On the contrary, these charts seem nice and familiar to me.* As part of my uni degree I did some modules on English linguistics for the first two years.
*and by that, I mean I remember the shape, but none of the sounds
Good point. Anyway, this is a limit of the chart. The chart shows single sounds, and not diphthongs.
By the way, I’ve always found strange that almost every vowel in english is a diphtongh:
A - eɪ
E - i
I - aɪ
O - oʊ
U - ju
Anyway, it happens for any english vowel: in some words it’s in the full diphthong form (ape, iron, open, unique) or in the pure sound form (arm, even, ship, not, dude).
We also have the opposite case, when a diphthong on the paper is pronounced as a single vowel… that’s the case of “thought”, which is pronounced θɔːt.
Given all of this, I must admit that the pure single english O sounds match pretty well the italian ones, but are anyway less common than the diphthong forms. I’ll edit my post.
I don’t, because we speakers of Hollandic Dutch (as distinct from Netherlandic Dutch) do the same thing. Few things are harder in French pronunciation than not saying /eɪ/.
I alluded to this earlier when talking about how letters refer to multiple acceptable pronunciations. For example, in a word like boot:
/boʊt/ (very similar to English)
/boːt/
Similarly /eɪ/ and /eː/ are both acceptable realizations of the letter e.
Now I know how to call that sound we make to say “no”.
It’s a “dental click” and its symbol is ǀ. According to wikipedia it’s the sound English specifies by “tut-tut” or “tsk-tsk” (both versions were widely used in Italian comics, especially Mickey Mouse).
However, in Sardinia we just do a single “tsk” and it means “no”. I don’t know if it’s used also in other parts of Italy.
I always thought English speakers were more likely to make alveolar clicks. I mean, it’s not like we non-isiXhosa speakers differentiate between dental and alveolar clicks so I’m sure both occur plenty without anyone noticing. But anyway, here’s a recording of the alveolar click: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Postalveolar_click.ogg
Mhm… the xhosa click is quite peculiar… difficult to make (at least for me). I succeded after many tries, but no way I could use it while talking. My xhosa trainer had a lot of fun listening to me…
Maybe the wikipedia author of the IPA sounds reads this forum… or maybe, when writing the “E” post, I clicked on the wrong symbol… anyway, now the sounds on the wikipedia page are correct. I’ve updated the links.
I really couldn’t find a private moment for a short record these days… I’ll do it, I have in my mind some examples and some accents to try… then I have a little audio surprise for you… and even a request for your next italian pronunciation attempt/contest…
But, first… I have to complete the vowels with U and maybe adding a short post about consonants…
Yes, but @sushi correctly stated that in “Hobbit” and “automatic” the O sound is the same as in italian, while in the other words they’re more “A-like”
IPA transcriptions
some -> sʌm
done -> dʌn
These are the "A-like sounds for the italian ear according to the chart I previously posted: