Re: Your Help Appreciated

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