Why Y Is a Vowel According to Physics (and so is W)
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Human language is an incredible thing: a combination of mouth sounds that we combine into words, sentences, poems, and constitutions. They carry meaning, emotion, and power. But underneath it all, language is really just physics. In this episode, we explore how physics is at the core of every syllable, starting with the first word most of us ever speak.
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0:00 Your voice is just physics
1:16 Some basics of linguistics
2:27 There are more than 5 vowels?
4:49 The physics of the vocal tract
7:04 Resonance and sound filters
8:47 How vowels are an acoustic illusion
11:25 Finding vowels in surprising places
13:09 A touching moment
13:45 The extra bits
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So did this video make you say "oooh" or was it more of an "aaah" experience? let me know down here in the comments, friends.
lalala or okokok
More of a womp womp.
Lmao why you use blacks in the video?
I said "Meh" 🤭
pink trombone.........r
As a person with hearing loss who struggles to tell the difference between v and b, I had to keep reminding myself that Joe was talking about vowels.
Haha! 😂
Yes, the sounds our bowels make are usually less dependant on tube length ^^
Genuinely one of the funniest comments I've ever gotten 😂
♫ trombone sound
I never realized how much I relied on lip-reading 'til the pandemic. All the sudden I couldn't understand anyone (besides my neighbor, who was a vocal coach for years, and over-annunciates every syllable)
I struggle too in distinguishing v and b, but that's because I speak Spanish.
So a vowel saves another vowel’s life.
The other vowel says, “Aye E! I owe you!”
The way he said “A E I O U” sounded like caveman XD
😂❤
Yeah, pink trombone
caveman way is the only way
[j] in "you" /ju/ is not a vowel ;)
The presence of [j] in "Aye" and "I" is debatable
Got to the Pink Trombone.
When I am learning Korean, it is so interesting that they consider Y and Ws are treated as Vowels as they are formed from combining the 5 vowels and it is reflected on the way they write.
/wa/ is a combination of /o/ ㅗ and /a/ ㅏ= 와
/wu/ or /oo/ is formed from /u/ ㅜ and /o/ ㅓ = 워
/ya/ is formed from /i/ and /a/ in this case they add a single line to ㅏ turning it to ㅑ.
we also have ㅡ as one of the main vowels which sounds like e in esophagus
@@nineten-eu4ig oh, u talking about 의. It took me a while to learn that.
I don't speak any Korean but /w/ = /u/, so /wa/ should be /ua/ and /wu/ should be /uu/, which is pretty much the same as English "oo" (except for "door", which is weird but "foot", "tooth", "moo", etc. work all fine).
@@LuisAldamiz Korean has a vowel harmony system, so some vowels get paired with /u/ and others get paired with /o/. Regardless, /u/ and /o/ are both relatively closed rounded vowels, of which /w/ is the closest semivowel equivalent.
Hi! I'm an opera singer and vocal coach, and I teach with a particular focus on the science and anatomy of the voice. I absolutely LOVE this summary of how vowels are formed (and therefore how resonance works), and will be saving it to show to future new students! ✨ (Also: pink trombone!)
I used pink trombone in my phonetics class for my linguistics degree. We also had to look at graphs and identify which vowel was plotted there based just on the formants.
I just had my exam on exactly that topic last Thursday 😁
It's surprisingly good, much better than Praat, in synthesizing unrounded vowels. I wish there was a way to control lip rounding as well.
**reads the title**
Me: "What a dumb question."
My brain a second later: "No, No. He's Got a Point."
**Clicks video**
"Dumb questions" when it comes to science do tend to make for really interesting answers :D
My EXACT thought process :D
When my students get confused about when Y is a vowel, I tell them, "The secret is that it is always a vowel, even when it's a consonant." Just one of the peculiarities of this weird pink trombone of ours.
The pink trombone experiment is interesting! Thank you for including it in your video!
As a voice teacher, I am constantly trying to explain a lot of this to my students. Thank you for giving me a new voice for them to listen to! And, btw, pink trombone!
Nothing like a phonetics lesson to get people to make sounds while they're learning.
The origin of phonetics is Sanskrit vocabulary. A gentleman called Panini wrote a very complete study on how humans create sound . 6th Century BCE . It's all registered. Physics came much later into the human interpretation of reality. 🤗
The joy of learning a trill haha
As someone who did my undergrad in speech sciences and master’s in audiology, I loved this video so much. Great scope and coverage, Joe!
One of the most clear discussions about vowel formants I've come across--thanks. I'm a singing voice teacher and every one of my students gets a combination of awe and brain melt when this subject comes up! Also, the tube-vowel experiments are great fun; also, also, I'm so pleased you mentioned Pink Trombone , it's such a lot of fun.
Hey pink trombone!
Dr. Geoff Lindsay recently made some videos that talk about the issues with the IPA vowel space chart that you you must've noticed when trying to illustrate things like gliding from one place to another, using an alternative that makes better use of the two chambers approach you naturally moved to, which is more akin to color space charts
yup, i even made a comment mentioning Pratt
I was just studying this for making my new constructed language and script but was having a hard time understanding it on my own. I was so happily surprised to see that you just made a video on this exact topic a few weeks ago. Thanks for making this video. Really great explanation. Helped me a lot at the right time.
Great video! I remember when I learned the source-filter model of phonetics in undergrad and it blew my mind - being able to identify the formants of a spectrogram of a speech signal, and learning how to determine what sounds they were purely by matching frequencies to the shape of the vocal tract was wild! And then in grad school I worked in the speech and signal processing department, so I spent a lot of time dealing with acoustic data. It's one of my favorite aspects of linguistics for sure. Pink Trombone isn't a site I'd heard of before though, so that's really cool too!
The pink trombone thing looks so cool!
Fun fact! The masculinity / femininity of a voice is also based on formants as well: specifically, the difference between the fundamental and the first formant. This is because during male puberty, the primary vocal tract gets bigger causing the first formant to drop.
I kinda find this wild since it means that the gender of a voice is not dependent on pitch, despite what you'd think at first, and explains how you can have women with butch voices or men who are higher pitched and still sound like their gender. (or heck, how the Chipmunks still sound like boys even tho they have incredibly high pitched voices)
And another fun consequence is that ppl with masculine voices can sound feminine if you learn how to use your throat muscles to shorten your vocal tract while holding your pitch steady, as this will raise the first formant again and basically undo what puberty did.
Wow that sounds really interesting! I always kind of wondered what the fundamental difference was. Thanks!
Very interesting!
I learned all about that when I tried to figure out why voice changers never really work. Then I found one that had a formant control, and it is 100% convincing.
If you heard the original Chipmunks, the reason they sound like boys is because Alvin's, Theodore's, and Simon's voices are actually Dave Seville's (played by Ross Bagdasarian) voice speeded up. Dave was recorded at half speed, and when the audio tape (reel-to-reel back in the day) was played at full speed, you got the chipmunk voices. So even the fundamental was higher. So they sound like boys in the original recording. Look up "The Chipmunk Song" in 1958.
So interesting!
Wonderful! The best eye-opening course I ever took was on speech production and perception. You covered a small part of the magic that happens when we speak and understand each other.
It has been just first 5 minutes of the video and I've already learned and enjoyed more than with any other internet content in my whole life! Thanks Joe!
Oh God I seriously never expected pink trombone to be that much addictive... I've created sounds that should be considered warcrimes according to the geneva convention.
🤣
I'm arresting you!
@@simarkarmani4034 yamete kudasai!
I’m Danish and I loved how you mentioned danish because as a Dane I don’t see the weird or difficult in us having 40 vowels😂✨
I have no idea where he got 40 vowels you guys have almost 30 still a lot but off by more than 10.
I have no idea what the correct number is, but we do have æ, ø, å & [y]
Edit: Danish has nine vowel letters: a, e, i, o, u, y, æ, ø, å (the final three not existing in English). But on top of this, there are a significant number of vowel phonemes - about 22 in total (though some count as many as 40!), which is more than most languages in the world. In comparison, English has about 12 vowel sounds and Spanish only 5.
It should be 26 (edit: 24). 40 isn't possible because that'd mean every vowel was used in its long and short form. The schwa doesn't have a long form. Maybe he confused it with the morpho-phonemes which also include a couple of consonant-vowel combinations or voiced consonants which can replace the core of a syllable. (i.e. [n̩] and [l̩]).
He probably read the wiki and counted the morpho-phonemes, but this is a good example why it isn't always a good idea to trust Wikipedia.
🤣
@@Nifuruc - I actually thought Danish only had 11 vowels and that seemed like a lot to me, but guess depends on how you count them (usually long vowels with a short counterpart are no counted, as aren't dyphthongs).
Man, you have several great videos. This one was simple and amazing. My favourite so far. Thanks for blowing our minds!
Who could possibly NOT watch it to the end. I kind of knew how the vocal cords worked, but your details were super informative as well as exquisitely surprising. I also love your sense of humor. When "Its OK To Be Smart" disappeared from CZcams I actually cried. It took me a few years to find out where you had snuck off too. Yeah, I'm a little slow at times. In any case, please keep the videos coming; they make my day.
Small detail at 3:58 : When you pronounce a [u], you also round your lips. The sound you pronounce at first is more like [ɯ], the unrounded version of [u].
When you see pairs at the same location on the chart, the difference is basically just rounding, i.e. if your lips are rounded or not. By convention, unrounded on the left, and rounded on the right. For example, [y] is the rounded version of [i], and is how the French "u" and the German "ü" are pronounced.
[j] (written "y" in English) and [w] are called semi-vowels. They are approximant consonants that sound very similar to closed vowels, to the point some languages don't quite differentiate between the two. Note that "y" in English can be used either for the consonant [j], like in "yes" [jɛs], or for a vowel, generally [i] or [ai~aɪ] (the latter is what we call a diphthong, which is a vowel that changes its articulation as it's pronounced). For example, in "really", it's [i] (or sometimes [e] if you're British), and in "why", it's the diphthong.
There is some debate in linguistics about how the vowel chart is organized and how the phonetic alphabet functions, as when the phonetic alphabet was created back in the 19th century, we didn't have a full understanding of how vowels work. Dr. Geoff Lindsey has a video called "The Vowel Space" which goes into that topic and dives deeper into the topic of formants, if anyone is interested. He uses color combinations as an analogy to how formants combine, which is very interesting.
Additional note : Voiceless vowels actually exist. This is what you do when you're whispering. In some languages, they are actually used in normal speech as well.
In some sense, the glottal fricative /h/ is just an voiceless /ə/.
I was also wondering if anyone would mention Dr. Lindsey's vowels here. I do somewhat like this video, since while it still talks about tongue position, it explains that the position helps shape the formants which are what actually determines the vowels.
@@angeldude101 Oh yeah, apart from the first paragraph of my comment and maybe the additional note at the end, I wasn't trying to correct the video, I just wanted to write something for those who want to go deeper.
Oh, I think we can go even crazier than a voiceless schwa; I've seen [h] being described as being a voiceless version of the vowel it precedes (or follows, in some cases), which means "help" is in fact pronounced [ɛ̥ɛlˠp] or something like that. Interestingly, the Ancient Greeks kinda figured that out, since they ended up writing /h/ as a mere diacritic on the vowel.
And that's because English lacks short /u/ (it has a long one however, typically represented by "oo").
it’s just due to ipa for english being inaccurate. the “oo” sound is more accurately notated [ʉ] (just the basic vowel sound i mean, ignoring the [w] glide)
@@shoutplenty Actually, there's a lot of dialectal variation when it comes to how the "goose" vowel is pronounced, ranging from back to front, from monophthong to diphthong.
I’m a graduate student in linguistics, and the concepts you’re describing here is one of the craziest parts of my field. How is it that these sounds we make not only communicate to someone, but can somehow unpack an entire concept from your mind into another’s.
Parenting and schooling--it's a truly enormous effort
Literally packets of interconnecting semantics for every meaning we have ever known, by my own understanding.
It's really interesting to learn how it's applied in constructed languages and world building.
Please never stop making videos they're top notch and an absolute blast to watch, thanks profoundly!
pink trombone 😂 this was very cool! and then on top of that you have to add pitch which is another frequency... variations in pitch can communicate so much also and some people are able to pick up on much finer variations than others. so much complexity.
Apparently there is a strong argument that R is also a vowel in some dialects of English. The PBS CZcams show Otherwords made an episode about that recently and it was super interesting.
Yeah I don’t see how R isn’t a vowel. With R sound as in an American saying “heR” or a pirate saying ARRR there is no necessary contact between structures, it’s purely a voiced sound like any other true vowel, with no element of voiceless consonant action. It can be held by itself as a single sound too, it’s not a weird dipthong shorthand or transitional sound. Fun fact, that R sound is very rare in terms of the number languages that have it, but because it appears in English and Mandarin it winds up being extremely common in terms of number of speakers
It's quite common for an r to sound like (and be represented by) an a, too. And not just in English
It can even be represented with formants, specifically F3.
Everyone wonders why ooh doesn't sound like aah 🗿
ooh ooh aah aah
I've wondered that my whole life.
@@doomjunyu_ dang dang wala wala bingbamg
@Don't Read My Profile Picture /dont ɹid ma͡ɪ ne͡ɪm/
As someone who loves to augment my voice to emulate different accents, pitches, and tones, this video is vastly interesting! I love it!
Pink trombone! I love learning about dialects and accents. The explanation of tongue placement with the lopsided trapazoid diagram didn't click until the Pink Trombone demo. Thanks (and thanks?) for that visual aid and weird tool/toy. 😅
Thank you Joe. I really love your channel, and as a phonetics teacher I appreciate even more that this video focus on vowels. The "surprising places" part really made my day. Gracias! (Pink Trombone)
Pink trombone. Slightly creepy but fun too.
ive had it bookmarked for so long!
pink trombone :P
Now I have two vocal cords thanks to Pink-trombone
Pink trombone! Great video, I love this topic. I was hoping you'd slip in a mention of tonal languages too though!
Pink Trombone! I always think about how we create sound which then makes our language. Thank you for the video!
As a mom of a daughter with a speech delay it wasn't until I started thinking about language and sounds that I realized how complicated language can be. It takes a lot of small movements in our mouths and with our vocal cords to make words and our little ones need to learn all of this mostly from listening to people speak and watching our mouth movements.
Pink trombone! This was amazing for me since I've wondered for a long time how speech works.
Denmark isn't the worlds largest country, so when it's mentioned I feel proud, even when it's insignificant as 40 vowels since other languages probably have more.
Pink trombone! This episode opens up new ways to look at language from scientific perspective. Thank you Joe and team
Pink trombone 😁 thanks joe i look forward to your channel on CZcams every week 😊
Pink Trombone
that pink trombone looks interesting. i've been wondering sometimes how some other sounds are made
Pink Trombone!!! Your videos are amazing!!
I love it when linguistics and science come together. Great video!
Reminds me of my linguistics classes back in 97 to 01. Pink trumpet wasn’t out yet. I’m sure it’s very helpful
Pink trombone best trombone
Pink Trombone sir, thank you for another special episode! Very cool!
I'm glad you made a video about phonetics, I am fascinated by language and other things our pink trombones can produce.
Trombone that is pink
One of the coolest videos a pink trombone could put out.
Oh wow! I always wondered what vocal cords look like. This is a really fun channel.
Pink Trombone! Very cool video. Thank you Joe!
I remember being in the fourth grade and first learning about how frequency and amplitude affect our perception of sound waves. I immediately raised my hand and asked the question in the title of this video. Oh... the look of existential panic on my teacher's face. I'm glad to finally have an answer.
The short answer would have been "overtones" or harmonics, that is also the reason that a violin sounds different from a piano even when playing the same note.
@@pinkfloydhomer violin and piano are built differently, and from different materials. Their size also affects the sound. So yeah, overtones, but they're different because the instruments are built different.
@@AnnaEmilka They are certainly different. And the precise way their differences express themselves in the physical reality of sound is in their different overtone spectrum. There is nothing else, after all.
Fascinating as always! About to go lose a few hours to a pink trombone rabbit hole now…
Pink trombone.. will check it out, my son is into linguistics so he was fascinated with this
Joe! I love your videos, you're amazing!
(something something, pink trombone)
Pink Trombone. I am going to check that out. Should be interesting, just like this show always is!
Thank you Joe....❤ I always wondered how 'talking' is done. I have searched the internet for this knowledge but never found it. Thank you Joe.
Pink trombone ✌🏻
pink trombone
@@gustykraken țeavă
In Czech we often use r and l as wovels (we call them syllable forming consonants).
Foreigners often complain that we have to many consonants.
“Wovels”
*Too
*Vowels
Very informative! I've tried being a singer from time to time and have trouble due to allergies so gave up, but this was fascinating. I had no idea that some of the way I form vowels is ... non-standard, which might be why I have more trouble with allergies getting in the way. Maybe I'll have better success if I practice making my less resonant vowels in a more "standard" way. Thanks!
Also, haha pink trombone (have opened the link to check out later)
I’m currently teaching two kiddos phonics. Pink trombone will be awesome to show them about the vowel sounds they are learning!!
Hearing this video just before my choir practice. Gotta go train my pink trombone :D
Seriously though, thanks for the video, it was very nicely done! :)
Hello there Joe!
Love the videos you do.
Since I recently saw one on how you had recognised that a previous video had drawn erroneous conclusions owing to a lack of information, I hope you won't take this criticism amiss...
I have been a Teacher of English as a foreign language for 30 years and love teaching phonetics and I can assure you that, in BRITISH English, there are 20 pure vowel sounds. This may , of course be totally different in American English!
I couldn't recognise as human some of the sounds you made in the video 😂
Love your channel! I often share it with my students. But not in this case!🤣
At a sound exhibit, I saw an oscilloscope that measured the waves of what you spoke. The base line, instead of being a straight line, was circular. Different sounds made waves of different overtones, some showing Lots of variation from the basic circle, and some with only three or a small number of wave cycles around the circle. I sang an "O" in my regular voice and saw a lot of overtone waves. Then I tried to bring my voice shape to be only pure tonic.
I noticed that the closer I could bring my voice closer to tonic-I measured this by watching the ring becoming closer and closer to a smooth ring-the more my voice sounded mechanical! Like a generated voice or robot voice with no modulation.
That was spooky!
Nice of you to mention trombones because I got a pink trombone myself!
PINK TROMBONE, BABY!!!
My voice professor probably would have really dug this. She had a doctorate in vocal science. She and her peers trailblazed this discipline that sought to understand the biology behind singing. They got into resonance chambers in the human body, stance, and muscle engagement (tighten that buttocks). the whole class ended up at more than 3 octaves without engaging falsetto. The class improved my vital capacity (which helped my asthma) and the vibrations helped clear my sinuses. She was amazing.
Pink trombone. That was awesome. Worth a like 👍
I love to play with my pink trombone every day.
pink trombone is an awesome band name!
As a trumpet player I’ve found how critical it is to make the right vowel sound while playing, wonder how a pink trombone would sound though. I do a lot impressions too, never occurred how much I changed my vocal tract
The reason why w and y are classified as “semivowels” is because their phonological function is different from that of vowels, but phonetically they can be thought of as vowels (for all non-academic intents and purposes). In particular, semivowels are non-syllabic, meaning that they cannot appear as single syllables, whereas vowels can, like the first syllable [ə] of “America”.
I started making all the sounds and my roommates think I have gone mad. FUN!!
Claim your Pink Trombone gang certificate here
Pink Trombone! ♫
I does sound a little lewd saying it.
1:55 Very surprised the OED doesn't also include "tsk," but I checked my copy and you're right!
Pink Trombone, great episode Joe! Can you explain a Guitar Talkbox though? People are totally confused by how they work, cheers
Is a Pink Trombone just pink in color or does it have any specialties?
Pink trombone
Like deployed 👍
A follow-up to this could be a video about throat singing/overtone singing. When I change notes while overtone singing, I am just changing the vowel I am singing. But because I am isolating and amplifying the high overtones, you hear different notes instead of different vowel sounds. Dr. Richard Feynman would be proud of you, posthumously, if you talked about throat singing, too.
Thanks for the Pink Trombone & the Diagram of vowel sounds and mouth positions (International Phonetic Alphabet)
Pink trombone pick a trombone
Pink trombone?...
The fact that our bodies do extremely complex stuff without we thinking about it deeply fascinates me. I usually like to take walking as an example. We are precisely controlling many muscles in our feet, toes, knee, ankle, arms, head, back etc. It's insane how we were able coordinate all these muscles and master such a feat. This makes me believe that, we are practically unstoppable and can do anything we want to, we just have to practice and commit!
Also, Pink trombone.
Pink Trombone! Linguistics is one of my favorite sciences. There can't be too many episodes about it in my opinion.
Pink trombone 👍
Pink trombone looks cool
pink trambone and a mom teaching daughter to use her voice as an instrament. Man this kid loves to sing...👍🎤❤👩💻👩🦳
thanks Joe🎉
11:45 you sound just like Owen Wilson. Another excellent video thank you !
Asking the real questions mankind desperately needs answers for, respect
At least this way, I have something to tell my 3-year old when he inevitably asks the same questions.
I keep seeing u in comments of literally every video I watch lol
@@h4rt360 It's making me go insane haha
In Sanskrit there are two letters r as ऋ (vowel) and r as र ( consonant).
In Swedish we gave 9 vowels, and yes, Y is one of them. When learning English I found it weird that Y was taught as a consonant
(Pink trombone). This was really cool.
And, as much as your vocal tract impression of a wah pedal was good, I think you DO need a guitar, which I’m quite happy to see, as a fellow guitarist.
Pink trombone! Thankz! It’s great for demonstrating pronunciation when teaching IPA and phonics!! 💕
Coltrane's pink trombone!?
Pink trombone!
😆 🤣 😂 😹 😆 lol
Pink Tombone coolness!!!! This was very interesting. Thanks
I remember when I first learned about vowel formants, I was blown away that a vowel only really needs a couple of frequencies to be distinguishable. It’s weird to me that a couple of pitches put together like that suddenly sound like a phoneme, and I don’t even really hear them as separate tones anymore.
Pink Trombone fr
Only here to say pink trombone
Pink trombone
i love this video so much
thank you :) :) :)
PINK TROMBONE love your videos. thanks you always