Re: Phaleran: the Webpage.

On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, FFlores wrote:

>
> I've also seen <ch> and <chh> in Sanskrit transliteration.
> I don't see a reason why <ch> couldn't be /tS/, so that'd
> be another example. Anybody knows?
>
In Sanskrit, and in Nepali, they really are stops - I wouldn't know about
Hindi and other related languages.  There's a very natural tendency on the
part of people with a Germanic or Latin language to pronounce /c/ and /j/
as affricates - but that's not always correct, as I had to learn when
learning Nepali. (_ch_ and _chh_ are just old-fashioned transcription
for _c_ and _ch_)

This confusion means that very few accounts can be really trusted, and
it is not uncommon to see centro-palatal consonants in one language
be described as a stop by one researcher, and as an affricate by
another. And, as Boyd Michaelovsky (La Langue Hayu) has said, the
analysis is often dependent on the state of the informant's dentistry!

I wouldn't know about Tibetan - it's completely unrelated to
Indo-European, being a Sino-Tibetan language (or, since that's an
extinct proto-language, a Tibeto-Burman language), and while the current
pronounciation can often be derived from the script, I've never seen a
really thorough description of the phonology of any Tibetan language,
and for the Tibeto-Burman language I have descriptions of (Yamphu, Limbu,
Hayu and others) my remark above about dentistry holds.

My Tibetan teacher was already satisfied if we'd pronouns everything
about right, no matter the tones. He was more interested in the grammar,
and whether we got the meaning of the little ditties of the seventh Dalai
Lama!


Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt