Blah blah blah natlangs

Sic Danny Wier:

> In languages like Sanskrit and its descendants which had a shift from
palatal to
> palatoalveolar (c, ch, j, jh, s'), palatoalveolar was probably an
intermediate
> stage.
    My freshman year in college I had a roommate who was a native
speaker of Nepali. When he would pronounce English /tS/ and /dZ/ (as
well as their Nepali equivalents) they would sound to me as if they
alternated between palatoalveolar (e.g. [tS]) and alveolar ([ts]).
    Having heard enough alveolopalatals in spoken Chinese I now kind of
wonder if he wasn't using [ts\] and [dz\].


Sic Adrian Morgan:

> Pronouncing "yeah" with an [&] is new to me.
>
> [je@] and [je:] are both common.
>
> [jE@] and [jE:] also believable. Reference points on the
[e]->[E]->[&]->[a]
> continuum can be hard to pin down, and I don't think my dialect has
[E] so
> I have difficulty distinguishing it.
    My idiolect definitely has [j{] (or [j&] depending on your favored
transcription system), but the actual phonetic realization might be
something else, just because speakers of other dialects usually insist
that my /{/ is not [{]. If this is so, I don't know what exactly it is.
It's definitely not a diphthong, however, even in "yeah."
    By the way, blah blah blah is occasionally pronounced bla bla bla
with the same lax sound ending a word, no?

JDM

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