Experimenting with how I produce /b/ versus /p/ (both unaspirated), the main difference is that airflow is uninterrupted when I say /mba:/ (during the /m/, the airflow goes through my nose only), but when I say /mpa:/, there is an airflow stop before the /p/. It’s not a glottal stop(/ʔ/). I’d say the my dorsal soft palate is just closing the way out through my nose, so the airflow is fully interrupted. This causes my vocal chords to stop vibrating until I open my lips to restore the airflow.
The same seems to happen when I compare /nda:/ with /nta:/ or /ŋga:/ with /ŋka:/.
I can’t find an IPA symbol for this sort of “nasal” stop. Perhaps it’s just implied by the distinction between voiced and unvoiced plosives?
I guess this depends on the dialect. In Niederdeutsch, which is what I’m usually hearing around me, it seems they are unaspirated, as in Dutch. But now that you mention it, when looking at the news it seems they are aspirated.
That at least solves why Regenwasser might find the “p” incorrect for the first letter of baduk.
Coming back to the conversation for a second time even though I said I’m out but I just read the new comments and there seems to have been some fruitful development.
I’ve read through your posts and assimilated to your way of speaking. So I came to understand that what I call a “normal” p is what you guys refer to as “aspirated p” or apparently this here “pʰ”. I can work with that. Every language that I’ve ever spoken to the degree that I can hold a conversation (German, English, Korean, Spanish) does pronounce the p like that. So I never really thought about a distinction here.
I always felt like Dutch/French people talk a little “soft”. Now that you say that this could be because of them not aspirating their consonants. Interesting.
This is not really true. From my birthplace it takes like a little more than an hour by car to get to the dutch border. Everyone aspirates the p. German also seems to aspirate it the most from all the languages I speak. Does not really seem to be a binary thing, you can put more or less power behind the motion. I mean you are the linguist not me but Niederdeutsch is not considered a dialect but its own language and there are not many people left that speak it. Like some folks in smaller villages close to the north sea maybe.
Now we have established that the ㅂ is not aspirated. Great. In Korean the p is always aspirated though (like in German, English, Spanish). The Korean character for p is ㅍ. So if I understand you correctly you are now trying to argue that Korean just “does not have the character b” because apparently in your view ““ㅂ,ㅍ” are the same latin alphabet character”. Which is kind of hilarious. What you and your linguist friends should try to look at is the unaspirated b. I think then you’ve got it.
I don’t speak Korean at all, so I’m falling back on wikipedia about Korean phonology[1].
It says the following (pronunciation between slashes in IPA):
ㅂ = /p/
ㅍ = /pʰ/
And later on it says that ㅂ becomes voiced (/b/) between vowels (and certain consonants).
When transcribing Hangul into the Latin alphabet, the spelling conventions are to transcribe ㅂ as b and ㅍ as p, (mostly?) disregarding if this accurately reflects pronunciation.
It also says younger generations may aspirate ㅂ in initial positions, so I assume that ㅂ would then be pronounced pretty much the same as ㅍ?
At least this may explain why I hear some aspiration in the first consonant of “baduk” (바둑) in those videos, as I assume that both Yeonwoo and Baduk Doctor are not much older than 30.
[1] The wikipedia page on Dutch phonology seems quite accurate to me, so I assume wikipedia is generally a decent source on language phonology.
Bulgogi sounds like /puɭgogi/ to me, though it’s a bit hard to make out the first consonant as it is right at the start of the video. It could also be a /b/.
Boinda, I cannot make out that word being said here.
I’m no expert in linguistic, but I can share a bit about my native tongue, which is German. I was actually confused when I read …
The reason for my confusion is because wrt. “pʰ”, I thought of how the name Philipp is pronounced here (and many other words with “ph”). There is also the name Filipp, and as far as I’m used to, they sound exactly the same, with a typical “F” sound at the start, and a “puff of air” at the end.
I have now watched a video about aspiration in linguistics, and hopefully cleared this misunderstanding. That being said, I can’t think of an example where “b” is aspirated (that I know of). Maybe where I’m from, “P” is just an aspirated “B” in most cases.
I know Hindi has aspirated voiced plosives (and distinguishes those from unaspirated versions as well as unvoiced versions), for example /bʰ/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hCYJP4lx6o&t=37s.
These aspirations are noted by inserting an “h” when transcribing into the Latin alphabet, for example, Ghandi, Buddha, Bhrama.
As I understand it, all combinations of aspiration and voicing of plosives existed in PIE, but their evolution varies between different daughter languages.
Ancient Greek had both unaspirated and aspirated unvoiced plosives:
π = /p/, κ = /k/, τ = /t/
φ = /pʰ/, χ = /kʰ/, θ = /tʰ/
Later on, the aspirated unvoiced plosives shifted to unvoiced fricatives:
φ = /f/, χ = /x/ - /ç/, θ = /θ/
The Romans started using “ph” to transcribe the Greek letter φ when it was still pronounced as /pʰ/, as Latin did not have aspirated plosives and the Latin alphabet lacked symbols for those.
This transcription of φ into the Latin alphabet was preserved when the native Greek pronunciation of φ shifted to /f/ later on, even though the Latin alphabet already had a symbol for /f/.
AFAIK nowadays “ph” is always pronounced as /f/ when used in European languages that use some form of the Latin alphabet (except in words like “uphold” where the p and h belong to different syllables).
In Dutch spelling, “ph” even got replaced by “f”: alfabet, foto, telefoon, Filip, xenofoob.
In Dutch also, morphology can override phonology in regard to spelling.
For example “rood” (red) is pronounced /ʀo:t/, but spelled with a final “d”. This is because in inflections of the word, the “d” is actually pronounced as /d/, such as “roder” (redder) /'ʀo:dəʁ/.
The same can happen with final “b”. For example “lab” /lɑp/ is spelled with a final “b” because of “laborant” /labɔ’ʀɑnt/ and such.
English spelling rules in such cases may follow pronunciation instead, for example “thief” vs “thieves”.
Most english “format” of chinese words, such as weiqi, do not make sense to westerners, because they are not designed for westerners. It is a phonic system, borrowing english 26 letters, to teach chinese the sounds of the chinese words. More than often, they sound differently than if you just follow english to sound them out. One has to learn the system to read them out correctly.
For example, the popular chinese family name, yang, sounds like Young in english.
Foreign languages and their translations are confusing in nature. You pick what you like or best you see fit to communicate. No need to over-read the situation.
The Chinese invented the game, and thus using the Chinese name is most appropriate. Many people would say that the name “Weiqi” sounds a lot better than “Baduk.”
To be honest, I have trouble hearing the difference between “weiqi” and “baduk”. I guess we’re lucky the Chinese and Koreans picked such similar words.
ㅂ is pronounced /p/ or /b/.
ㅍ is pronounced /pʰ/.
In English, b is pronounced /b/ and p is pronounced /pʰ/.
In French, b is pronounced /b/ and p is pronounced /p/.
So to help people pronounce 바둑 correctly, tell native English speakers to say “baduk” and tell native French speakers to say “paduk”. But the best is to use Hangul.
To avoid other confusions, maybe tell native English speakers to say “bah-dook” and native French speakers to say “padouc”.
Native German speakers can just say “baduk”, while native Dutch speakers would be saying “padoek”.
Agreed, it is not binary. Most of my friends are indeed from a small-ish town in North Germany. They don’t speak Niederdeutsch (at least not with me), but have the accent common to that area, which does not have an aspirated “p” as far as we can discover.
I’m not a linguist by the way, that’s just a hobby. When referring to linguists, I was pointing to the people who write the Wikipedia articles on Korean phonology.
No, where did you read me claim that? Korean does have unaspirated voiced plosives, like the b; it occurs when ㅂ is between two sonorants. But, as I’ve said quite often now, at the start of a word it is mostly common to have ㅂ unvoiced.
Since in Korean there’s no difference between voicing (or at least it has no impact on understandability), it happens as well that the initial sound is voiced, but I see it mentioned everywhere I look that it is generally not voiced. This is also what I hear in the examples you listed.
Meanwhile ㅍ is always aspirated.
And ㅂ,ㅍ are not Latin characters, and certainly not the same, but in Latin alphabet there’s no way to differentiate between ㅂ and ㅍ. Same to how there’s no way to differentiate between a rolling R in the back of your mouth (as in French) or at the front (as in Spanish), but how these are definitely different sounds from what is usually denoted as L.
Again, stop your insinuation. You have not a clue whom you’re talking to.
Hard to believe. Do you have a video/soundbite for this?
You literally just did it again here:
I did not insinuate anything. The user in question described how he has trouble hearing the difference between the words “Weiqi” and “Baduk”. Since this obviously demonstrates a severe lack in the ability to pronounce/hear Korean words I suggested to maybe use the Chinese term “Weiqi” for now.