How to read the international phonetic alphabet
I had a friend who was very thorough and insisted on pronouncing the g at the end of -ing words. I took college linguistics and remember this table. I tried to explain to her that &quot;ng&quot; may be spelled as two letters but, like sh and ch, is really a single consonant, and linguists give it its own name (the velar nasal) and its own singular symbol (ŋ).<p>Sometimes we clip the g, and say goin&#x27;.
Then there is the standard way to say it, goiŋ.
Then there is the way she was saying it, goiŋ-guh.<p>I find it fascinating that languages have different sets of sounds. For example, in English p and b are two different letters, and pat and bat are two different words. But other languages don&#x27;t distinguish them, and their speakers really wouldn&#x27;t notice a difference if you said pat or bat. On the other hand, I don&#x27;t hear the difference between p at the beginning of word, like pat, and p at the end of a word, like stop. But one is &quot;aspirated&quot; and one isn&#x27;t, and in some languages they are different letters, so pat and pʰat could be two different words. The only difference is a puff of air following one and not the other.<p>They say in the babble of babies you can hear all the consonants of the world, but as we take on our mother tongue we lose the ability to hear or say many of them.