Some speech sounds that are phonemic in other languages either aren't used in English or appear only as allophones of some other phoneme in some specific sandhi context.
- Bilabial trill [ʙ]
- In English, any trill sounds like an R, and this rare phone sounds like /br/ as in "bring".
- Voiceless palatal fricative [c]
- In German, it's the allophone of /x/ after a front vowel: ch in ich. In English it represents /hj/ as in "huge".
- Front rounded vowels [ø] and [ʏ]
- In German these are ö (oe) and ü (ue); in Dutch and French, these are eu and u. They sound sort of like how a nonrhotic speaker of a rhotic dialect would pronounce the R-colored vowel /ɝ/ as in "turkey". In fact, English-language print ads by Hoechst (now part of Sanofi) recommended pronouncing the company's name like "Herkst". Combined with the absence of final [c] in English, this makes bück dich sound like "birthday".
- Voiceless bilabial fricative [ɸ]
- Japanese F, as an allophone of /h/ before /u/
- Voiced labiodental nasal [ɱ]
- "m" followed by /f/ or /v/, as in "emphasis"
- Voiceless alveolar lateral fricative [ɬ]
- In Welsh, it's the voiceless grade of [l]. In English, it shows up as an allophone of /θl/ in "athlete".
- Palatal lateral approximant [ʎ]
- This is a common allophone of /l/ in palatal environments. In some languages, such as iljena, it comes from a fusion of original /lj/.
- Pharyngeal or epiglottal approximant [ʕ]
- The "ayin" of ancient Hebrew and modern Arabic, which to English speakers may sound like a dark L. Some dialects pharyngealize prepausal /l/, and it tends to diphthongize or merge with the previous vowel. For example, English "call" may sound like [kʰʌˤ:].
- Voiced uvular approximant, fricative, or trill [ʁ ~ ʀ]
- Sounds like a guttural R due to influence from Parisian French and Parisian-influenced standard German. In Eskimo languages, it is written "r" but otherwise has no relationship to any rhotic consonant, instead being part of the /q/-series.
Categories: Linguistics