What is the difference between “short” and “shirt?” Expand your knowledge of the IPA charts and learn how these two words illustrate some striking nuances between two world languages.
TRANSCRIPT:
So now that we’re more familiar with all the different sounds of all the languages in the world as captured in those IPA charts, the next question would be, what about one language? And of course any one single language is going to use a subset of those phonemes that have been identified. Now, all languages have vowels. In fact, imagine a language without vowels. It would be really hard to speak it, and even harder to sing it because when we sing we spend most of our time in the vowels. La la laaa, right? So all languages have vowels. Some have as few as two vowels and then only a total of 11 phonemes. Most languages have like 30 to 40 phonemes all the way up to over 100 for some of the African languages. In fact, there is this theory, this hypothesis that as languages have evolved, following human migration and evolution of languages, the actual number of phonemes in the phonetic diversity has been reduced. For example, a data point would be British English has more vowels than American English. These is this ‘oh’ sound in British English that is not present in American English. Now, in order to determine whether something is a phoneme or not, you basically need to study where there’s a minimal pair. Let me give you an example. If I say, what’s the phonetic difference between short and shirt, you would say, well that’s fairly easy, short as opposed to long, is spelled with an ‘o.’ There is a vowel ‘o’ sound in short whereas shirt, you know the piece of clothing I’m wearing, sounds differently because the vowel is not an ‘o’ it’s spelled as an ‘i’, right? Short, shirt. And that is certainly a distinction that is made in English and that’s why ‘o’ and ‘i’ are different sounds.But the interesting thing is, a speaker of Mandarin Chinese would say, “There is another difference.” What? Another difference? Short, shirt just beyond the vowel? But if you pay close attention you’ll realize that the ‘shh’ in short versus the ‘shh’ in shirt is actually articulated differently, and in Chinese, that is an important difference.
For example, ‘shh’ means ‘to be’ in Chinese versus the ‘she’ of East like Shevania of Spain, that sound is different ‘shh’ versus ‘she,’ and so that distinction is important, and that’s a different phoneme. So, in fact the main part of learning a language is really realizing what are important differences versus what are not important differences in the language.
