The Vowel Space

0:00 Vowels are not discrete
1:50 Vowels and colour
3:40 Resonating cavities and formants
5:40 Synthesizing vowels with Praat Vowel Editor
6:33 Vowels and basic colour terms
8:24 Early phoneticians and the tongue space
9:36 The tongue quadrilateral and MRI
9:54 Daniel Jones & Cardinal Vowels
11:00 The real vowel space explains
14:07 Inconsistent vowel demos
15:07 Consistent vowels with technology
17:05 A 3D vowel space

This video was sponsored by Brilliant.

[ksiistoyiiwa]

This is the best explanation of vowel quality I have ever heard - thank you, Dr Lindsey!

[rosehipowl]

I studied linguistics at university and I can't believe I was taught "wrongly"! Your chart makes a lot more sense to me - I hope it gets more widely adopted. I love your channel because it really has made me think differently about the things I was taught, like that analogy to the colour spectrum really made links in my brain that I had never thought of before!

[lunasophia]

I'd like to point out how uncommon it is for an academic open source project like this to be so actively maintained. What often happens is a student (typically someone working on a graduate degree) will work on something as part of their education, finish their degree, and it never gets updated again. But praat has a history going back more than 18 years (the github repo only goes back to 2005, and even then they'd passed version 4). Quite impressive!

[blerst]

The analogy between colors and vowels was perfect. I have no idea why I haven't seen anyone explain like this before.

[margett__]

As someone who's currently working on bettering their English pronunciation, the tongue position explanation never quite made sense to me. Thanks to your brilliant video, I can finally understand why. I find it so much easier to trust my ear and try and replicate sounds this way. Somehow my tongue and lips find their way by following the information my ears have gathered. Truly fascinating stuff.

[vanderkarl]

Learning this feels a lot like when I learned that elementary school lied to me about red, blue, and yellow being the primary colors

[m.germano]

As a native Brazilian, I missed the NASAL set of vowels ã (nasal A - não) and õ (nasal O - aviões), as well as the unwritten (but nonetheless spoke) ˜u (nasal U - muito), ˜i (nasal I - quinto) and ˜e (nasal E - mente).
It would probably require another 3rd (or even 4th dimension hahaha) vowel space representation.
I should state that I your video. It's so instructive that I keep watching it repeatedly.

Maybe, you are planning to create a video about the TONES of vowels like its used in Mandarin or Cantonese

[Rjkooljay]

"The Vowel Space" *yawn
"The Vowel Space by Dr Geoff Lindsey" *click

[gameXylinder]

5:25 🤣 I burst out laughing at the "bluuu" 😂 You are both educational and hilarious!

[SiddharthS]

Really interesting video! The comparison with colours reminded me of the terms used in Sanskrit: the vowel letters are called svara varna, which means resonant colours.

[Nikedemos]

I can see Dr Lindsey is trying to beat the record for the most dynamically changing thumbnail! We must be on version 9 by now :D

[ebey]

From one linguist to another, thank you for such a great video!

[kelcben]

Thanks! Love your expertise, rich and delightful videos, and the sense of humor threading through them. I've been fascinated by all this all my life (Enfield, UK, war bride mother, Newark, NJ, father). Although it's not a phonetic issue, I've often thought to ask you your view on double-is. Today I was reading "SMART Speech" and there it was (I admit I was dismayed to see). Page 42: "A corollary of this is, as I discussed in Chapter Two, is the expectation that..." It has always irked me a little and I suppose it will now do so a bit less. Congratulations and best wishes for your continued success.

[LeelooMinai]

It's interesting how a-u-a-i-u glide at 6:29 is interpreted by the brain (at least mine:) as "how are you" - it fills the missing sounds automatically to match the most probable phrase.

[SupGaillac]

It would be fun to see an animation of the great vowel shift on this diagram, with blobs representing a rough position of each vowel at a given time, slowly moving around :)
Excellent video, which makes some much more sense to me than IPA diagrams on Wikipedia !

[MrSlowrolla]

I have a degree in linguistics, majoring in phonetics (graduated 2013). I've since moved into a totally unrelated professional field, and sadly lost touch with a lot of concepts and ideas of phonetics, my formative passion. I must thank you for reigniting a nostalgic fire within me with this fantastic video! ❤️

[PC_Simo]

For me, as an associative synesthete, who always saw vowels as more colourful (and ”round”), and consonants as more black-and-white (and angular), this fills so many gaps and answers so many questions. Thank you. 😌👍🏻

[taylormanning]

Dr. Lindsey, you may not have known this application of vowel-space, but brass musicians use this as a pedagogical tool to describe ways of modifying their tone. Unfortunately, many of them reject the science of their art, but many of us understand this is a very effective way to develop a way to communicate about an essential part of what we do. Thank you for providing a video that I can send to my musical friends; as long as their minds are open, they will benefit greatly from your work. Sincerely – thank you

[cruztijerina]

This is mindblowing and somewhat intuitively understood by many but not articulated (clearly) by anyone until now. Thank you Dr. Lindsey !

[timgerk]

6:30 As an Iowan, I feel heard. It's been a long road, expressing our all-vowel nature in four glyphs.