Do YOU pronounce Sigil with a hard or soft G?

[Max_Killjoy]

It's /aɪ̯/ (or /ɑɪ̯/ if you have an Australian accent). It's two vowels in one syllable. That little curve under the second vowel means it's not a separate syllable (there's also a diacritic mark to represent when a sound is a separate syllable when you might expect it not to be). Your mouth starts open for the /a/ and then closes near the end to /I/. If you don't close your mouth, you'll just stretch the /a/ to /aː/. That pair of triangles that looks like a colon means the vowel is longer (meaning "you spend more time saying it", not like what English teachers usually call a "long vowel", which is really just a different vowel altogether). Pronouncing /aɪ̯/ as /aː/ is what a "Southern drawl" sounds like (or "sounds lahk"). Being in Michigan, you probably don't have a Southern drawl but you may be doing what's called "Canadian rising" which would change the /aɪ̯/ to /ɐɪ̯/. It's still two vowels but they are closer together so the movement between them is less obvious.

Odd... I don't have to close my mouth to make or sustain the sound I'm talking about, and the closest it comes to "two sounds" is a minuscule pop of breath if I don't lead into it from another letter... if I say "sigh" and just kinda hold the sound there's no starting /a/ and no need to close the mouth... or I could stretch the middle of "fright" out for however long doing the same thing.

I went through this last fall when trying to work on a conlang (with help from someone who was offering as a way to practice for their linguistics degree)... spent three days trying to find the symbols for "long I", etc, before we figured out I meant sounds that don't have single symbols even though I don't hear any hint of "two sounds".

And like I said, all the IPA vowel charts sound like 75% variations on the same sort of grunting pained sound.