unreleased stops regularly happen in words ending in a voiced stop. In your and in my language, final voiced stops don't exist.
> 
> I think we mean the same thing and just express it differently.


If you are talking about the part of the video I think you are, what I heard was a labiodental affricate, not an unreleased stop followed by an "f".

The unreleased stop I mentioned was the "t" in "courtship", which is unreleased and followed by "sh", as opposed to the "ch" in "core chip", which is an affricate. I was trying to explain how I distinguish between that "tsh" and that "ch" and why the description "affricate" applies to that "ch" and not to that "tsh".


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## berndf

Forero said:


> If you are talking about the part of the video I think you are, what I heard was a labiodental affricate, not an unreleased stop followed by an "f".


I understand. I was formulating a theory based on the traits of our languages that might explain why it is perceive as an affricate by you while in German it is not.

In German, an _unreleased stop _would be a contraction in term. And that might explain why you hear something where I hear nothing. Without an audible release it is not an affricate and there is no audible release but there is an audible closure. That is my current theory.


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## Forero

berndf said:


> I understand. I was formulating a theory based on the traits of our languages that might explain why it is perceive as an affricate by you while in German it is not.
> 
> In German, an _unreleased stop _would be a contraction in term. And that might explain why you hear something where I hear nothing. Without an audible release it is not an affricate and there is no audible release but there is an audible closure. That is my current theory.


You seem to be saying that you won't hear the "t" when I pronounce "courtship", but I don't see how this explains how you and I hear the lady's version of "pf" differently.

When I hear her "mit Pflasterstein" at 1:05, I do not hear an unreleased "p" but "mit" with an unreleased "t" followed by a labiodental stop releasing into an [f]. I hear the unreleased "t" because of the vowel that precedes it, and I hear the labiodental stop because of the way it releases into the [f].

Do you not hear the unreleased "t" in "mit"?

(I think [t͡f] is possible, but that is not what I hear.)


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## berndf

Forero said:


> followed by a labiodental stop releasing into an [f]


The issue is that I can't find any kind of release, neither by listening carefully nor by inspecting the wave form. The only thing I can detect is a closure of what seems to me a glottalized separation of _die _and _Pferde_, which is quite common in German to enhance the separation of a word or morpheme ending in a vowel from the following word or morpheme.

Another issue is that since there is not such thing as an labiodental affricate or stop in German, I am not sure what this is and how to produce it. By pressing my lower lip against my upper teeth I am not able to block the air-stream. You might have to explain to me what you mean by "labiodental affricate".


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## Forero

berndf said:


> The issue is that I can't find any kind of release, neither by listening carefully nor by inspecting the wave form. The only thing I can detect is a closure of what seems to me a glottalized separation of _die _and _Pferde_, which is quite common in German to enhance the separation of a word or morpheme ending in a vowel from the following word or morpheme.
> 
> Another issue is that since there is not such thing as an labiodental affricate or stop in German, I am not sure what this is and how to produce it. By pressing my lower lip against my upper teeth I am not able to block the air-stream. You might have to explain to me what you mean by "labiodental affricate".


Pretend you have a very sore upper lip, or hold your upper lip out of the way with your hand, and make as close as you can to a "p" sound by using your upper teeth as a "lip".

When I pronounce the labiodental affricate sound, the middle part of my lower lip stays in place against my two foremost upper teeth and the air pressure releases to the left and right.

If I pronounce English "comfort" quickly, I get [ɱf]; but if I pronounce it carefully so as to get a proper [m] sound, what comes after that [m] is a labiodental affricate sound instead of a plain [f].

According to this article, the symbol for the unvoiced labiodental affricate sound is [p̪͡f] or [ȹ͡f]. I tried pronouncing the Modern Greek word "σάπφειρος" [suggested by that article], and that labiodental affricate sound came out naturally.

I am just suggesting that the lady in the video may be using this [ȹ͡f] as an allophone of [p͡f].


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## berndf

Do you hear it here? I hear [s̺ap.fi.ro̞s̺]. No affricate. If I try to join the π and the φ what comes out is [p.p͡f] is in my _Apfel_, which sounds wrong to me. It seems that [ȹ͡f] if it occurs is simply /f/ in German.

What do you hear in each of these three version: diePferde.wav ?
All three are natural in my variety of German, though probably overarticulated. That is difficult to avoid if you are recording specially for the purpose of demonstrating how to pronounce something?


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## Forero

berndf said:


> Do you hear it here? I hear [s̺ap.fi.ro̞s̺]. No affricate. If I try to join the π and the φ what comes out is [p.p͡f] is in my _Apfel_, which sounds wrong to me. It seems that [ȹ͡f] if it occurs is simply /f/ in German.


I don't see a link here.





> What do you hear in each of these three version: diePferde.wav ?
> All three are natural in my variety of German, though probably overarticulated. That is difficult to avoid if you are recording specially for the purpose of demonstrating how to pronounce something?


I hear a longish [f] sound in the first version, and [p͡f] in the other two, with a little more aspiration in the last version.


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## berndf

Forero said:


> I don't see a link here.


Sorry. Pronunciations for σάπφειρος


Forero said:


> I hear a longish [f] sound in the first version, and [p͡f] in the other two, with a little more aspiration in the last version.


I admit it is so overarticulated that I might hear two [p͡f]s as well. In fact only the last one was produced as a bilabial-labiodental affricate. The second pronunciation is an labiodental fricative with a glottalized separation of _die _and _Pferde_.


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## Sobakus

berndf said:


> What do you hear in each of these three version: diePferde.wav ?
> All three are natural in my variety of German, though probably overarticulated. That is difficult to avoid if you are recording specially for the purpose of demonstrating how to pronounce something?


I hear a very clear fortis~geminate [f:] that is clearly different from a normal /f/ precisely in the same way as with the woman in the horse video; then an _absolutely unambiguous pre-glottalised_ /ʔf/ with something like an additional stop component that sounds like an artifact to me; then a normal German /p͡f/.


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## Forero

berndf said:


> Do you hear it here? I hear [s̺ap.fi.ro̞s̺]. No affricate. If I try to join the π and the φ what comes out is [p.p͡f] is in my _Apfel_, which sounds wrong to me. It seems that [ȹ͡f] if it occurs is simply /f/ in German.


Right. No affricate here.


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## berndf

Sobakus said:


> I hear a very clear fortis~geminate [f:] that is clearly different from a normal /f/ precisely in the same way as with the woman in the horse video; then an _absolutely unambiguous pre-glottalised_ /ʔf/ with something like an additional stop component that sounds like an artifact to me; then a normal German /p͡f/.


You confirming that you hear what I intended to produce and @Forero confirming that he hears affricate can, I think, be taken as evidence for my hypothesis that the frequent but not mandatory pre-glottalisation in German can produce an artifact that can induce the perception of an affricate if in front of a fricative and that is what happened with that lady's pronunciation of _die Pferde_.

But @Forero's hypothesis that she intended to produce the German /p͡f/ but didn't get it out quite right remains a possibility as well (though I still don't think so). Speakers of her variety of German tend to pronounce initial <pf> differently in different registers (/p͡f/ in formal registers and in careful speech and /f/ in colloquial and casual registers). She speaks quite casually but being on TV is not exactly "colloquial". So it is an in-between register.

Thank you all.


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## Linnets

berndf said:


> As for _pizza_, the correct pronunciation in Italian is /'pit.t͡sa/ (a long [t͡s] is [tt͡s]). The de-composition does make sense but the it needs to be annotated as a joint phoneme and so it is.


Luciano Canepari, an Italian phonetician, transcibes it as /ˈpiʦʦa/; it might be not the best way to transcribe it but remember that in Italian geminates are heterosyllabic and are the same phonological segment (although duplicated).



berndf said:


> BTW, are you aware of any language that maintains a phonemically significant difference the between [t͡s] and [ts] within a syllable?


Maybe not the best example, but in Italian you may notice a slight difference between (_la mosca_) _tse-tse (_with /ts/, at least a possible pronunciation of a word or foreign origin) and _zeppa_ (with /t͡s/).


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## Drakonica

Hulalessar said:


> I said: /t͡s/ and /ts/ are essentially the same thing - or at least are perceived by most people to be the same thing.


No, it isn't.

Minimal pair in Polish:
- katsy (cats) a playful polonisation of English word,
- kacy (of hangovers).

---
For many, many years I thought that the only difference between the "i" in "sheep" and "ship" was the length of the vowel. Most Poles and other non-English speakers probably thought the same.


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