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.
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/.
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.
MR used b instead of p when the previous syllable ends with /ŋ/, /n/, /m/, /l/ or a vowel, signalling that ㅂ is definitely voiced when the previous syllable ends with a voiced sonorant phoneme.
RR uses p instead of b in a final position, signalling that ㅂ is definitely unvoiced in a final position.