Re: YAC: Widse -- a conlang based on Ygyde

> Date:         Fri, 31 Jan 2003 19:07:19 +0000
> From: Joe <joe@...>
>
> On Friday 31 January 2003 5:22 pm, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> > (A wild thought: perhaps the reason that /D/ is alveolar in Danish is
> > that there's no /z/ --- otherwise /D/ might tend to be dental to keep
> > the two better apart).
>
> If there's no /z/, and it's alveolar, wouldn't it be better transcribed as
> /z/, not /D/.
Well, the Danish phoneme has no sibilant allophones: it sounds more
like a [D] than a [z]. Sibilance is more salient than dentalness, it
seems. (Also there's no diacritic for "non-sibilant" in the IPA, so
there's no way to base a close transcription on [z]; for me that would
be a strong criterion when choosing a symbol for the phoneme).

/z/ might make sense in a theoretical description, but in practice it
would be very hard to reconcile with the actual sound.

> Also, English has an alveolar/dental/postalveolar distinction(/s/,
> /T/ and /S/)
Yes, and I take that to show that neither [+/-dental] or [+/-sibilant]
is enough by itself to carry a phonemic distinction for (voiced or
unvoiced) fricatives.

More to the point, perhaps, English has direct /s/ ~ /z/ and /T/ ~ /D/
distinctions, showing that [+/-voice] is enough in that context.

English:

          [+dental]   [+sibilant]
          [-sibilant] [-dental]

[-voice]     /T/          /s/

[+voice]     /D/          /z/

In Danish, on the other hand, there's only /s/ and /D/, and two
features are more than enough to distinguish them:

Danish:

          [-sibilant] [+sibilant]
          ([-dental]  [-dental])

[-voice]      -           /s/

[+voice]     /D/           -

In Danish it's actually possible to drop the [+/-sibilant] distinction
and be understood perfectly well, though it will be seen as a speech
defect. Some performers have used either [z] for /D/ or [T_-] for /s/
for comical effect.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)