Re: Diphthongs in ASCII (was: CHAT letter names etc)

En réponse à Ray Brown :


>Not if they're pronounced as tw syllables, surely? It's a feature known as
>hiatus and does occur in natlangs; e.g. French 'maïs' (Br. maize, sweet
>corn; Am. corn) is _disyllabic_. In phonetic transcription [ma'is] would,
>I suppose, be clear enough; but stress is not phonemic in French and the
>phonemic transcription must be /mais/ - but it ain't a diphthong.
Just use the syllable break mark: /./: /ma.is/.


>Yep - but I'm not sure what the tie-bar shows here.
That we have a single diphtongue rather than two separate vowels.

>  OK, if its [a_i] we
>assume the [a] is syllabic and the [i] ain't. How do you distinguish
>between rising and falling diphthongs? For example, [i_u}is ambiguous;
>both [ju] and [iw] occur in Brit English dialects.
The problem is that not all diphtongues are strictly rising or strictly 
falling. IIRC a few weeks ago there was a discussion that Finnish 
diphtongues sounded like separate vowels to Italian speakers because 
Finnish diphtongues are level, i.e. both vocalic parts have equal weight. 
The difference between [a_i] and [a.i] being that one is one syllable and 
the second is two (and usually [a_i] is shorter than [a.i]). My Maggel also 
features level diphtongues, so the [a_i] notation fits perfectly.


>Which leaves me now wondering what really is the best way of showing
>diphthongs in ASCII?
It depends on the nature of the diphtongue in the language.
___________________________________________________________________________
En réponse à Matthew Kehrt :

> >
>I had thought that '.' represented a syllable break.  It was so used two
>years ago when I was last active on the list.  However, a cursory glance
>over http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/x-sampa.htm and
>http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/home.htm gives no use of this symbol,
>and I am unfamiliar with the changes to XSAMPA that make CSX.
http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/studerende/thorinn/xsamchart.gif for X-SAMPA 
(Daniel, the link on the Invaluable Conlang Links page doesn't work, you 
should change it for the one above), and 
http://cassowary.free.fr/Linguistics/cxschart.png for CXS. In both, you see 
/./ for the syllable break (in Suprasegmentals. It's the same symbol in IPA 
itself, incidentally). It's a symbol I use extensively, seen the 
nightmarish syllable structure of Maggel ;))) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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