Absolutely. It’s helpful in practice, not just as a reference (aspirated Korean consonants are the bane of my existence, IPA and tons of instructional videos and I still can’t pronounce them satisfactorily to my ear. I can distinguish them when I hear them, tho ).
I couldn’t describe it like that on my own, maybe, but it’s clear to me that I’m hearing different sounds. I understand that some may not, though. As I said, this may be a “me” thing.
My point was, IPA and similar shouldn’t be used against native people to belittle their knowledge of their own language. As in, it’s standardised like that, so it’s actually like that. It’s not. It wasn’t about anyone in particular here. I’ve had many “Greek studies enthusiasts” do that, and I find it annoying, what can I say
At the end of the day, language is all about approximating one thing with another, so it’s fitting that a language about language does the same. Are there any languages about languages about languages?
This discussion has left out, understandably, another factor that affects how a word is pronounced and heard: a person’s hearing. People begin to lose the upper partials of their hearing at about age 28. In addition, people naturally differ in their ability to discern the interval between two tones. Many people are unable to hear even the interval of the half-step (they are literally tone deaf). It is hard to imagine what they hear, probably an incomprehensible wall of distorted sound. I knew such a person, and he had no appreciation of music (by his own admission), which didn’t surprise me.
The consequences of these deficiencies are that they would interfere with the hearing and imitation of any intoned language, and I suspect with some aural clues to pronunciation in any language. Even things like the rising tone of a question in English might be lost. Accents also need to be considered. Imagine the differences that might occur in the pronunciation by a Bostonian, a Mississippian, and a Minnesotan of Swedish descent. Finally, the state of one’s vocal cords, as well as the muscular control over tongue and mouth, would affect how one speaks.
Just a small drive-by comment: when I heard Koreans saying baduk it was more like a p than I had expected (based on the ‘baduk’ transliteration to sounds in my head and maybe I had heard some English-speakers saying it in quite a ‘b’ way too).
In native English, p tends to be aspirated. I heard that because of this, native English speakers easily confuse a non-aspirated p with a b. In other Germanic and Romance languages this is not the case AFAIK.
I haven’t checked yet how the initial phoneme of baduk, as pronounced by a native Korean, sounds to my Dutch ears, but I will.
in particular, “badukpan” 바둑판, meaning go board. The first consonant is not aspirated and unvoiced, and the first consonant of “pan” is aspirated (and unvoiced).
To me the first phoneme of “baduk” in those videos also sounds unvoiced, so more a /p/ than a /b/ in IPA.
In the 1st video at 6s and the 2nd video at 2s, I’d even say the first phoneme of “baduk” sounded a bit aspirated to my untrained Dutch ears (even though it shouldn’t be?), but less aspirated than the first phoneme of “pan” in the 1st video.
Even the “d” in baduk sounds a bit aspirated to me in the 1st video, but not in the 2nd. Can this aspiration be a means of adding stress in Korean, or can be it be a local accent of the speaker?
About the “pan”: I actually hear her say something like /pʰänɞɭ/ as one word (around 6s in the 1st video). Is the /ɞɭ/ some kind of suffix?
Same for me, the initial consonant sounds like how the letter “P” is pronounced in French.
I don’t speak Korean either so my hearing of Korean is untrained.
Indeed my statement was partially incorrect. In Dutch and French plosives p/k/t are unaspirated, but in German they are (mostly) aspirated, as in English.
It seems that during the 2nd German consonant shift, increased aspiration of plosives happened in southern Germanic dialects, sometimes even shifting plosives beyond aspiration, into fricatives
/p/ → /pʰ/ → /p͡f/ → /pf/ → /f/
/k/ → /kʰ/ → /k͡x/→ /x/ → /ç/
/t/ → /tʰ/ → /t͡s/ → /ts/ → /s/
So we now have cognates like these between Dutch and German (English between parentheses). Note that all those consonants are unaspirated in Dutch, but aspirated in English (even the w in water):
apen <=> affen (apes)
koken <=> kochen (cooking)
water <=> wasser (water)
Because Dutch doesn’t have aspiration of plosives, most Dutch people won’t aspirate those when speaking a foreign language. I suppose that’s part of having a Dutch accent when speaking German or English. We need some conscious effort and training to aspirate consonants and make our German/English speech sound more native.
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