this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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Linguistics Humor

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[ʲʔ̬̃ˤː˥˩˥˩]

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

parsing it:

  • [ʲ] - palatalisation; co-articulate your tongue closer to the hard palate. You can kind of get the difference if you focus on the /f/ of the words "few" /fjuː/ and "fool" /fuːl/, the former is slightly palatalised due to interference of the nearby /j/
  • [ʔ] - glottal stop. If you're old enough to remember ICQ, it's the dash in the "oh-oh!" sound. Plenty English speakers use it to render /t/ in the words "butter" and "bottle", John Lennon for example.
  • [ ̬] - voices the sound represented by the symbol above. In this case, [ʔ̬] would represent a voiced glottal stop, but this won't happen - you need the glottis open for voicing! However due to sloppy notation people use the symbol for a creaky-voiced glottal approximant.
  • [~] - nasalisation. It's air slipping through your nose. This can happen in vowels, consonants, or both. If it helps to visualise how to do this: [b̃] = [m], [d̃] = [n]. Now you just need to do it with the above.
  • [ˤ] - pharingealisation. Constrict your pharynx slightly while pronouncing the consonant. (Arabic, Hebrew speakers: "emphatic" consonants are typically pharyngealised.)
  • [ː] - whatever comes before this character should be pronounced longer. e.g. longcat is loːng. (Sloppy people use [:] instead. I do it all the time.)
  • [˥˩˥˩] - tone. Pitch is going high, low, high, low.

...I'm not even trying to pronounce this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Based on this I think it's sort of a nasal gagging sound.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I have no idea, but I'm picturing something like that too.