Re: Phonetic question...

From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>

| En réponse à Paul Edson <conlang@...>:

| > And is there a practical difference between say, IPA
| > [left-tail n]/SAMPA [J] and SAMPA [n'] or for that matter
| > [nj]? Take as an example the Spanish word for "year": [aJo]
| > vs. [an'o] vs. [anjo].
| >
|
| Yep, though the difference is very thin. [J] is a palatal nasal. That's to say
| it's completely articulated in the palate. [n_j] is simply palatalised, which
| means that the middle of the tongue raises towards the palate, but the basic
| articulation is still alveolar (or dental, depending on your n's :)) ). As for
| [nj], it's a cluster, composed of two different sounds (with a blurred limit
| due to the inertia of the vocal apparatus), whose main difference between the
| two other sounds is the length of pronunciation.

Another way of putting it: the palatized nasal [n'] sounds like "ny", while the
palatAL nasal [J] sounds more like "ngy".

Castillian Spanish Ñ (N-tilde) is the latter; Latin American Ñ is the former.

| I agree that the difference is extremely thin, and I actually know of no
| language that has phonemic distinction between palatalised alveolar consonants
| and actual palatals (a distinction between [n_j] and [J] for instance).

Me neither. Though it could happen. Modern Greek has two "y" consonants: /j/
(iota + vowel) and /G'/ (gamma before front vowels and former -iota diphthongs),
but even these might have already merged.

| > I've a whole range of consonants with a palatal release in
| > my as-yet unnamed first language, and I'm having trouble
| > deciding how to notate them.

I like the apostrophe (') myself -- if you have ejective or retroflex
consonants, the reversed apostrophe (`) is used.

~Danny~