4:26 No, French accent is always on the last syllable of the word, that's why there are no minimal pairs

I never realized ðe 'c' in "cold" was different from ðe 'c' in "scold". Ngoldih a Ngand in front of my mouþ really ngelped me get a ngah of ngow aspiration works.

You have just 12 videos but the quality of your channel is comparable with KZfaqrs that have 4+ years of experience. Keep it up!

As a native Chinese speaker, this video is mind-blowing; I'd never given much thought to my language before. Despite the fact that the video is quite complicated, the knowledges presented in it continue to astonish me.

4:07 Love the flag usage, really shows how idiotic it is to represent languages with national flags

Fun fact: another language that has a zero onset in it's syllable structure is Korean and the Korean writing (essentially a letter based script) even has essentially its own character for it (which is the same as the ng sound at the end of syllable). To make it even more interesting there are special pronunciation rules if the previous syllable has a consonant at the end (batchim) to move its sound into the next syllable.

When I found your channel it was at 8k subs. After watching it, I clicked on another video and saw you had 9k subs. Now you're at 16k, I don't think I've ever witnessed such a meteoric rise in real time before

Never in my life have I been confused by my native language more than I am at this very moment. Cheers, I guess?

In my opinion, the neutral tone constitutes a separate toneme due to the minimal pairs present between words like "卵子" (luǎnzǐ) meaning "ovum/egg" and "卵子" (luǎnzi) meaning "testicles/balls". Although that might also depend on where you are, since Taiwan rarely uses the neutral tone at all.

This is one of the most accurate summaries of the concepts of "phoneme" and "allophone" that includes some real world applications I've seen. Great job! Analyses aren't really typically picked in order to make it easy to understand a language's phonology, they are generally picked to make it easy to explain it. In this way, I'd be hesitant to include "it makes it easy to read X" as a real advantage of an analysis (don't worry: I know that you're also approaching this a bit more casually and are offering advantages that are beyond just scientific merit). What really matters is "can we predict certain processes we see happen in the language?" Sometimes this means providing an analysis that looks super fucked on the surface but ends up explaining the distribution of sounds extremely accurately. The two-vowel analysis for Mandarin isn't actually nearly as strange as you might be tempted to think. To understand it properly we need to understand what a vowel is in a phonological context. To simplify, all sounds have features that distinguish them from other sounds. The thing that distinguishes /d/ and /t/ in some languages is a feature called [voice], where we say that /d/ has the feature specification [+voice] and /t/ has [-voice]. The feature [voice], then, is used to distinguish voiced from voiceless consonants (/t/ and /d/ actually work a little differently in English but let's simplify their difference to being that of [voice]). The distinction between consonant and vowel also has a feature dedicated to it called [syllabic]. Consonants are [-syllabic] (because them existing doesn't add an extra syllable to a word) and vowels are [+syllabic] (because if there is a vowel, there is an extra syllable). Given that segments may form minimal pairs in which they differ in nothing but one feature, we would expect to have sounds that are identical except for the specification of their [syllabic] feature, and that is certainly what we get: think of the sounds /i/ (like the e in "eon") and /j/ (like the y in "yonder"). How do they differ in terms of quality? Does /j/ sound "harsher" and therefore more consonantal? Not really; the difference is pretty much only in their syllabicity: if you shift the stress in "eon" from the e to the o and then shorten the e a little, you'll see that it sounds identical to the "yon" in "yonder". So here we can say that /i/ and /j/ are identical except that the former is [+syllabic] and the latter is [-syllabic]. Thus: what we see here is that English has essentially pre-decided whether or not a particular sound is syllabic - /i/ is always [+syllabic] and /j/ is always [-syllabic], in the same way that /t/ is always [-voice] and /d/ is always [+voice]. In some other languages, it is completely 100% predictable whether a given sound will end up being voiced or voiceless just by knowing where they are in a sentence and/or the sounds around it. The technical way of putting this is that this language leaves the feature [voice] "underspecified". In English, there are some situations of sounds that are underspecified for the feature [syllabic]. Take the verb "to assemble". This word contains a final /l/, which is essentially pronounced as a vowel (i.e. is syllabic): /əˈsɛmbl̩/. If we were to form the noun meaning "a thing that assembles" by adding -er, then we end up with /əˈsɛmblər/, which has the same amount of syllables as assemble. Suddenly, the /l/ is not syllabic anymore, so we can say /l/ is underspecified for the feature [syllabic], since we can know whether it will end up being syllabic just by knowing what the sounds around it are. In other words: the syllabicity is determined after the word has been assembled. Now that I've rambled on for 9 paragraphs, how does this relate to that analysis of Mandarin? Well now imagine that Mandarin does the same: it leaves the segments /j/, /w/ and /y/ underspecified for syllabicity, therefore underlyingly not strictly vowels, as we can know whether they will end up sounding like vowels just by knowing what the sounds around it are. Fun fact: Proto-Indo-European is said to have had a similar system. The vowels [i] and [u] are said to just be syllabic equivalents of /j/ and /w/.

Native Mandarin speaker here and omg thank you so much for putting so much efforts into this! The thing here for us is that we would study all the pinyin stuff including all the vowels and how they pair with consonants etc etc when we were like 5 and by the age of 8 (third grade normally) that chart of what pairings are allowed are essentially second nature already and you wouldn’t even think twice about oh is that a legit mandarin sound or not. So again, thank you for making me relearning my kindergarten and first grade Chinese with these linguistic analysis that no way I would’ve understood or cared back then 😂

One thing worth noting is that while the palatal sibilants can be considered allophones of the retroflex sibilants (the Wade-Giles system worked like this), they could alternatively be considered allophones of the ALVEOLAR sibilants instead, as these all form minimal pairs with retroflex. This is the case with the Palladius transcription of Chinese (in other words the system used by Russia which is in Cyrillic). The only thing that can really be said for sure is that the palatal sibilants only occur before the palatal glides, so they could certainly be allophonic. It's just hard to know what they're allophonic TO, so pinyin AND bopomofo give them unique representations to sidestep the issue, while also including the triggers (the glides). Edit: According to another commenter the palatals sibilants could also be considered historical allophones of the velar series...

Damn, this guy is pumping out some great contents!

okay you've been on the platform for 4 months (i mean the first video on this channel was 4 months ago) and already cracked the code -short enough for people to not get bored -jam packed with jokes and witty lines to keep people's attention -educational so people feel like they've learned something which makes them feel better about themselves and gives them the excuse for watching youtube all day for "educational purposes" -a slightly monotone sarcastic voice which is calm enough for people not to get annoyed quickly (as oppose to the OVERLY DRAMATIC INTRO VOICES some youtubers have) all in all amazing videos and channel so riddle me this: How have you only got 18.6k subscribers? (at the date of commenting)

Babe wake up new k klein video

im not studying chinese, but i am learning japanese. its so fascinating because this language (chinese) has always seemed like this extremely unapproachable , difficult wall to me. understanding the mechanics behind it a bit more is very helpful.

One analysis that I came up with that I rarely see people use is a three-vowel analysis that conceptualizes three vertical vowels /a ə ɨ/ and redefines all surface vowels except those three as glide-vowel sequences. It's really parsimonious in that it accounts for every single final, collapses many of the consonant phonemes together and eliminates the weird syllabic consonant (by conceptualizing it as the realization of ɨ with no adjacent glides)

the 2 vowel system is really bizarre, it's basically loads of allophonic envrionment rules 2:47, also, [k]old will just sound like 'gold' cause it gets lumped together in onset 7:02 historically, a lot of the alveolo-palatals are allophones of velar obstruents, so ki -> qi-, gi-> ji-, hi -> xi. Cantonese, Min, Hakka, Japanese/Korean, etc still retain these. So 京 is Cantonese ging ([ɡ̥ɪŋ] [kɪŋ], same thing just marking aspiration so people don't mispronounce this) becomes Mandarin Personally, I don't think it's all that helpful to count the exact number of phonemes, you just need to know what to do with them. 8:52 well, we say "Mandarin" because it includes more than just the standardized variety (Putonghua, or "Standard Chinese") as most people don't actually speak the way it's taught but still remains mutually intelligible. In terms of language family, it's offhand for the whole Guan branch (官話) and not just Beijing-proximal speech Also, Mandarin refers to "high government bureaucrat of the Chinese Empire" (per. Wiktionary) and probably predates the fruit. You could say the name of the fruit is stupid, not the other way around. The _other_ issue I have with the term "Standard Chinese" is it subsumes all other Chinese topolects under the label "Chinese" and just claims "Standard Chinese" is representative of these varieties. That can be argued for the vocabulary and grammar in formal registers, but it absolutely doesn't apply for Phonology, which are so wildly different that you _have_ to consider them as different languages. If you use "Standard Chinese", then it's unclear to what extent the described processes apply to a speaker's own language production. If you use "Mandarin" you can safely assume it applies to varieties who are intelligible with Standard Chinese and aren't classified into another common topolect like Cantonese or Min.

I have zero understanding in linguistics and had no idea what was going on for the majority of the video, but you still made it entertaining either way. Good video!

You are filling the hole Xidnaf left for me. Keep up the videos dude!!

This video reminds me of a convo I had with my parents on tones and how shi and xi, and chu and qu are pronounced differently which can confuse non native putonghua speakers. But as much as i find this interesting, there’s a lot I don’t understand as a layperson ;; eg tonemes, minimal pairs, segmental, suprasegmental?? It gets a little hard to follow as the video goes on... I want to learn about linguistics but I’m not sure where to start ;; is there any resources you can recommend? Or maybe make a video on the basics/terms?

8:57 About the name of the fruit coming from the name of the language and not the other way around, and how this supposedly makes it not a stupid name for the language: consider that Turkey is trying to convince people to start saying "Türkiye".

i literally just found your channel through that video and now there’s another one!! this is amazing i’m obsessed w all these videos now

given that there's phonetic dinstinctions between /ɻ̩/ ([ɚ] in general, [ɑ˞] with the fourth tone (the "leaving tone" as like prefer to say), examples 而, 耳, 二) and /ɻɻ̩/ (just [ɻɻ̩], examples 日), I would highly disrecommend a model that intends to "put the syllablic consonant back into the other consonants".

I just recently stumbled upon that other video and was really happy to find another place in the rabbit hole of linguistics, and now there's already a follow up, just lovely! Keep it up

Is this part of the test? Do we get a printout?

I found you just yesterday, watched the chinese video just yesterday, and here you are. life's good. and you deserve 100 times the subs and the views

One language family where I've frequently seen the 'underlying glides, no vowels' analysis used is the Wakashan language family. Basically, all glides are called 'resonants', which includes /j, w, h/, which have the (potential) surface realizations of [i, u, a], respectively. When realized "vocalically", they're appropriately called 'vocalic resonants', while when realized "consonantally", they are 'consonantal resonants'-even weirder, glottal stop ia considered an allophone of /h/! The analysis is (as you can imagine) pretty controversial for some folks, but it persists for several Wakashan languages, notably Kwakw'ala, Haisla, and (I think) Nuu-chah-nulth

Your channel is gold. Completely underrated. Great job!!!

You are right, [i] and [ji] sound pretty much the same to me, only difference being the 2nd one is slightly louder, or [i] being the first tone, while [ji] being the 4th.

I recently found your channel and have seen all of your videos dozens of times already and I hope you keep making your amazing content :)

Ah, another awesome and interesting video. Great job as always! :D

Glad to be part of the wave of new subscribers to this channel!

cool video! i've been into sinitic phonology for a while (mostly by reading wikipedia). you pretty well explained the unique issues that make it hard to define any single best analysis for mandarin. you mostly talked about vowels, but also super interesting is the palatal series which developed only in the last 300 years as a unique feature of mandarin. I will indicate Pinyin in brackets and IPA in slashes. the options, none of which are really satisfactory, are: 1. Analysis by native speakers: are phonemes, and not allophones of anything. This is due to widespread Pinyin education, of course everyone thinks they are separate sounds if they've written them with separate letters since kindergarten. In contrast, nobody in English thinks cold and scold have different /k/ sounds since they have the same letter. Analysis should typically rely on the intuition of natives who have NOT learned about phonology (go to some village and ask "do you think these are the same sound?"). Problem is, due to Pinyin, everyone has learned phonology. This method results in the highest phoneme count which may be considered "not efficient". 2. Analysis by sound resemblance: are allophones of retroflex series . They sound the most alike. Mandarin learners including the speakers of other Chinese languages are commonly mixing up /ʂaŋ/ with /ɕ(j)aŋ/. The two series are in complementary distribution. Problem is it's purely by coincidence that glides were lost after retroflexes. In other words, /ʂjaŋ/ used to exist in the past, where these two series formed minimal pairs and could not be allophones. 3. Analysis by history: are allophones of either the dental series OR the velar series . Pros of this: historically correct because the palatals are a full merger of dental and velars that occurred before glides. In other words, /t͡si, t͡sʰi, si/ and /ki, kʰi, hi/ used to exist, but both turned into /t͡ɕi, t͡ɕʰi, ɕi/. It is the reason for variant spelling of places like Peking/Beijing (velar-->palatal) and Tientsin/Tianjin (dental-->palatal). Cons of this: low sound resemblance. Presumably at some point in history, there were some "intermediate" sounds that were more similar. Another huge problem: to follow the rules of phonemes, you can't merge palatals into both series, nor split them based on individual words. You have to choose either dental or velar, and inevitably the history is wrong for half of the words. If you choose velars (the one with least sound resemblance) you get the slight advantage of being able to reduce the vowel count by merging the empty rime (aka syllabic consonant) /ɨ/ sound with the vowel /i/. Edit: some concrete examples of 尖團合流 (dental-velar merger). the unmerged sounds are reflected in modern Cantonese. 精清星 Middle Chinese corresponding to , Cantonese Mandarin 經傾興 Middle Chinese corresponding to , Cantonese Mandarin Interestingly, the numerous bilingual speakers of Cantonese (or other southern variety) plus Mandarin, have a subconscious awareness of these sound relationships and potential allophony.

at first glance i thought the title said "the pheromones of cheese" i thought it was gonna be how cheese can control behavior using it's smell

Please never stop making videos!!!

In your last video, I noticed you didn’t count erhua syllables such as “ber” (贝儿). Any reasons for that? Also how are the unusual syllables used in interjections counted? For example, n (嗯), m (呣), hm (噷), and 哼 (hng).

4:39 instead of analysing the "neutral tone" as a 5th toneme, I find it more meaningful to describe it as the lack of tone. There are syllables like 子 and 友 which have tones (both have the 3rd tone) in most words, but lose their tones at the end of certain words, e.g. 兔子, 朋友. So instead, a system of phonemic stress can be described for Standard Chinese (minimal pair: 孫子 sūnzǐ = both syllables stressed: "Sun Tzu" vs 孫子 sūnzi = only first syllable stressed: "grandson"), where only stressed syllables (which correspond to most syllables, though it varies between dialects) have tones while unstressed syllables do not ( = "neutral tone"). Stress-wise, since Chinese words/phrases are generally "initial-heavy", the neutral tone tends to occur at the end of compounds. This also explains why Mandarin dialects/accents which are more syllable-timed (e.g. Singaporean Mandarin, which I speak; also, Taiwanese Mandarin) than stress-timed (Beijing dialect is quite stress-timed) and don't really have any distinct "stress" usually don't feature the neutral tone as much or even at all (in such cases, the "original" tone of the syllable, that is, the tone which the syllable would have if it were stressed, is used instead).

Interesting analysis video! Thanks for uploading!

great video! i am a chinese native speaker from Taiwan, studying how to teach chinese as second language.your video provided me a new perspective of how you learn chinese!

I didn't understand most of it but i Guess i could start with learning about phoneme. Anyhow, I like your manner of speech and how you explain things. Keep it up.

You could argue, somewhat in jest, that there is a minimal pair between /ŋ/ and /h/. The last name Nguyen, and a more conservative pronunciation of when. /ŋwɛn/ vs /hwɛn/.

I'm sorry the editing that works to highlight the different noises is incredibly choppy and distracts a lot.

Minor point, but in French, stress goes on the last syllable of the intonation phrase, so in just "français," it's on /se/, but in the compound noun "français standard," it would be on the last part, and if that were at the beginning of the phrase, there wouldn't be any stress on those two words, since it'd come at the end of the whole phrase, so... The nitpicky thing is to say stress placement on that one French word is wrong, sorry. The more interesting takeaway is that French probably doesn't have lexical stress at all, and that it's important to distinguish between stress on the word level and on a phrase level. English has both, and they work independently, as in: "I didn't say HE loved her" vs "I didn't say he loved HER" vs "I didn't SAY he loved her" or phrasal/focus/sentential stress put on any other word in that sentence. In French, even that kind of focus stress shifting isn't possible, so you use other things like clefts instead. French really just doesn't have stress. Pick Spanish, haha.

I'm amazed by you. Found you on the start page and caught my attention immediately. I was looking for youtube channels about linguistics because either the few left upload videos very irregular or don't at all. I'm glad that I found you. Your content is superb. But one question: Why is your overlay language in word and youtube German but your location England, Uk? Are you German living in the UK? But if so why don't you sound German at all? How is this possible? Keep up with that content. I see that your subs are rising extremely fast :)

earned a subscriber, hope you pump out more vids!

I would love for someone to make a video like this about Irish one day. There's actually disagreement amongst linguists about whether and are associated with seperate phonemes. Even weirder, some linguists even think that Irish has a vertical vowel structure with [ɪ] and [ʊ] being allophones of the same vowel, as well as [ɛ] and [ɔ]. They say that which realisation appears depends only on the surrounding consonants. There's also a weird tradition of marking what is clearly [ʌ] with [o] (because of it being spelt ?)

As a native Chinese, I actually do not consider and never considered “toneless” 4:54 to be a toneme, and that’s how we are taught growing up

Wow you gained a few thousand subscribers in just a few days!!! Good job

Thank you for this video. I always intuitively has this hunch about the Chinese language but did not no how to approach it. Thank you.

Good job! Your channel has some high quality stuff. Kinda remind me of Xidnaf [I just typed a 10-line comment about sibilants and dental-alveolar merger in Standard Chinese, and I discovered that someone has covered it in another comment way better than I could ever do.]

“Disadvantages: Stupid and Dumb” Haha very scientific

A question that troubles me from time to time: How are vowels different from (certain) syllabic consonants? How many vowels are there that cannot be regarded as syllabic consonants? BTW: According to my experience, the zero-onset is often realized as either a glottal stop, or as ng before /a/ and schwa, but not when a glide is present, so I would consider it as an initial in its own right, or a glide equivalent at the very least. (The ng variant is not relevant to the 疑母 initial ng from Middle Chinese, as it is also witnessed in e.g. 愛., which does not have a ng initial in MC.)

Damn this is well explained. Learned something new about a language I have been using for 18 years.

Great video. My only real nit pick is with the section where you discussed how we know how some phonemes are different, like /h/ and /ŋ/. You mentioned that the two ways to do this is by looking at minimal pairs and by looking at how different the sounds are phonetically. But that latter method is actually very rarely used, if ever. Instead, most linguists when building phonology's and deciding phonemes have a few different approaches, for finding what phonemes a language has, and what allophones said phonemes themselves possess. The first method is obviously minimal pairs, which work great for many simple morphemes, like pin/bin, tip/dip, etc... But as you mentioned before, sometimes, some phonemes don't have minimal pairs to work with. In English, this would be /h/ and /ŋ/. However, we do know that they are different phonemes, not because they are phonetically different, but because they can exist in identical environments. /h/ can only exist in the onset, and /ŋ/ in the coda, yes, but they can also exist intervocalically. reheat /rihit/, dehiscent /dıhısǝnt/, singing /sıŋıŋ/, hangout /hæŋaʊt/, etc... Looking at words that place the phones in near identical or identical environments, we can then determine if said phones are independent phonemes, or allophones of one phoneme.

btw, are allaphones varaities of pronounciation within one language, or anything a native speaker would consider one sound? For example, could german ch (idk the ipa for it) be considered an allaphone with english h, where a person has an accent?

I absolutely love your videos

Love ur vids!! Keep em comin

tbh having you pronounce the Chinese words, even if butchered, would make this a lot easier to understand. I watched this when it first came out, and had no idea what it was about. I watched it two or three times in between and now, after understanding all of the linguistic terminology, had a lightbulb moment after watching this video. After knowing mandarin IPA, I'm only now realizing that at 7:06, you're saying that "x" and "sh", "j" and "zh", and "q" and "ch" are allophones respectively, which I didn't realize without pinyin. With this aside, I do appreciate seeing language content being more objective by analyzing it with IPA, rather than the more common, less objective/analytical content on the web!

You had me at the difference between the scold and cold

Just discovered your channel. I love it. More linguistic channels!

Huh, I never noticed that insight and incite have the same pronunciation but different stresses.

Another great video as always, are you getting monetised now or is KZfaq still being hell?

很有趣同时涨知识的视频，鉴于您选择的题材，我觉得用中文反而更能表达我的尊敬。

I personally think it would be more elegant to analyze the syllables as /bʲɛ, kʰʷɑ/. The semivowels never felt like distinct sounds to me, as they tend to be pronounced simultaneously with the "preceding" plosive. Consecutive realization of plosive+semivowel sounds markedly non-native

I feel like when deciding how many phonemes a language has, it important to take historical linguistics into consideration as well. For example, the zero onset in Mandarin mostly came from the glottal stop initials and velar nasal initials in Middle Chinese.

I'm officially subscribed to your channel.i believe it was a glorious choice .

Good use of humor throughout your video. Very professionally done.

Your videos are really intriguing for me as a native Mandarin speaker! And no, I have no idea why the language is called Mandarin in English. Maybe the reason is lost among translations between European travelers centuries back. In primary school, I was taught that Chinese has six vowels (a o e i u yu) but your explanations make so much more sense in linguistic studies. Language barriers have created and will continue to create distrust and distorted views among people. I am learning my third language now, and looking forward to more quality videos from you!

I have a question, is there some sort of update schedule for your videos? Any specific day that a video could be expected to come out?

o and e as minimal pairs in mandarin made sense to me until I saw the o and e section in the graph at 7:00. How can the two vowel model hold up when you have La, Lo, Le,and Lu, Li, Ly (u umlaut), doesn't that make o and e minimal pairs, especially since you can't recontextualise Lo as a form of Li, Lu or Ly?

Cool! What's a vilar nasal and glockal fricative? (I'm learning so many new words in these videos)

@1:33 The vertical vowel system is so true, as my professor told me before: so basically Chinese is one of the weirdest 30ish languages in the world whose "consonants (including liquids and glides) bears more weight than vowels in their syllables". So many languages that we know, like English, are "vowel dominant": meaning that their whole phoneme/phone system is evolved from vowels. Then we were used to thinking this way for the rest of the languages. However, we then observed that there are a handful of languages like Circacusan, Abaza, that have only two (or maybe only ONE @Karbadian) vowels but 134ish consonants and consonantal features. AND yes, these features are "PHONEMEIC" unlike the ones in English where they are only stylish (think about vocal fry in North American English but can actually word meaning in Circacusan). Anyhow, weird-aXX languages like Chinese and Circacusan keep us thinking: maybe vowels are not that important in our mental grammar.

I'd heard the idea floated that Bopomofo would've likely been more accepted over Pinyin had the "Initial + Final + Tone" symbols been arranged into syllabic blocks (like what Hanguel does). What are your thoughts?

Chinese has a set of consonants and a set of the 5 vowels you can use, but there's a whole list of the possible final segment of a word in pinyin that we learn and memorize in elementary school. I can't list all of them off the top of my head right now, but it starts like this: a, o, e, i, u, v(for notation reasons I'm using v, since chinese pinyin does not use v), ai, ei, ui, ao ou, iu etc. These can contain non vowel letters, for example ang, eng, ing, ong are all in this list. There's also another form of chinese word, which in pinyin form would be consonant - connecting vowel - vowel. Usually the connecting vowel is "i", but this list is pretty limited, so it only works with a small combination of connecting vowels and the list of final segments. One example would be i-ao, and a word with that could be xiao, or 小. There's a few final segments that can be used without a consonant, namely a, ai and er. I'm pretty sure these are the only ones. There's also a list of words that sound the same as either the consonant or the vowel. For example, zhi sounds like the consonant zh, and yi sounds like the vowel i.

Pronouncing /p/, /t/, /tʃ/ and /k/ in positions where they are meant to be aspirated may sound like [b], [d], [dʒ] and [ɡ] to English speakers.

3:16 omg, I really want someone to make a terrible spelling reform based on the idea that ŋ and h are alophones now!

The "scold vs cold" thing really broke my brain

Hey! I love the high quality and high effort nature of your channel and would love to contribute. Is there a way that I can share video Ideas?

Could two phonemes be allophones in certain contexts? Because I've been thinking about it and it seems like there are examples in English where /z/ and /s/ are allophones and examples where they are not.

8:50. Don't worry K Klein, I got you on why Standard Chinese is called Mandarin. Mandarin, as we know today was called 官話 or the 'language of the officials' when it was used as the adminstrative language of the Ming and Qing dyansties. In the 16th century, the Portugese, having established logistical colonies in India (Goa) and the Malay Peninsula (Melaka) were among the first Europeans to establish proper contact with the then, Ming dynasty China. Thus, they had the honour of translating and transcribing many Chinese words into the Latin script. The Portugese translated 官話 into 'mandarim', which was derived from the Malay word 'menteri' meaning minister. The Malay word itself has its origins in the Sanskrit word 'mantri', which again has the same meaning of minister. Both the Merriam-Webster and Oxford Dictionary’s acknowledge the origins of the word 'mandarin' in the Portugese 'mandarim' and was incorporated into the English language in the 16th century. So, it seems to check out. According to an article I read: Mandarin is what linguists call an exonym, a name given to a place, people or language externally from the place of origin.' This article talks about it in more detail: www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/where-does-mandarin-come/579073/

7:03 the same can be said for the alveolar sibilants and the palatal ones

6:42 it’s funny because it makes sense. In Miyako (a Japonic language) i and u when between consonants (and other places in some dialects) become syllabic s and f like pstu “person” (cognate to Japanese hito) or tabz “journey” (cognate to Japanese tabi) so it makes complete sense. The r syllabic consonant probably happened as z merged in place to the retroflex consonants it was after. The theory from Miyako is that it became ɨ before breaking out of the vowel space to z (then in the case of Miyako dialects, assimilating in voice)

Could you increase the volume of your videos going forward, they're very quiet relative to other videos and difficult for me to hear even with the youtube volume all the way up.

I have recently watched a video explaining why russian "и" and "ы" are the alophones of the same phoneme. I am interested, if there is a similar thing in in other slavic languages, and if we can call all of them a "5-vowel" language?

3:04 I have a question fellow, language enthusiasts, if their exist no minimal pairs for two sounds, we can add a replacement test too. If two sounds exist in a language such that they do not have any minimal pairs and one can replace the other to give the same word eg uvular trill and voiced uvular fricative in french

Ughh these videos and comments are simultanionsly very intresting and also make me feel like I know nothing.

What’s the outdo music? It sounds nice

6:39 The z and the inverted r are not pronounced as z and r, both are actually vowels. In fact z and r are used to represent the vowels because other letters we usually use to represent vowels (a, e, i, o, u) have been used up. How z and the inverted r (which you use r to represent) sounds like is somewhere in between i and u.

In Korean language, P,T,K sounds are distinguished by three differences in aspiration. For example, /tal/(moon), /t͈al/(daughter), /tʰal/(mask) and /ki/(energy),/k͈i/(talent),/kʰi/(height).

Im not a native english speaker and thank you for providing me with the ability to just check how perfect my english accent is. I do indeed say the k of kold and skold very differently when checked by air ammount as the first has much the other has none. And I dont even know how to asperate something, I so struggle with this trying to say latin or PIE or ... words. Knowing that everything is unasperated in my language I also checked if I speak english with a latvian accent what then happens and yes neither skold nor kold have any air reaching my hand.

6:07 what do the G and X stand for?

i would categorize syllabic consonant as 0 final imo like in bopomofo there just isn't any and i would merge the alveolar-palatal series as either velar of alveolar bc of historical sound changes

Why is the screenshot of word at 1:34 in german?

I understand almost nothing, but i was very amused. Love it dud

Omg that screenshot of my comment was UNEXPECTED IM FAMOUS

Some have suggested that /ɥ/ is actually an allophone of /jw/ or /wj/, so you could lower the count by one again

Interesting stuff. 👍

8:43 does this have something to do with the names Ng and Wu being considered the same, which doesn't make ANY sense?

what software do you use for your videos?