Iltârer phonology
| From: | Tom Tadfor Little <tom@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, April 27, 2001, 5:05 |
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At 03:27 PM 4/26/01 , Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> > Iltârer phonology is distinctive among the Thekashi languages in that it is
> > strongly frontal; there are no back vowels and no velar consonants.
>No back vowels? Wow. Any particular reason, or is it just the way it is?
Just the way it is...although I think it is fun to play with constraints,
to see what sort of "flavor" emerges if you're restricted to only certain
elements.
> > Consonants are distinguished by place and mode of articulation, but not by
> > voice:
>
>Pardon my ignorance; what is voice? Is that as in "creaky voice" and
>things like that?
No, voice as in whether the vocal cords are active or not. [t], [p], [k]
are voiceless; [d], [b], [g] are their voiced counterparts.
> > imprecise) to pronounce them as diphthongs, with the basic vowel followed
> > by a u or w sound, but minimizing the duration of the sound and the
> > separateness of the components. To many English speakers, â may sound like
> > an oddly pronounced short o or u.
>
>Do you have recordings of this? I would love to hear what this language
>sounds like; I'm very intrigued.
Yikes! I'm struggling to pronounce it myself--the phonology is less than a
week old! But I have been practicing, and maybe a few audio files on the
web would be fun. Actually, one of my choices this time around was to work
with sounds that are not too easy for me, like the dental stop, unaspirated
/t/, and rounded /a./. I'm having to work to achieve passable
pronunciation, but I sort of like the result. It makes it sound like a real
language from a distant place, rather than just another rearrangement of
generic European phonemes. It reminds me of my (very brief) attempt to
learn to pronounce Sanskrit.
>Sorry I have no useful comments, only questions. But thanks for sharing!
No need to apologize--I appreciate your taking the time to have a look.
Cheers, Tom
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Tom Tadfor Little tom@telp.com
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Telperion Productions www.telp.com
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