Excellent IPA Tutorial, etc , compliments of Chris Duffel

2 Excellent IPA Tutorial sites:

http://staff.washington.edu/dmontero/IPACharmap/

instead of having to know the combination code for each character ...

and also this one

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~stairs/phthong/phthong100.html

its an interactive run through of ipa characters


The second one actually tests you over words, English to IPA and IPA to English; very cool and approved by ee! (:

All the IPA symbols in one sentence, modified to include previously missing symbols

2 Excellent IPA Tutorial sites:

http://staff.washington.edu/dmontero/IPACharmap/

instead of having to know the combination code for each character ...

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~stairs/phthong/phthong100.html

it's an interactive run through of ipa characters


The second one actually tests you over words, English to IPA and IPA to English; very cool and approved by ee (:

Minimal Pairs

A minimal pair proves that two phones (i.e., sounds) are completely separate phonemes in that language (and not two different variations of the same sound like our various pronunciations for /t/).

A minimal pair consists of two words in a given language with all the same sounds (in the same sequence) except for one, in the same place in the word.


For example, cap and gap are minimal pairs showing that /k/ and /g/ are separate phonemes in English. You can also have minimal triplets or minimal sets of sounds that are quite long. so add tap map, nap rap lap, sap, zap,map, chap, yap, (but not dap, wap, shap, zhap, bap, fap, vap, which are all lexical gaps just waiting to have a meaning assigned to them),

But not crap. Why not? It has more than 3 segments/phones in it, which is all the others in the set have.

On the other hand, crap and clap are a minimal pair, showing that /l/ and /r/ are separate phonemes in English (or allophones of separate phonemes, to be more accurate).

However, crap and crop are minimal pairs showing that /ae/ and /a/ are separate phonemes.

And crop and crock are minimal pairs showing that /p/ and /k/ are separate phonemes (in case you thought they were two variations of the same sound (: , which would just be sad ).

So the contrastive sound in a minimal pair can be initial, medial, or final in position, as long as both are in the same position in their respective words.

Stuff you can do with linguistics

Some Applications of Linguistics

Speech pathology: children, stroke victims, persons with other kinds of brain damage or language complication.

Accent reduction: Teach people to talk like everybody else ; this is particularly helpful if you want to be a spy. Sometimes people with strong dialects are turned down for employment, esp. if communication with the public, etc. is a big part of the job (answering phones, for example)

Writing fiction, etc: Represent dialects or language varieties accurately; use knowledge of language to bring about certain effects on the reader. Poe was very linguistically purposeful in the way he went about writing The Raven, Lanore. (:

Vocal performance: Be able to produce the sounds of songs in foreign languages you don’t actually know. Singing operas in Italian and so forth, which most of you do weekly, I'm sure

Actor: Be able to adopt the language variety of the character you are portraying. I.E. be Meryl Streep.

Government/politics: Be a diplomat (or a spy) (or both)

Military intelligence: Code breaking/Code making; communicating with the ‘enemy,’ combatants or otherwise. . .

Foreign language teaching: ESL or any other language. Speech and/or writing systems.

Other teaching: Teaching content areas to students in a language that is not native to them (e.g., teaching history in English to native speakers of Farsi).

Translation or Interpretation (written ((diachronic or synchronic)) or real time spoken) for the FBI, CIA , Corporate world or a zillion other spheres.

Computational linguistics: Teach computers to think like and communicate better with humans.
Create Machine translators for the FBI, CIA or Corporate world.

Cognitive linguistics: Use language to understand the cognition of the human brain.

Neurolinguistics: Identify parts of the brain that control various linguistic functions. . .

Psycholinguistics: Understand first and/or second language acquisition and bilingualism (different)
Understand something about human behavior and language

Experimental psychology: use language as a key to human psychology and processing.

Communications:
Marketing, Interfacing optimally with the public, understanding nonverbal communication; managing media production (including handing off the speaker turn to somebody at a remote location)

Teaching Reading to Children (or Adults): Be able to understand how dialect differences affect a person’s ability to connect orthography with the sounds of a language; understand the psychological processing of language for reading. . . .

Editing, Teaching Grammatical Styles: Syntax helps you understand and convey the ‘rules’ of a language, both prescriptive and descriptive.

Law: Be an expert witness as to where a person is most likely from, whether they are a native of x language, whether differences in their stories are likely to be due to fabrication or the normal processes of the human brain’s production of narrative from memory. . .

Medicine: Know whether the language anomalies in a patient’s speech are pathological and/or what pathology they are evidence of.

Language Planning & Policy: Help form public policy that regulates the use of language in a country or society (for various purposes). People who think “English Only” in the U.S. is a good idea are one example, people who want to argue for diversity of language and get legislation to protect this are another.

Choose or develop an orthography for your (nation’s) language. (E.g., Ataturk changed the Turkish writing system from Arabic script to the Roman script I am writing in right now).

Philosophy: Combine linguistics with logic and math to chase English and Anthropology majors away.

Academics: Teach, write scintillating articles, overwhelm people with your incomprehensibility to make them think you’re a genius, make not very much money.

Cultural Anthropology: Get into the ‘minds’ of your informants; discover unique linguistically encoded cultural features, assumptions in words and structures that do not exist in other languages.

Archeological Anthropology: Translate ancient texts; reconstruct ancient languages, etc.

Evolutionary/Biological Anthropology: Study animal communication systems and try to reconstruct the path of the evolution of language.