Phonetics video – the Italian song

[Giuseppe Prencipe]

Hey hey, I just wanted to make a couple of observations on that Phonetics video for session 3.

Besides the hideous auto-tuning without which these pretty songs would have sounded more authentic and child-like (as I think that’s the intention of the album anyway), the second singer in the Italian song may not be native either. We can tell that from the pronunciation of “Maggio”, that has a “long” consonant [dʒ:], pronounced by holding the air for a little longer in the vocal tract, let it build up, and let he affricate explode a little louder. The singer pronounces this sound indeed as a plane [dʒ].

 

[Kirsten Middeke]

Thank you for this observation! I don’t speak Italian myself, but if you can hear and describe even more deviations from the target pronunciation than I can, I hope the others will be convinced that studying phonetics can increase our awareness of the subtleties of articulation and can be put to good use in language learning/teaching/coaching. Excellent! 🙂

[Alexander Rauhut]

Great catch! 🙂
The phenomenon is called gemination, by the way. It’s phonemic in Italian, as you pointed out. To our German ears it is very difficult to hear, but I have been taught a trick to pronounce it, which is imagining it as two words, like [mad dʒo]. In German and English, we assimilate two adjacent sounds at the same place of articulation, but the time of closure remains, so the result is very similar. Gemination is actually quite common across the world. You could consider us Germanic speakers the weird ones. 😀

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by Alexander Rauhut.

[Giuseppe Prencipe]

I didn’t know gemination was so widespread, I only knew it of Italian and Finnish (not sure whether phonemic in the latter). And thanks for the pronunciation tip, I do get to teach Italian now and then so that’s handy 😉

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