Re: Your Help Appreciated

John Mietus <sirchuck@...> wrote:

>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.

>> What is <wh>?
>
>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/.

>> 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.


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/index.html
  "... When all men on earth think, day and night, about the
   Zahir, which one will be a dream and which one a reality?"
                              Jorge Luis Borges, _The Zahir_