Re: Thagojian phonology (was Re: oh no, not Tech phonology again)

A few corrections to my last post:

>I have to take a brief aside for Tech.  I realized that when I had dentals,
>retroflexes and post-alveolars (which I called vaguely "palatals"), and
>listed their neutral, palatized and labiovelarized counterparts, I think I
>ran into some overlap.  From my study of the phonologies of Abkhaz-Adyghe
>and Chinese, I found that when retroflexes or postalveolars are palatized,
>they become alveolar-palatal (the c and z with a curl on the lower part;
>pretty much the same as [sj]/[Sj] and [zj]/[Zj] if I'm not mistaken).  Or,
>the postalveolar series are probably automatically palatized, so they
>probably have no neutral/labiovelarized variants in modern spoken Tech (in
>particular, Qotilian and Maou dialects -- incidentally the latter has no
>retroflexes at all).  For Chinese (Mandarin), see my previous post on how I
>merged zh/ch/sh with j/q/x.
Yes, but I better add something concerning the classical/literary/high
formal Tech: there could very well be two sets of retroflexes: an apical
retroflex and a laminal retroflex.  That would actually leave not only
retroflex stops (d. t. t.') but retroflex affricates (d.z. t.s. t.s.')!  The
distinction occurs in Hmong (in Pollard script at least), so it's a
possibility.  The retroflex *stops* palatize to (dZ tS tS', the common
alveolopalatals); the other to (dz, tc, tc,') (z, and c, are supposed to be
IPA z-curl and c-curl, which represent the palatoalveolars of Mandarin and
Polish).  It's like the difference between the "blue-green" Crayola crayon
and the "green-blue" one (one of those was discontinued, right?).  Or "north
by northwest", that sort of thing.

>All I know about vowels for now: ä (a-umlaut) has two allophones, depending
>on stress or open/closed syllables: [ae] (ligatured, the ash) and [@]
>(schwa).  Also, ü (u-umlaut) likewise has two allophones: [y] (French u)
>and
>[i-] (i-bar, Russian bI).  If there's an ö, then it would have two
>allophones: [o/] (Danish o-slash) and [o-] (rounded schwa, similar to
>French
>e).
Uh, it's not rounded schwa.  It's the high central rounded vowel [u-]
(that's u-bar), the ubiquitous Swedish and Norwegian "u".  The allophone to
o-umlaut.

Danny
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