I indeed want to know what this special k is, who’s using it and how to make it. 👀

Right?

You probably lay men

As he said, it’s not a click.

I thought the same thing! Also bizarre that you can say the words both ways correctly.

As an Indian it was the other way round for me. In Indian languages, the ejective sounds are separate consonants and in Indian English we primarily use the ejective sounds so that's how I used to hear it. Only recently did I realise that Western speakers primarily use the 'regular' sounds.

@@rhopi can you give an example from an Indian language

@@pratn For example, in Hindi we have the letters क for ejective K and ख for regular K. But when speaking English, Indians generally use the former for K.

That's arguable 🤣

I can confirm that the ejectives are used in beatboxing

May I suggest a ts’ for a hi hat

t’ for closed hi-hat. ts’ for open hi-hat. 😀

Ohh. Thank you. Now I understand how my son can do a rythm and melody at the same time.

I'm an ESL teacher and I teach my students to beatbox by saying "boots, cats", without pronouncing the vowels. B-ts-C-ts :D

When he fixes his channel so that you can say words like "he" and "black" without having your comment shadowbanned, maybe I'll stop thinking of him with anything besides disgust. Try it, go to a video of his, make a perfectly innocuous comment in reply to any thread, use the word "he" in it somewhere, then check the thread while logged out and you won't see your comment. (Note, use a link to the thread and _not_ a link to the specific comment. Those will work.) There's quite a number of perfectly innocent words that will cause this, and it seriously disrupts the ability to have a discussion under his videos. I e-mailed him about it more than a year ago. I never received a response and, so far as I know, nothing has been done.

I'm APPAULED!

@@Mythraen yikes, just tested, he's right

@@Mythraen I kind of understand ‘black’ but what’s wrong with ‘he’?

@@molamolalaaa2968 I mean, I can only speculate on what happened. My speculation is that someone (not necessarily Tom, as I expect he has channel managers for this) tried to ban a phrase/sentence/comment and instead banned all of the words in that phrase/sentence/comment individually. Also, while you can certainly say some bad things about black people and that's not acceptable, referring to black people or black, the color, is generally not remotely controversial in itself. I discovered this one while talking about his _black_ and white lines video. Note, those two words were the ones I remembered. There were several more that I found, and likely many I did not find. If you want a real explanation, though, I suggest you ask Tom Scott... and then he can ignore your e-mail too.

Really? Can you give me a link of some kind?

@@DrGeoffLindsey You know that the aliens from Avatar you jokingly used in the video are called na'vi, right? EDIT: this comment was egotistical, lame, and innacurate. I apologize.

​@@KevinJennissen he literally named them. He was requesting an example of his work being used for teaching.

@@ferrous719 Wow, I am stupid. I thought the commenter was joking and claiming to be a literal na'vi, not someone learning the fictional language. I want to delete my snarky, "um, actually" comment, but I'll leave it up to possibly embolden others to admit their mistakes and learn from them.

I’d love a linK or a piK

Wow I’m half way, 30 years myself!

Thanks so much. (By the way ejectives are strictly different from the sounds we call 'clicks' in phonetics, though obviously the sound is like a click.)

@@DrGeoffLindsey I think it would make more sense to call the click consonants something else. Maybe "smack" (in the sense of the sound of a loud kiss)? Ejectives sound more "clicky" to me than click consonants. Of course, changing established terminology would be difficult.

💯💯💯

I'm a native speaker of English who is a German teacher. I learned so much about the structure of German. However, in my 40's I started teaching English as second language, as well. I was blown away by how complicated the structure of English really is, including the sound system and grammatical structures. It's fascinating to discover all the rules and patterns that I've been following my whole life and I wasn't even aware of them.

I’m a native English speaker and I tend to say a glottal stop before vowels too, am I not meant to do that?

I learned a formal British English - one of things I had work on to make it sound more palatable to Americans was to kick the glottal stop. I was surprisingly hard for me to soften my accent! Now I speak an obscure with somewhat continental accent somewhere in between British and American English. Unless I snap - then I regress right back to what I learned in school 🤬😂

@@jakobraahauge7299 And here I thought sounding _any_ kind of British would immediately get you laid in the US...

That is exactly what I was thinking when he said that English native speakers tend to use the glottal stop more frequently

@@cinnamon3389 I think as a native English speaker you're in the comfortable position to do whatever the heck you want ;D Except for that comma splice there... you're supposed to know better 😘

Singing in choir in Russia it's even more complicated: you study to use the sounds in singing and in your English speaking (to emphasize the ends, Russian has quite a different approach to word endings), but you never speak like that.

When you're recording music, its the opposite because mics are sensitive, which is why you have a pop filter between you and the mic to mitigate the harshness of plosives

@@frankifyed. academic technique is for a big hall /cathedral unamplified, not microphones. It often sounds awful with a micro.

Same. Taught this in choir but without the technical explanation.

I learned that some choir members just sing the word normally and a few replace the consonants with harsher ones. For example the word God is frequent in choir music, and some people would sing Cod or Cot instead.

@Suzann Lee I've been trying to learn Korean and going the other way is pretty tricky too 😂

@Suzann Lee it's the right kind of hard for me! Consonants I couldn't even hear at first and particles everywhere and having to figure out how formal I'm trying to be 🤣🤣🤣 I'm three months in and at the point where I can hear a sentence in Korean and hear exactly enough words I recognize to say "he's politely agreeing with something and adding that something exists" or "wait we're talking about a dog, or maybe a crab" 😂

I'm working as an English teacher in Japan and just realized this because of your comment. I definitely do this when trying to teach kids how to pronounce things.

I am a Japanese learner of English and I never knew this until now. I am very surprised because no one told me about it and I was not aware of it. Language learning is interesting.

there's nothing odd about that. its called a "k" sound. the difference is many americans don't pronounce the "k" at the end of words. or they pronounce it lazily, like a "g.' i swear, people can't even get their differences right. there's NO problem with how the english pronounce "k's!" one thing i noticed, beginning particularly with oild beatles' interviews, the english tend to really sound-out the "g" with words ending in "ing." this "ejectivizing' really comes out on your "g's" not your "k's." americans's just kind of leave off the "g" sound at the end of words. "loving" becomes"lovin'." "standing" becomes "standin'." its the "g" not the "k" that's different.

May be because your visual perception is more dominant over your audio.

Unless you're studying a language that specifically uses the feature to distinguish between words, then it's not going to be relevant. Every language has ranges of pronunciation of different syllables, and has variations in dialects in regard to whether something is homophonic or not. As long as you're a descriptivist about language and not a prescriptivist, you'll be all right.

More embarrassing still, is that you have written “you” and not “your” in your statement. Bravo.

@@tolgaaykut4557 Burn

As soon as I heard this, I realize I only do this when I am trying to be annoying.

Pity the movie is total crap about space hippies🤷‍♂️

@@Man_fay_the_Bru go watch rambo

@@Man_fay_the_Bru but they are very pretty space hippies, with a nifty conlang! 😂

@@Man_fay_the_BruOnly a hippie would think Na’vi are hippie 😂 Pathetic loser!

Yes, hard attack is characteristic of 'explanatory' type speech more than conversation. But older folks like me don't use it much.

Separate has two when I say it.

You had a heart attack!? Are you okay!?!?

that's what it sounds like to me. hearing all those examples i was like "that's just proper diction..."

I did realize I do this most when I'm teaching/tutoring bc I want others to understand me better

Thanks, I hope your class like it!

I always associated them with people being pretentious lol. I'm surprised they're not... or maybe they still are?

based pfp

I'm not even sure what his pfp is.

@@highgroundproductions8590 what's a pfp?

Profile picture

Probably closer to a glottal flap in that case

Or Crisps

@@JoeJigsy Yeah, kind of similar! “-sks” feels like the throat closes off somewhere, whereas “-sps” is just closing the lips. You can also hold and repeat “-spspsps..” for as long as you can hold a breath unlike “-sks”

@@AB-ft7ng I agree, although you can definitely say '-sksks...', but much slower than '-spsps...'!

@@JoeJigsy wasps. Makes a whilsting sound when i say these words

It is, its just not common in American English

As I show, other languages like Quechua have ejectives at the start of words. And as I say at the end, I think English ejectives may be becoming more common because of glottal stops at the start of the next word. (Very rarely I do hear one inside a word in English.)

A possible midword example would be indicative.

@@thomaswilliams2273 I really don't think 《indicative》 has any ejectives in it, perhaps you are mistaking it for aspiration? if not, perhaps could you be more specific as to where in the word you find the ejective consonant?

@@sKadazhnief It's just that I believe I have heard the word pronounced with a pause between the c and the I. Not all the time though, but more when it's used in frustration when answering a question.

often I find in my own accent, the ejective plosives are far more common before words that have an unwritten initial glottal stop. in the coda at the end of a sentence my plosives tend to become unreleased versions (at least in quick speech): [p̚ t̚ k̚] lets ɡo to the park ⟨park⟩ [päːk̚]

This is definitely a regional thing and by no means universal. Most of my adolescent English was influenced by Appalachian dialects, where consonants are very much *not* heavily emphasized. The only time in which we would have done an ejective k’ is when deliberately enunciating for emphasis.

Sure, that's where it started, and it was rare before vowels. But I think the increase in hard attack has probably increased its use before vowels. It's striking how Margot Robbie uses normal k utterance finally then ejective k' before a vowel.

Young brit from the north west, didn't even realize I clicked this much. Can't get myself to do a none ejective...

you probably have come across it, without realisinɡ lol

I'm not trained in singing at all, but I've noticed these, and I've always called them ghost vowels.

You hear Bob Seger doing this in the song "Turn the Page-uh".

Language and pronunciation fascinate me. After watching these and other accent & dialect videos, I became very attuned to the difference between the glottal stop in "button" and the softened T in "butter" and the hard T in "between."

It's hard to say, because it depends a lot on your accent. In a word like "betting" or "bedding," you might be pronouncing both like [ɾ], an alveolar flap, which is the same sound as in the Spanish word "para." This is common in many parts of the U.S. The reason you (and most people) hear it as a /d/ (rather than a /t/) might be because it is not aspirated. This isn't necessarily exclusive to words spelled with a doubled t or d. Words like "hater" and "glider" are pronounced with that same sound in my dialect (and thus, "trader" and "traitor" are homophones). Words like "button" have many possible pronunciations, including with a glottal stop [ʔ] for the t, which is also common in many parts of the U.K. This still isn't only restricted to double t, considering words like "mightn't" and "matins." Most examples do have a double t, because most examples have the inflection or suffix -en, and a final t is typically doubled before an -en (e.g. batten, written).

In RP English we use an 'actual T sound' in betting 🤔

I'm from North Carolina and my pen and pin have no difference. It drives my wife, who's from Chicago, crazy.

@@adampope5107 my wife is from Ohio. She made fun of my pin-pen merger until I discovered that she pronounces wolf with out sounding the L. She pronounces it “woof”. We both have a better respect for each other’s regional dialects now. 🙂

@@paulabuls5802I’m from the Seattle area, married a Texan and moved to Texas. I’ll never forget one time asking my mother in law if she had a pen I could borrow, she goes “A what?” Me: “a pen?” Her: “I don’t understand what you’re saying” Me:“ P. E. N…PEN” and she goes “ OHHH!!! A PIIIIIIIN!” 😂. What makes me laugh the most is that I have no idea what she could’ve thought I was saying or if it sounded like gibberish? I have no clue lol

@@samuraitoaster maybe she thought you were saying pan funny and was confused?

@@samuraitoaster Your "pen" probably sounded something like "pan" to her!

this reminded me of a while ago, when I was trying to learn to sing a bit, and I kept hearing things like "you need to train to raise your palate," so I assumed I must have been doing it wrong because I would need to train it, I was thinking like "but if I raise it too much it starts to hurt and make me gag, am I supposed to train to stop that from happening to raise it more?" but no I just found it super natural from learning some IPA years earlier so I did it the first time I tried (or maybe I'm just still doing it wrong)

@@sheep4483 Are you referring to the back palate which opens up with nasal sounds? 😁 If so, I too had no idea I had control over the back palate until I learned how nasal sounds work

Now I know what I'm reading about at the weekend, thank you!

as he says in the video, it's not a click, it's an ejective. the clicks in xhosa are different than these sounds, and swahili does not have clicks or ejectives. clicks and ejectives are different, separate things

@@gwen6622 I stand corrected about the ejective.

Fancy seeing you here!

what was the context for the joke? I love Game Grumps

@@LukeZuniga Dan asked Arin if he would still be his friend if he enunciated the "p" sound in every word that has it. During the sonic heroes playthrough

If you're interested in dialect levelling there are papers on the Antarctic accent.

And masks, we must indeed have learnt to speak differently , especially those in the Nhs and care indusdutry who spent the last 2 years wearing a mask for up to 12 hours a day.

Good point.

Не за что :)

New England? We drop our Ts and Rs like crazy. I'm realizing that I use the K.

@@nckoes West Coast- I don't think anyone uses this ejective K here but now I'll be on the lookout

Thank you. Very kind.

Thanks so much Stella

In others it’s breakfast cereal

Ketamine can be pretty great!

Glad it was useful!

I spent 10 years in radio, and I've actually softened all my plosives to the point that I can't add them back in without working at it. (One of the things with working close to a microphone is that any plosives you make anywhere in a word jump out at you when you hear them.

Yeah, when I'm angry, I use it to give misophonic people the itch.

Thanks for commenting. I'm glad if it was useful!

What's interesting to me is that Arabic's pharyngeal sounds (aka emphatics) used to be ejectives: this was standard to Proto-Semitic. But this was thousands of years ago. If you want Semitic languages with these sounds still (more or less) intact, you should look up Tigrinya, or Mehri, or some of the other non-Arabic Semitic Languages in Yemen, Eritrea and Ethiopia.

I realize this is over a year old but I just had to make a correction, Korean doesn't have ejectives (perhaps there's a particular dialect but not to my knowledge), as a learner I'd thought that as well at first because there's an old romanization system that (very confusingly) uses p', k', t' to represent "tense consonants," which're basically just geminated consonants, pronounced strongly, without aspiration

@@sheep4483 That had me scratching my head.

@@sheep4483 in my korean class, the teacher specifically told us not to use ejectives as they could be confused with the 'euh' vowel at the end of a word.

Thank you, Bryan! Yes, FLEECE is tricky and deserves a video for sure.