Re: retroflex consonants

--- Josh Brandt-Young skrzypszy:

> I think it may be likely that the native speaker with whom you spoke wasn't
> looking at things from an objective point of view (in much the same way that
> a native English speaker, though clearly no one with linguistic training,
> might swear that "th" constitutes two sounds). There's a Pole in the
> Linguistics department here at Berkeley who has done all the analysis with
> spectrograms and whatnot, and confirms that they are *quite* retroflexed.
The person who gave me my information is clearly not without linguistic
training. But if Polish linguists cannot even agree among themselves about it,
then who am I to make a choice?

> But then, if they were alveolar, what would differentiate them from [s] and
> [z]?
[s] and [z] are dental. And what distinguishes it from *our* [s] and [z] is
probably something in the field of apicality/laminality.

But as I said, I don't consider myself a specialist in the field, so I opt for
neutrality.


--- Danny Wier skrzypszy:

> I've read conflicting descriptions. The book I have has <cz>, <sz>,
> <z.>/<rz> has palatoalveolars /tS/, /S/, /Z/ -- but somewhere on the web I
> read they're retroflexes. Since you have contrasting and fully phonemic
> alveolopalatals <c'>/<ci>, <s'>/<si>, <z'>/<zi> (IPA c-curl and z-curl are
> involved), I tend to think retroflexes would set them off more. Maybe it
> depends on the locale and the speaker.
Your representation of the alveolopalatals (or "prepalatals", as my spokesman
calls them) is beyond any doubt. About the <sz> etc. you are probably right as
well: just an individual/local matter.

> I know Russian <sh> and <zh> (but not <ch> and <shch> which are always
> palatized) are realized either retroflex or near-retroflex, once again
> because of the phonemicity of softness vs. hardness. Don't know about Czech,
> but I know <r-hacek> is a palatal trill (or something like that), reflected
> as <rz> in Polish but pronounced as the much less difficult /Z/ (or /z`/?).
I have always been under the assumption that Czech r-haczek is a retroflex
trill.


--- Josh Brandt-Young skrzypszy:

> > I thought |sz| and |z.| were both postalveolar ([S] and [Z]).  Am I insane?
>
> No, just incorrect. :) Believe me, whatever the books may say (perhaps
> they're reluctant to describe Polish in terms of retroflexion because it's
> such a "European" language), these are absolutely not
> postalveolar--pronouncing them so sounds utterly wrong and bad and awful.
> The retroflexing causes all kinds of interesting crunchy effects on
> surrounding vowels as well, which wouldn't occur if they were merely
> postalveolar.
You are a native speaker, right? I'm curious what kind of "crunchy effects" you
have in mind.


 --- Danny Wier skrzypszy:

> So now we got both an English pronunciation thread and a Polish
> pronunciation thread, and it's all my fault!! What's next, Mandarin? Somali?
> Klingon?
You want to kill such a scarce race? ;)
Well, for me this discussion has a not-so-obvious conlang component too, since
it might have repercussions on Wenedyk phonology.

Jan

=====
"Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Everything you'll ever need on one web page
from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts
http://uk.my.yahoo.com