Help talk:IPA/Portuguese

missing symbol

The i with tilde (ĩ) is missing under vowels. I came here looking for it and thus do not know how it should sound, or I would fill it in myself. 174.19.239.54 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 11:17, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

It's in the "diacritics" section. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 17:56, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Help talk:IPA which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 16:18, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

ɐ sound

The character ɐ is listed as having a sound approximately similar to the 'a' in 'father' or the 'ur' in 'purse.' I'm not sure in which geographic area these two sounds are similar, but in US English they are very distinct and I've also not heard a similarity in British English, either. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.46.221.17 (talk) 14:18, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

They're more similar in British English, where the purse vowel. But you are right that this isn't helpful to American speakers. According to the vowel charts at Portuguese phonology#Vowels, I'm thinking cup and commA would be more accurate, the latter especially because this is an unstressed vowel. What do people think? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 16:25, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

In unstressed vowels section, the English example is actually about. The anon user is probably referring to the row with the words andaime and falámos/falamos (past tense of first person in plural of the verb falar), which is an open a in most European dialects, while it is closed and generally nasalized in Brazil (as virtually all stressed pre-nasal a, see Fonética e Fonologia do Português Brasileiro. p. 37).

As for the samples, maybe cup could be more helpful to American speakers.--Luizdl ^Talk 01:11, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

I've had the same doubt as the original commenter ("'father' and 'purse' don't sound similar"); I'm native to Brazilian Portuguese, fluent in American English and fairly used to British English (but no experience with European Portuguese). I agree that cup and commA are better examples of stressed and unstressed /ɐ/. Monstrim (talk) 00:42, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

ʁ and ɾ

I don't understand how these symbols are compared to the US latter. What am I missing? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:A000:BFC0:21:1432:4CB9:846A:C1B8 (talk) 02:10, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

[ɾ] is the sound of latter in the United States. [ʁ] is a guttural r. Is that not clear in the table? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 04:35, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

The letters 'tt' are placed in bold in this example, implying that they are significant. It is the 'r,' of course, that should be the focal point. 2605:A000:BFC0:21:1432:4CB9:846A:C1B8 (talk) 01:24, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

No, it is actually the tt in North American latter that is pronounced [ɾ]. The er part is pronounced [ɚ]. — Eru·tuon 04:06, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

I'm sorry. I hear no connection between por and the 'tt' of latter (ˈlæt̬.əɹ.) There are some, perhaps many, Americans who pronounce 'latter' like 'ladder,' but how does this mean anything to our discussion about the 'r' sound of por? Are there other examples I might see and hear? Many thanks for your help with this. Incidentally, I am a native English speaker, raised in the Northeast United States, and reasonably proficient in Brazilian Portuguese.2605:A000:BFC0:21:1432:4CB9:846A:C1B8 (talk) 18:59, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

There are audio files of example words available at Dental and alveolar flaps. Most salient to this issue are the audio files for English better and Spanish caro. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 19:49, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

I think I can hear this in the Portuguese word 'prato.' Thank you. I'll keep studying. 2605:A000:BFC0:21:1432:4CB9:846A:C1B8 (talk) 23:35, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

Maybe your confusion is because por actually has a guttural r ([ʁ] or the like) in the dialect of Brazilian Portuguese that you are familiar with, while prato and caro have the flap [ɾ] in all dialects; see the Wiktionary entries for por and prato. — Eru·tuon 23:47, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

ð in European Portuguese

I have never heard any Portuguese person pronounce the d like a ð. Definitely not in words like cedo. Is there any source for this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cuddleiro (talk • contribs) 06:16, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

@Cuddleiro: There are sources listed in Portuguese phonology#Consonants, under "Phonetic notes" after the table. — Eru·tuon 12:53, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

@Cuddleiro and Erutuon: I'm pretty sure that [ð] in European Portuguese is an approximant as in Spanish and Catalan, not a fricative as in English (though word-initial /ð/ in English might be an approximant as well).

The reason for calling this sound a fricative is that the approximant allophone of /ɡ/ isn't a consonantal variety of the close back unrounded vowel but a frictionless [ɣ] which is unspecified for rounding - see voiced velar approximant for more information. This is the sole reason for calling those fricatives as the distinction is meaningless for bilabial and dental approximants (though perhaps not for the former if you consider the bilabial approximant to be the consonantal variety of the close central rounded vowel). Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 13:43, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Iberian [β, ð, ɣ] are on a continuum, ranging from a (weak) fricative to an approximant. They can thus be classified as lenis fricatives, if we want to borrow that term from Germanic phonologies. Human speech is not an IPA chart, there's some free variation in it. Sol505000 (talk) 11:15, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

L sounds

The sounds of L are currently wrong! I tried to fix them, by adding the velarized allophone for European Portuguese, but user:Kbb2 reverted it and made a comment implying that I added a clear L. I'm not sure whether he didn't see what I edited or he is misunderstanding something. --Mahmudmasri (talk) 20:28, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

@Mahmudmasri: Maybe the phrasing of my edit summary was somewhat unfortunate.

[ɫ] is the only allophone of /l/ in EP. There are no neutral nor palatalized varieties of it. I believe that the same is true of BP, as far as the lateral allophones are concerned ([w] is labio-velar). Our readers can read all instances of ⟨l⟩ with ⟨ˠ⟩ implied. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 20:53, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Accordingly, this only means that the normal L should not be used at all for European Portuguese. The page is currently confusing for our readers, since it lacks the velarized L in the table, yet, I find it used habitually all over Wikipedia, like there before you removed it. The velarized L is normally written with the precomposed ɫ rather than adding a diacritic to a normal L. --Mahmudmasri (talk) 23:26, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

@Mahmudmasri: ⟨l⟩ does not denote a normal L (however you'd describe that, there are at least 3 varieties of what you could call a normal L) but whatever coronal lateral approximant happens to occur in any given language. It can be dental, denti-alveolar, alveolar or postalveolar and apical or laminal, it can also be palatalized, neutral (perhaps schwa-colored would be another term for that), velarized or pharyngealized or variable between any of those. As long as there are no two or (rarely) more contrastive coronal laterals in the language, there's no problem with writing the sole coronal lateral with ⟨l⟩.

⟨ɫ⟩ is a precomposed symbol, that's true. It's a combination of ⟨l⟩ and an obsolete diacritic that could be used to denote velarization or pharyngealization, therefore it's equivalent to ⟨lˠ⟩ or ⟨lˤ⟩. ⟨ˠ⟩ or (in the case of languages other than Portuguese) ⟨ˤ⟩ can be implied when you write ⟨l⟩ the same way the dental and laminal diacritics are (Portuguese /l/ is, AFAIK, laminal denti-alveolar).

On Help:IPA/Catalan, Help:IPA/Dutch and some other pages we use ⟨l⟩ for a sound that is either [ɫ] or an [ɫ] that is in a free variation (more or less) with a clear [l]. As hundreds of milions of native speakers of English (from Canada, United States, Scotland, Northern England, Australia and New Zealand) use [ɫ] for /l/ in all positions, I don't think that we need to complicate our transcriptions with this additional detail.

Perhaps @Aeusoes1: will explain it better to you. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 15:37, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

It makes more sense to avoid special diacritics like the tilde on velarized/pharyngealized l when there's no meaningful contrast in a language between clear and dark versions. Doubly so if there's no allophony between velarized and non-velarized (as is the case in English). It seems like l is velarized in all positions in Portuguese, so if there are transcriptions of Portuguese with dark l, we should fix that. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 16:48, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Why is that discussion getting that long? Shouldn't it have been simpler for others to understand what we are talking about? Thanks for your explanations, but I really didn't need any of them. It felt like you are inviting someone who agrees with you to weigh upon your opinion. I only had one point, which is: using the correct, common symbol for the pronunciation, because it's not English, so a diaphonemic notation is unacceptable. And again, based on your claim, European Portuguese speakers only have one pronunciation for L [ɫ], not even in free variation with [l], which only makes ɫ the right choice. --Mahmudmasri (talk) 19:44, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

The transcription of Portuguese is by-and-large diaphonemic whenever we can make it. It's the same with Spanish. When we can't make it dialect neutral, we pick the dialect that is more strongly associated with the topic.

Are you also of the opinion that we should transcribe a language's single lateral as [ɫ] whenever it's more phonetically accurate? We would need some consensus on that before we changed the transcription of Catalan, Dutch, etc. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 21:02, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

The transcription convention in European Portuguese is [ɫ] in coda and [l] in onsets. That's it, I am a native speaker and a professional linguist, I can cite as many references as you wish. A major difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese is the coda lateral. [l] (or clear L) is never the sound that occurs in coda in EP. This transcription convention is also the same as in English and Catalan. @Kbb2 please change it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Roy Aleksis (talk • contribs) 15:45, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

You say that "the convention in European Portuguese is [ɫ] in coda and [l] in onsets". But in a simple Google search I've found a site that transcribes European Portuguese using the dark L for syllable onset https://european-portuguese.info/pt/ipa.

Syllable onset /l/ is also dark in both European and Brazilian Portuguese, the European coda /l/ is only darker than the onset one. We're using /l/ for broad transcription and it is a simple symbol, we're doing the same for English and Catalan.--Luizdl ^Talk 19:13, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

I'm very late to this, just came across it as a curiosity - but as a native European Portuguese speaker, I can tell you it's almost impossible for me to start a word with the dark L. It feels horribly unnatural and requires focus so I go against my instinct. I wouldn't put it past some regions sticking to a dark L throughout as "regional accent", but "[ɫ] in coda and [l] in onsets", on a syllabic sense, is absolutely the most commonly accepted way.

"Lado" is absolutely a clear L. "Lordelo", two clear Ls. "Punhal", dark L. "Desfalque", dark L. "Lateral", clear L then dark L.

I see the table now reflects this, which I agree with. 81.109.71.137 (talk) 21:46, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

I have reverted the addition. In other guides (such as Help:IPA/Turkish and Help:IPA/Norwegian), transcribe the velarized-unvelarized distinction only when it is phonemic. In other cases, we don't bother with any special symbols and use ⟨l⟩, as in Help:IPA/Catalan and Help:IPA/Serbo-Croatian. Per Portuguese phonology, The consonant /l/ is velarized [ɫ] in all positions in European Portuguese, even before front vowels. In Portugal, the unvelarized lateral appears only in non-standard dialects. This is sourced to Fonética do português europeu: descrição e transcrição, ISBN 978-972-665-614-2. We follow the sources, not the opinions of native speakers which may or may not know whether they velarize their laterals in syllable onset. Sol505000 (talk) 19:45, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

j̃

This was added as the Brazilian variant of the palatal nasal, which Portuguese phonology backs up, but we should probably discuss it first. What do people think? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 22:52, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Barbosa & Albano 2004, p. 228 says "The palatal nasal very frequently reduces to a nasalised palatal approximant" then it's just an allophone.--Luizdl ^Talk 00:20, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Well, an allophone would have a phonetic context tied to it. But if even if the palatal approximant variant is what appears "very frequently" it's the same phoneme with a different phonetic attribute, which we have tended to gloss over here (especially with the rhotics). — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 18:38, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

I've removed all instances of that symbol, replacing it with either ⟨ɲ⟩ or ⟨j⟩, depending on the context. Editors who transcribe Portuguese into IPA have long disregarded this guide (not through malevolence but simple ignorance), so it was time to fix this and much more (e.g. replace other symbols not found in the guide such as ⟨h⟩ or ⟨ɫ⟩, remove redundant diacritics and non-standard pronunciations). Sol505000 (talk) 21:04, 31 March 2023 (UTC)