[General] voiced consonants and unvoiced consonants

[konungursvia]

My web site on phonetics has a two relevant pages designed for such difficulties: "Voiced / Unvoiced Consonants" and "Drills in Final S" which many learners have difficulty with:

Perfect English Pronunciation

Hope this helps.

[Raymott]

Originally Posted by BobK

I'm not sure you are. For the purposes of TEFL, there are 44 English phonemes, listed in a site that Raymott recommended in another thread: IPA Typewriter it has no ʍ.

There are many phonetic symbols that the IPA typewriter doesn't have. It's actually a phonemic only typewriter for English only.

That voiceless sound does exist in some versions of English. I have told elsewhere the story of a dictation I was given by an English teacher born in Edinburgh, who expected us to distinguish between "Wales" and "whales".
Indeed. My old English teacher was quite concerned about this. But she could never explain (and I still don't understand) why "wh" was pronounced "hw". In fact teachers of English to English native speakers are the only people who seem to have an issue with this.

Madox, you should check with your teacher whether you are right to worry. It depends how difficult your exam is. Raymott is right to say that [ʍ] is distinct from [w], but there are many many speech sounds that your course may well not cover.

Of course this is true. I was assuming that Mad-Ox knew what level of exam he was talking about. A "difficult exam in phonetics" does not just cover English sounds.

b

I'm sure with all this information, Mad-ox will know exactly how much he has to worry.

[orangutan]

For IPA for modern standard English, people might also like to look at John Wells' web site, e.g. this chart and a discussion of variations here: IPA transcription systems for English.

(Sorry, I botched the formatting of this link - perhaps a moderator could help?)

[Mad-ox]

Originally Posted by Raymott

I'm sure with all this information, Mad-ox will know exactly how much he has to worry.

[anupumh]

Originally Posted by Raymott

ʍ(wh) - where, which, whether ...
w - we, were, Willy Wonka ...
I wouldn't worry about this too much. These days many people do not both to pronounce 'wh' and use 'w' for all these words. It's rare in Australia. I never use ʍ.
It sounds like /hw/ - hwich, etc. or a simultaneous /w/ and /h/.

This is new for me. Till now I had learnt that English has 24 consonant sounds and 20 vowel sounds. I never knew about the existance of unvoiced W (wh), does this sound find mention in the cambridge pronunciation dictionary (Daniel Jones).

I belive almost every phonetic symbol which represents a sound has variants (phonemes)
ex. /L/ has a dark form dark L, /R/ has 3 variants, clipped (british), rolled (american) and trilled (scottish), /T/ has various variants flapped, tapped, etc

[Raymott]

Originally Posted by anupumh

This is new for me.
Great! I've been able to teach you something.

Till now I had learnt that English has 24 consonant sounds and 20 vowel sounds. I never knew about the existance of unvoiced W (wh), does this sound find mention in the cambridge pronunciation dictionary (Daniel Jones).
I don't know. I don't have that book.

I belive almost every phonetic symbol which represents a sound has variants (phonemes)
ex. /L/ has a dark form dark L, /R/ has 3 variants, clipped (british), rolled (american) and trilled (scottish), /T/ has various variants flapped, tapped, etc

Many phonemes have allophones, yes. But since /ʍ/ and /w/ are found in 'which' and 'witch', respectively, which are minimal pairs in some dialects such as Scottish, they are not allophones of the same phoneme.