What Do ‘Phonetic Symbols’ Mean?
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ʃ, tʃ, ʈʂ, ʎ, χ, etc. – Listen To Them All Here!
In our word comparison tables, all the words in whose pronunciations you can hear are also written down in special symbols, called ‘phonetic symbols’. Here we use those of the International Phonetic Association; to see their official symbols chart click here. They are in the Arial Unicode MS font, which comes preinstalled on most modern computers. If you don’t have it, you can download it here, but beware, it is a very big file, at 23 MB!
Many of these symbols look like normal letters, but others are different, such as [ʃ], [tʃ], [ʈʂ], [ʎ], [χ], and so on. What do they all mean? Well, they represent particular sounds, many of which are special to Quechua and Aymara. We need these symbols here, then, if we want to represent more precisely certain sounds that there is no point in showing in normal spelling, but which can help us see the finer differences between the sounds used in the various regional accents of Quechua and Aymara. To hear the exact sound that each of the symbols we use represents, just hover or click on any of the symbols in blue in the tables below.
Note: the best way to hear exactly what a consonant
sounds like is to hear it pronounced between two vowels, so in these recordings most consonants are
pronounced in between two [u] vowels. So if you try the
symbol [p], for example, you will actually hear
, with an [u] sound both before and after the [p] consonant. Listen too to what
happens automatically to these surrounding vowel sounds when they
are next to the [q] consonant in Quechua and Aymara! Also, a few of the sounds here never occur in
Quechua or Aymara words with a vowel sound after them, so those are pronounced
here with an [u] before them only.
Consonants
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Now there are a lot of different sounds here! At first you may hardly be able to hear any difference between some of these sounds, but if you listen hard you eventually will. Helping you to hear them all is what this page is for, because this too will help you understand the differences between the pronunciations in different regions.
If you speak only European languages like Spanish or English, you will probably have a lot of trouble at first, especially with all the different sounds in the first three columns. Of these 27 sounds, Spanish and English only use four, which is why these European languages need to ‘make up’ for having so few consonant sounds by having more distinctive vowels. Quechua and Aymara, on the other hand, with so many consonants to use, simply don’t need to make an important difference between more than three vowels.
Still, even people who speak Quechua or Aymara will not be used to some of these sounds, because no one region uses all of them. Each region just uses different selections of them. The main regional differences are these.
• The sounds in the first three columns are the so called unaspirated, aspirated and ejective sounds, like , and respectively. The differences between them are obvious and very important to all speakers of all languages of the Aymara family everywhere, and to speakers of Quechua in the far south of Peru (including Cuzco and Puno) and throughout Bolivia. So Aymara and the Quechua of all these areas use at least 15 of the consonants in the first three columns. In Quechua spoken further north, from Ayacucho in Peru, through the whole of Central and Northern Peru, only the unaspirated sounds are used, so people from those regions will not be used to these differences which are so important in southern regions, and will need to listen hard to hear them distinctly. In Ecuador, meanwhile, there are just a few aspirated sounds, but no ejectives.
•
On the
other hand, people in central and northern Peru make a big and important difference
between the first few sounds in the fourth and fifth rows (and/or the third row
too). That is, they distinguish normal
from the so-called retroflex
, and/or
. In Ecuador, and in
southern regions like Ayacucho, Cuzco and Bolivia, however, people don’t use
this difference, neither in Quechua nor in Aymara. So if you’re from these areas, this time it’s
you who will have to listen really hard to make sure you can tell the
difference between normal
and retroflex
, because your regions have now lost the retroflex
sound of Original Quechua and Original
Aymara.
•
Many
southern regions are also losing the real distinction between
and
in column four, while most Central and Northern regions
still have it. Again, this applies to
both Quechua and Aymara.
•
The
sounds written just with the letter
can be heard in many regional varieties of Quechua and
Aymara, as simply an optional alternative way of pronouncing normal
. In
fact it’s pretty hard for most people to hear the difference between
and
, but if you listen repeatedly here you should
get it in the end. (Technically,
linguists call
a ‘palatal stop’, while
is an ‘alveolar affricate’).
• The ‘prize’ for the region that uses every single one of the 24 different sounds in the first three columns (and optionally the variants too) goes only to Central Aymara, i.e. the Jaqaru/Kawki language.
As you
can see, all these different sounds make things very complicated! This is why nobody proposes using all of these symbols for
everyday use in spelling! As we have seen,
contrary to popular belief, spelling is absolutely not about representing every tiny difference in sound,
especially not from region to region. It
is completely impractical to try to, so there is no point using all of these
symbols for a day-to-day spelling system for Quechua or Aymara. On the contrary, we need more simple
spellings, with simple rules so that everyone can read and write the same, even
if there are different pronunciations from one region to the next.
So these
phonetic symbols are only used and needed by specialists in linguistics, to
represent very accurately the minor differences between different regional
accents. A practical spelling system for
any language can and should be much simpler.
Above all it should only use different letters for sound differences
that really are important in that particular language; and one has to choose the particular letters
carefully so that can work well for people in as many regions as possible. This is why the official alphabet has been
designed as it has.
Thanks to
their very large number of consonants, both Quechua and Aymara can work
perfectly well with only a small number of vowel sounds. This is why the [e] and [o] sounds don’t even need
to be spelt differently from [i] and
[u], because they are just
predictable variants of these basic [i]
and [u] sounds. So once again, remember that the table below
is only about precise sounds, not about the letters by which they should be
written in normal, practical spelling.
Vowels
Note: semivowels are pronounced in between two [a] sounds, so that you can hear them more clearly.
The symbol [:] is used for a vowel that is distinctly longer than normal.
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semivowels |
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basic vowels, normal length |
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predictable, automatic pronunciation
variants near [q], normal length |
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basic vowels, long |
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long, in some regions, derived from |
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