What does the International Phonetic Alphabet have to do with MindMeld? Watch our Director of Research explain the connection, while demonstrating how to pronounce the trickiest of sounds in the IPA chart.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, my name is Marsal Gavaldà and I’m the Director of Research at Expect Labs. One of the key inputs to our MindMeld platform is speech so that we can understand what you’re saying and bring you relevant information. But, what is really speech? If I said something like [not English] you would say was he speaking French? And I wasn’t really speaking any French words, but I was saying some French sounds. So what are the sounds of language and are they common or different across different languages?
Well, the good news is that linguists, and specifically phoneticians, have been studying these for over a hundred years and they’ve come up with a nifty chart; these tables analyze the different sounds of all the languages. When you first look at it, you might scratch your head and say what are all these weird symbols, but actually it’s uniquely organized. So let’s look at the first table, there by the consonants. There’s two dimensions and so, at the top, across, we can see that that’s the place of articulation: where in the mouth that the sound occurs. There’s the bilabial, using both lips but then ttt, ddd, using more of your teeth. Then there’s the retroflex palatal uvular, that goes more toward the back of your mouth using your throat, like ccc, ggg, C, G. Then there’s the nasals, that just means the air flows through the nostrils. In fact, try to say “man,” the word “man,” with your nostrils closed. It sounds very strange because mmm, nnnn all these sounds, you need the air to flow through your nostrils. That’s why they’re called nasals. There’s the trill, that’s a good one. For example, the famous strong Spanish R. Can you say it? There’s a difference, for example, between carro and caro. Caro means expensive and carro means car. So carro caro Right? The expensive car. That’s the rrr sound.
