Re: Consonantal length

Due to an error in my machine, I am resending the message in its edited
form. Appy-polly-logies. BB

"Dunno much about it. it's the sound my Chinese friend made speaking
Chinese  with her sister. It sounded like hard "ssssss". I never tried
Chinese and never will anyway."

Too bad, it's my favorite natlang to date. Such a pleasure to speak
(fricatives! fricatives!). And tones! Lovely, lovely tones! Mandarin really
engages your whole throat, and usually all at once. Truly pretty, too, once
you've become accustomed to it. No translation of Chinese has ever captured
any of the rhythm of the original. It always comes out like some bad
fortune cookie, a real shame given the literary and phonological richness
of Mandarin and other Chinese languages.

If it was Mandarin (or certain Cantonese dialects), the sound was the ...
well, I can't write it on email. They are vocalic consonants, really,
although I've never met their like anywhere else. In Pinyin (Romanised
Mandarin) they are si ci zi chi shi zhi ri. The first three are vocalic z.
Yes, z. I know they aren't written as such in IPA, but to be honest, that's
what they are. You continue the /s/ /tsh/ and /ts/ respectively; what was
once /i/ and schwa have merely become [voiced] /z/. Hence Szechwan, which
is pronounced as if it were Polich (shech-wan) by most, but is really
/sz.trwhan/ with /trwh/ representing the aspirated, retroflex, labialised
fricative [retroflex ch + w +aspiration].

The latter are /trh/ /Sr/ /tr/ /Rr/, where Sr is a retroflex S and Zr is
its VOICED equivalent. Since voicing 'does not contrast' in Mandarin, this
is interpreted as an independent phoneme.

[re: Korean doubled stops] "I did. What do I earn now ?"

Hm. Now you progress to stage 2: using said verb in a sentence without
malingering over this or other doubled stops. It's quite a pain, although i
admit i do enjoy it.

BB
*********
You! Off my planet!

I'm not a cranky person, I've just been in a very bad mood for 24 years.