Re: retroflex consonants

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?

Just watched the State of the Union address. Hail to the chimp. Anybody ever
heard of a "nucular weapon" by the way?

(Thus ended my off-topic banter. Now let us discuss conlanging and sex.)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Josh Brandt-Young" <vionau@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, January 28, 2003 8:09 PM
Subject: Re: retroflex consonants


> Quoth Joe:
>
> > 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.

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