VW (was: Digest 2 Apr)

At 4:32 pm -0700 3/4/01, Aidan Grey wrote:
>> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>> > That reminds me--how/why, insofar as the question
>> is answerable, did
>> > Latin v [w] go to v [v] in the Romance languages
>
>    /w/ is a bilabial fricative, of sorts, just bring
>the libs closer and closer together and you'll get a
>sound more and more /v/-like. Fairly simple, I think.
...and, of course, this all assumes that Latin v (or more strictly,
consonantal {u}) was pronounced [w].  Unless one has a time machine, this
is unprovable.  We can be fairly certain, I think, that it was a labial
approximant of some sort; but whether it was the bilabial [w] of British &
American English, or the labio-dental (denoted rather oddly IMO as [P] in
SAMPA, a stylized lower case upsilon in real IPA) of Indian sub-continental
English, we simply do not - and cannot - know.

In either case (tho more particularly in the latter, obviously), if
friction is added to the approximant, the sound becomes [v].  Frictioned
versions of approximants are not uncommon; the European Spanish speakers
I've met have had a tendency to add slight friction to /j/, so that it
sounds more like [Z], thus, e.g. _yo_ (I) tends to sound like [Zo].  This
sort of thing was clearly going on in Vulgar Latin/Proto-Romance.
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At 10:35 pm -0400 3/4/01, David Peterson wrote:
>    For some reason, several
>German professors here who were born in Germany can't say "village", they say
>"willage" (English orthography), even though there is a [v] in their sound
>system.  Somebody else has probably already responded to this in a better
>fashion, though--I haven't gotten that far down the e-mail list.
>
As I haven't met your German professors, you may well be right about their
[v]; but that makes it odd that they say _village_ as "willage".  I would
listen carefully to their /v/ to hear if it is really a [v].

For several years we had students from Swabia, Bavaria & Austria staying
with us.  They never said the English /v/ or /w/ properly; the result, in
fact, was that, as you say, _village_ sounded like "willage", and that
vice-versa _window_ sounded similar to "vindow".  In fact they were using
the labiodental approximant of southern German.

I have Iranian colleague at work who does just the same, with the same
effect in the way that his /w/ and /v/ are "heard" when he speaks English.

Ray.





=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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