Re: Questions (mostly about phonemics)

2007/1/21, Leon Lin <leon_math@...>:
> Hello,
[snip]

> 3. Final pinyin /e/ does not seem to be pure, but with a unrounded central
> semivowel glide into it (I've heard people say that research has yet to find
> a language with a central semivowel). This glide seems to be a semivowelized
> unrounded high central vowel, described on the Ithkuil page as, "an obscure
> vowel found in Turkish and Japanese". (According to Wikipedia, it exists in
> Spanish and Korean as well (and IMO in Mandarin, too))  X-Sampa [M] or [M\].
>
> To see why I feel it isn't "pure", say first part of the word "suppose"
> (don't say the "ppose" part). This is quite different from the sound found
> in se4, as in yan2-se4 (color).
The glide definitely exists, but not in all dialects. Standard Beijing
Mandarin (the very chingchong and ear-ringing type) employs it -- it
is another example of Modern Mandarin splitting up monophthongs. In
the Mandarin spoken by Chinese native to other dialct groups, the
phone does not necessarily exist, or only rarely. The Chinese spoken
in Southeast Asia, for example, most definitely does not have the
glide as a native phone, but it can be heard on television, pronounced
by (some) newscasters in a sort of acrolect imitation.

Eugene