Re: HELP: Vocabulary

--- Trebor Jung <treborjung@...> wrote:
> When I try coming up
> with compounds, they
> all seem to be imprecise; when I try to make the
> compound more precise, the
> result is something like 'to continuously attempt to
> crush with the teeth'
> for 'to chew'. That is far too long... Or maybe I
> need to add some
> grammatical categories to my language?
The definition I found for 'mâcher' (to chew) in a
French dictionary looks like: 'to grind with teeth
before swallowing, or to triturate inside the mouth'.
Chewing a gum doesn't really look like 'attempting to
crush' it. But about your problem, I'm afraid there
there won't be any other way than lexicalization. If
you don't want to repeat all the time expressions like
'to triturate inside the mouth', then you just invent
a word like, say, 'to chew', whose definition in the
lexicon will be 'to triturate inside the mouth'.
Otherwise the language will be awfully periphrastic.
Just think for a moment of the semantic power and
complexity of such a tiny word like 'to sell'. Isn't
it very handy ? If someone doesn't know what it means,
then he's supposed to look in the lexicon and find,
for ex 'to yield [something] [to somebody] for an
agreed price', all these concepts having to be defined
too, of course. So much meaning in only four letters
(and three phonemes) ? Nay, natlangs are really great,
if you think of it. (Some will say that especially
English is great, since in German, for ex, 'verkaufen'
requires 9 letters and 7 or 8 phonemes - I have
absolutely no intention of discussing the number of
phonemes in 'verkaufen').

[secund topic concatenated because of daily limit
threat]

Normally I'm not really interested in phonetics, but
discussion on this list makes me think sometimes. So I
listened carefully to an Irish song interpreted in
English by the (great) female singer Sinead O'Connor.
It's called 'Paddy's Lament' and is well known, I
believe. I was trying to detect differences of
pronunciation between the English I learned and her
way of pronouncing. First, I noticed words like 'ye'
or 'youse' for 'you', and 'Americay' for America, but
this is not really a matter of pronunciation I think,
rather dialectal words (the written text mentions that
orthograph). Then I also noticed that consonants were
uttered in a strong way (stronger than in French), but
as far as I know, this is the case in English too :
'p', for example, is much stronger than in French. (In
another song, I also noticed that 'she' seems to be
pronounced not quite I learned it, something between
'shee' and 'shea').

Then I concentrated on the sibilants (is that the word
') like 's' and 'z'. When you listen to a record (any
record), such sounds seem to come out separated from
the rest of the text, just like they were written on a
different music line. So the 's' and 'z' are quite
easy to localize, but to my surprise, it seemed to me
that the 'd' and 't' (dentals, I presume ') seemed to
belong to the same kind of sounds. Not only are they
much stronger than in French, but they seem to be
followed by something like a 'h' that turns to a very
short 'z' :
'And I wished I was at home in Dhear old Dhublin', or
'And I wished I was at home in Dzear old Dzublin'

I wonder if English people also notice this as
something peculiar ?

I also wonder if there is just one phoneme existing
both in French and English that could be reasonably
considered as the same sound ? To me, it seems that
there is none (1), while between French and German, or
Spanish, or Russian, or other languages, there are
some. Is English a human language ?

(1) No, this is exaggerated. The 'z' in 'reason'
sounds the same as the one in 'raison', and sounds
like 'm', 'n' (but not 'l') are also very similar. But
when you describe English vowels, not only have they
nothing to do with vowels from other languages, but
also you should take into account the melody of them
(does X-Sampa do that ? I bet for no). When a vowel in
French, for ex, is usually uttered on a single tone,
an English vocalic sound sounds like a whole melody :
a simple 'a' could nearly be compared to the first
verse of 'It's a long way to Tipperary' ;-)

[third topic... answering to Christophe]

An interesting pair in French: un boeuf / des boeufs
(an ox / oxes). In "boeuf", you pronounce the final
"f", but not in "boeufs". But, more interesting, the
sound "oeu" is not the same in singular and in plural.
Singular is open (like in "oeil"), plural is closed
(like in "deux"). BTW, "oeil" is simply a perversion
of Latin "oculus", and "yeux", of "oculos".



=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


		
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