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Re: Your Help Appreciated

From:John Mietus <sirchuck@...>
Date:Tuesday, May 9, 2000, 23:10
FFlores spake, saying:

>> I can't seem to pronounce that >> Japanese flap...the "ry" sound completely escapes me. > > The <dd> in "ladder" or the <tt> in "butter" are pronounced > as alveolar flaps in rapid speech, in many (most?) English > dialects, so this might help you.
I'll try -- of course, where it gets me the most is if it's the inital sound (the name Ryuichi, for instance). I end up with something like the Spanish <r>. (I've been flirting with learning Japanese for 20 years now, and the only phrase I'm really fluent in is "Can you please speak a little slower.")
>> Again, falling into the English orthographic trap. It should actually be a >> <hw> sound, like "white" and "what". > > > Ah, you're one of those! AFAIK some people actually say /hw/, while > others might pronounce an unvoiced <w>, or an unvoiced bilabial > fricative like Japanese /h/ before /u/.
Yeah, if I think about it, I actually pronounce <hw>; otherwise it's a voiced "w" (stuck out here in the American Midwest, where all the vowel sounds are slowly becoming /@/...)
>>> Then that's /B/, in IPA "beta": a voiced bilabial fricative. >> >> Isn't that more of a Bronx cheer, or have I classified the Bronx cheer >> incorrectly? > > > <rises, takes dictionary, scans the pages... OK> No, that's a > linguolabial trill (cf Spanish <rr>, which is an alveolar trill). > AFAIK there's no symbol for it in IPA, though I remember someone > proposed one for the sound when I included it in one of my langs. > There's a diacritic for linguolabial sounds in IPA, which is a > "subscript seagull" (like an open number "3" turned 90 degress > counterclockwise).
>>> Your system is a bit asymmetric -- you have tense and lax versions >>> of /i/-/I/, /u/-/U/, /e/-/E/, but not /o/-*/O/. Not a problem, I >>> guess -- you can make */O/ > /a/ in the past stages of the lang, >>> or something like that. >> >> Yeah, I did notice the asymmetry -- the /O/ sound is what, exactly? > > > IPA "turned c". In RP English, the vowel in "lot", I guess; American > English has /A/ (IPA "script a") in that position.
Got it -- a lax form of <au> as in "caught". I s'pose I lump that in with /A/ as well, being American, though I could easily have the sound in some of my words that use /A/ in order to add that vowel dimension. Actually, since my vowels for Palaged are *so* much like English vowels, I was thinking of going with PIE's instead -- to help facilitate the similarities in the evolved languages to RW equivalents. John