Do you know what this symbol is ?

 A test. Do you know what this symbol is? 

It's a sibilant and a fricative but which one? 

SIBILANT SYMBOLS

#ipa #symbols #sibilants 

 

These are the most common

IPA and other SYMBOLS for SIBILANTS

s ʃ ś ş š ɕ ʂ

generally written as s or sh or with one of the diacritics shown.

I will be posting this as a pdf on my metousia patreon soon. 

RHOTIC SYMBOLS

RHOTIC SYMBOLS

the IPA uses these and other symbols for "R"sounds

r alveolar trill Scots Welsh 

R uvular trill Swedish and Norwegian

ɾ tap or flap alveolar Portugese Spanish Italian 

Do you know which ones represent the R sounds in your language or dialect? Its actually more likely to be the tap / flap alveolar which seems to be the most common sound.

Modern English has a R sound with a symbol like an upside-down r called the Alveolar Approximant! ɹ  

There's also a symbol for a sound used in German French and Portugese.    ʁ

Do designers need to know linguistics?

Well yes a little for what if you were working for a community that uses one of these and wants a multi-lingual text say for a poster?

Or you are a graphic designer / typographer asked to help edit a linguistic text book? 

Something to think about?

How Many H's ?!

How Many H's ? !? 

One of the reasons for the triumph of the Roman alphabet over other scripts is that its combination of vowel and consonant signs makes it extremely adaptable to a variety of sound systems.

Most of us take H a fricative for granted ... oh h yeah sometimes its silent and sometimes people use it after a vowel to show a long or rounded vowel sound but our simple humble H is also used to show other sounds.

the symbol on the left is PHARYNGEAL and although we do not  have it in English it is used in Hebrew and Arabic .

The sound to the right a GLOTTAL is used in Igbo an African language but also in Dutch  and Czech.

Here's some languages with our H a glottal fricative.

English, Korean, Magyar, Japanese, Hidi, Thai, Hausa, Cantonese, Amharic. 

There's also a VELAR fricative sound  written as [x] by linguists that 's also written as a h used in Croat, Bulgarian, German, Gaelic Farsi and Sindhi.

The 2 rarest "H" sounds are probably the Epiglottal  Fricative used in AVAR and a soun dthat appears in Swedish dialects which is a sh+ x and written 'sj' though the IPA symbol looks like the sign on the right with a descender curl. 

A final use fo H to note is the use of h after a consonant to show its a palatal or palatalized as in Portugese and Catalan NH and LH.

So if you're planning to learn any of these languages bear in mind that simple H letter in the Roman Alphabet sections of the text may not be the H you're familiar with?!