Interesting. To me, the man pronouncing “o peixe” sounds different to the woman pronouncing it, differing not only in the initial consonant of “peixe”.
I feel the man says /ɔ 'pe:ʃɪ/, while the woman says /ɔ 'beɪʃi/. Maybe a difference in regional accent?
Please excuse my mixing up of brackets and slashes when using IPA. I should probably have used brackets here and in many of my previous posts.
I hear a “p” sound in both cases. But of course our ears haven’t been formatted in the same way.
Ermigerd. Those two sounded the same to me 
In that 1st video pronouncing Portuguese “peixe”, I can’t quite decide if I hear a /b/ or a /p/. It seems in between to me.
But in the 2nd video pronouncing (British) English “pain”, I can very clearly hear /pʰ/. I would never confuse that with /b/.
When you (as a native English speaker) pronounce “Spain” versus “pain”, don’t you notice a difference?
From my understanding, the first would usually be pronounced as /speɪn/ and the second as /pʰeɪn/.
I don’t know if there would be a difference between standard British English and standard American English.
I heard different sounds for Paixe as well. The second one sounds like what I expect from a p in other romantic languages, but I kind of heard a Chinese b in the first one. Almost a korean ㅃ.
Funny. Although I don’t speak Chinese at all, in the video with 2 different people pronouncing Portuguese “paixe”, I somehow thought the second one (/'beɪʃi/) sounded more Chinese than the first one (/'pe:ʃɪ/). Perhaps this is because the second one sounded quite similar to how I hear Chinese people pronounce the first syllable of “Beijing”.
But in your video about Chinese pronunciation of “b”, she indeed says it is unvoiced, i.e. /p/.[¹].
If that claim were true, then I wonder why that Chinese sound is not just transliterated as “p”.
But when she proceeds to pronounce “bàba”, I hear /pàba/, so it would make sense to transliterate it to “b” at least in medial positions.
This potential pattern of “b” becoming unvoiced /p/ in initial positions[²] seems very similar to what we are discussing here about Korean phonology. I wonder if there is some sort of sprachbund between Chinese and Korean. Although even to my ears, the initial consonant as pronounced here(“Beijing”) does sound like a /b/ (voiced), not like a /p/ (unvoiced), so my hypothesis about the pronunciation of initial “b” as /p/ in Chinese may not be valid.
[¹] It’s clear that this video is aimed at English speakers, because it recommends to pronounce “b” as the “p” in “speak”, which is unaspirated and unvoiced. Was the potential confusion of /p/ with /pʰ/ for English speakers part of the reason why the common Latin transliteration of the name of the Chinese capital (/beɪˈd͡ʒɪŋ/) changed from “Peking” to “Beijing”?
[²] By the way, in Dutch “b” becomes unvoiced (/p/) in final positions. We pronounce “lab” as /lɑp/ and “bob” as /bɔp/.
Some romanizations transliaterate it as a “p”.
So WG transliteration of Mandarin Chinese used p for /p/ and pʼ for /pʰ/, which was officially replaced by pinyin in mainland China in 1958, that uses b for /p/ and p for /pʰ/.
These developments seem very similar to the MR transliteration of Korean, that used p for ㅂ(/p/) and p’ for ㅍ(/pʰ/), which was replaced by RR in South Korea in 2000, that uses b for ㅂ and p for ㅍ.
Both MR and RR have some additional rules about the transliteration of ㅂ in specific situations.
To complicate things even further:
If that’s the same video I watched some months ago, didn’t it come to the conclusion that maybe one dialect is, but there are competing theories about what’s happening, and we just have to wait and see?
It was uploaded 5 days ago, and it talks about a gradual shift in Korean pronuncation (some plosive consonant distinctions being replaced by pitch distinctions), especially among younger people and women.
Ah, must be a different video, then. Was it pointing primarily to a dialect in the SW of Korea?
No, I doesn’t mention a region. Can’t you just watch it to see what it’s about? It’s less than 3 minutes long (a youtube short).
I don’t like shorts. Vertical video and autoplay next, two things I can’t stand
Here is the generated transcript (it has some mistakes and it obviously lacks the diagrams shown in the video, but you may get the gist of the video from the transcript)
Is Korean becoming a tonal language?
You’ve probably heard of tonal languages
before. Languages that can distinguish
entire words through pitch of voice
alone. In Mandarin Chinese, for example,
mm mm ma are all different words. Well,
Korean is not a tonal language. Yet,
that might be changing. To explain, we
have to talk about tonogenesis, which is
the process by which languages evolve to
develop tones in the first place.
Typically tonogenesis occurs when two
consonants that used to be pronounced
differently start being pronounced the
same and so to compensate speakers start
adding a tonal distinction in the vowels
to keep the words distinct. So if we
imagine that tonogenesis occurred in
English it would be kind of like if the
words pad and bad evolved into the
future to become pad pad. The two words
used to be distinguished by two separate
consonants. But as the language evolved
and the consonants began being
pronounced the same tones developed to
keep the words distinct. In fact, this
exact process is currently ongoing in
Africans. Okay, but what does this have
to do with Korean? Well, Korean
distinguishes three sets of consonants
all pronounced in the same position in
the mouth. Plain consonants like baaka,
aspirated consonants like paka, and
tense consonants like baa. But here’s
the thing. Many younger Koreans often
pronounce their plain consonants a lot
like their aspirated consonants, which
theoretically means entire sets of words
become merged together. Unless Korean
develops tones to compensate. To see if
tonogenesis is actually happening, you
would have to compare the speech of
younger speakers with that of older
speakers to see if you can find a trend
over time. And that’s exactly what this
paper did. The results were fascinating.
Let’s just focus on the top two charts
for now. On the x-axis, we’re measuring
year of birth of the speaker. And on the
Y-axis, we’re measuring VOT, which is
essentially a measure of how different
the consonants are being pronounced.
You’ll notice that the difference in VOT
between the aspirated consonants and the
plain consonants has been trending down
over time, which means that younger
Koreans are pronouncing their plain and
aspirated consonants more similarly.
This is also true for female speakers,
which isn’t too surprising since women
often lead linguistic innovation. Now,
let’s look at the bottom two charts.
Again, on the X axis, we’re looking at
the year of birth of the speaker, but
now on the Y-axis, we’re measuring
average pitch of the vowel after the
consonant. You’ll notice that younger
male speakers tend to pronounce the
plain consonants with a lower pitch.
This is especially true of female
speakers who used to show no
differentiation in pitch, but younger
female speakers show a very clear lower
pitch for the plain consonants. You can
see this much more clearly from these
top four charts from a future study.
Plain and aspirated consonants are being
pronounced almost identically by younger
speakers, but to compensate, vowels
after plain consonants are being
pronounced a lot lower. Now, this is
still a very new phenomenon, so there
are some caveats. How much this actually
happens is going to depend a lot from
word to word or on each individual
speaker. And so far, it seems like this
is only really affecting the sole
dialect. But that being said, it sure
seems like Korean is undergoing
tonogenesis. What used to be a constant
distinction is being replaced with a
tonal distinction.
I do notice now that he mentions at the end that this apparent tonogenesis is linked to the Seoul dialect (with Seoul transcribed as sole).
Pretty sure Korean isn’t becoming tonal. I think this has more to do with a vast amount of people that studied linguistics and now need something to do^^