#it's already crazy enough that 50 ms is the difference between a /b/ and a totally different phoneme. like delay vibrating your vocal folds | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

coquelicoq · 2 years

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the onset of voicing in the /b/ and /p/ phonemes are different in french than in english which is why french p's sometimes sound like b's to me, but for some reason i have not been able to replicate this yet in my own speech except in the word "père". pretty solid on pronouncing père, not at all on pronouncing any other word with a p in it. baby steps i guess.

#omg i just looked this up in ladefoged and he even has a handy chart comparing the voice onset time for /b/ and /p/#for french and english!!!!#thanks petey! i take back what i said about you last year not giving me the sufficiently complicated algorithm for determining the lexical #stress of any given english word #i mean i still want that but you're dead and i understand that it's unreasonable to ask things of you in that state #so that's on me. and now also you've got my back with this VOT graph. you're a real one #if you're curious voicing starts about 10 ms into the english stressed initial /b/ and about 60 ms into english stressed initial /p/#whereas french /p/ is about 15 ms and /b/ is -100 ms or more #that 5 ms difference between english /b/ and french /p/ is blowing my mind because i CAN hear the difference. it's just that french /p/ is #closer to english b than it is to english p so it kinda sounds like you tried to make an english b but were just sliiiiiightly off #but damn. five MILLISECONDS??? that's the difference that i can hear? sometimes?#it's already crazy enough that 50 ms is the difference between a /b/ and a totally different phoneme. like delay vibrating your vocal folds #for a mere fifty milliseconds and you have made a whole other word! bestie that is sooooo few milliseconds!!!!!!#my instincts are so off on this lol i was thinking VOT for /p/ was like 600 ms and VOT for /b/ was 100 #wow. send me back to phonetics 101 i guess. actually that sounds very fun i would love to take remedial phonetics #french #phonetics #my posts #my french pronunciation journey has gotten so much more fun since i stopped freaking out about how bad my accent is #or well i still freak out about it. but less!#turns out it's really hard to get better at something if you're so afraid of being bad that you never practice #also everyone else in my class has bad accents except for like two guys who have been taking the class for 12 years #and one of them lived in montreal. so that's cheating. disqualified!#god what if i just started like. recording my speech in praat and looking at the waveform and making adjustments based on the VOT #like biofeedback for my french accent #for all the rounded front vowels i can't tell apart just break out the spectrograms and start comparing formants #every time a french person says something i'd be like damn. what i wouldn't give to get that sound in my shop and look under the hood #i bet that spectrogram would be really something

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