Re: Pronunciation keys

> Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...>:
>
> > > The 'Swedish' -- a 'General Swedish as opposed to my
> > > Lect1 -- pronunciation key for English which I
> > > developed for the use of kids may be of some interest
> > > (numbers in round parentheses refer to notes below the
> > > table):
> [snip]
> > > * CHURCH tsh /t/+/s`/
> > > * JUDGE dzh /d/+/s`/
> > > * THING th ? (9)
> > > * THIS dh
> > > * ZERO z ? (10)
> > > * SHIP sh /s`/
> > > * ASIA zh ?
>
> Something that I've noted is that when pronouncing strange
> names from fantasy literature or the like, my
> linguistically naive friends tend to render _s z sh zh_ as
> /s s s\ s/. That's to say, they don't take _zh_ as
> analoguous to _sh_, but instead just ignore the _h_.
Real strange, tho it speaks truckloads about how
intuitive such analogies in symbolization are for the
linguistically naive!

I'm reminded of Jan Hus who used his catch-all diacritic the
superscript dot simply to indicate that the marked letter
had a pronunciation different from what he took to be the
normal Latin pronunciation of the letter. Thus _c s z_ with
the dot became /tS S Z/ against /ts s z/ without the dot,
while _l_ without the dot was /L/ against /5/ with the dot.
Later developments were towards a consistent palatalization
diacritic however. The fact that Hus choose _ch_ for /x/
rather than _h_ with dot for /x/ against _h_ without dot for
/h\/ rather shows that he was so naive it didn't occur to
him to apply his own device in spite of the fact that the
existing Latin digraph could be misread as /tsh\/.

> Is this something your test subjects also do?
I wouldn't know, as I had to explain _th dh z_ I explained
_zh_ in the stride. I guess both my subjects (my son and his
friend) are ruined for further research in the matter.

> Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...>:
>
> > > <rant> I took a lot of flak in the RP-normative
> > > Swedish school system because of the American accent I
> > > learnt from my grandmother.
>
> I think they've got more tolerant since. At least when I
> was being taught in the early to mid '90s they didn't try
> and cure anyone from americanisms of either pronunciation
> or spelling. They only taught RP, but if you picked up
> other accents from TV or whatever (a friend went to Calif.
> and ended up with something like [a-] for LOT, THOUGHT,
> FATHER) they didn't bother you about it.
Good to hear, as Philip jr. is picking up a GAE accent
from me and the media.

--
/BP 8^)>

Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

--

"Ge dig, Jedi!"
				-- A Sith from Gothenburg