Re: Questions (mostly about phonemics)

On Sat, Jan 20, 2007 at 06:23:53PM -0500, Leon Lin wrote:
[...]
> 1. Is it possible to distinguish two final unreleased consanants? i.e.
> Is there a sound difference between "back there" and "bat there"
Of course there is. Physically speaking, the movement of the tongue (or
other part of mouth) towards the point of articulation of the stop
causes the preceding vowel to change in quality so as to be recognizably
followed by that stop. In this way, it is possible to tell apart "back"
and "bat" even if the final stop is not released.


> 2. I have heard some people call words with syllabic consanants like
> "button" a 'nasal release'. Isn't this just a glottal stop followed by
> an /n/?
It depends on your particular English idiolect. In some parts of North
America, "button" is pronounced [bVtn=], where the [n] does not involve
movement of the tongue from the [t] (since they are both alveolar), so
the second syllable is entirely a matter of releasing the [t] nasally
(and thus be heard as [n=]).

In SE Asia, "button" is more commonly pronounced with an actual vowel
for the second syllable, like [bVt@n]. In England, AFAIK, the /t/ is
realized as [?] and so you have something like [bV?n=].


> 3. Is stress also accompanied by a raise in pitch (in English)?
Not necessarily, although this is usually the case. I suspect this
differs from region to region, too (as does most specifics of English
phonology).


> === If you speak Mandarin ===
>
> When I went to China, some of my cousins said my very Mandarin was
> very accurate and without accent.  I wonder if that's true...
>
> 1. Do voiced plosives and affricates exist in Mandarin? After some
> thought, it seems that pinyin /b d g z j zh/ are just unaspirated
> versions of /p t k c q ch/.
Correct.

(Off-topic note: that's why Pinyin makes me cringe... writing
unaspirated /t/ as [d] makes it extremely prone for foreigners to
mispronounce.)


> Maybe that's why other Romanization systems have a lot of unvoiced
> consanants, as in the name of the Taiwanese city Kaohsiung (pinyin
> Gaoxiong).
Taiwanese (Hokkien) has a 3-way distinction in stops, e.g., [t_h], [t],
and [d] are all distinct phonemes. Writing Kaohsiung as "Gaoxiong" is
just weird to Taiwanese ears (er... eyes), given that [g] is distinct
from unaspirated [k] in Taiwanese, and that "g" is traditionally used to
transcribe [g] in Taiwanese.


> Or maybe its both voiced and unaspirated
No, Mandarin's stops are distinguished by aspiration, not voicing. I'm
pretty sure there are voiced stops somewhere, but Pinyin /d/, /b/, and
/g/ are definitely NOT voiced.


> and it sounds unvoiced because there aren't unaspirated voiced
> plosives (are there?) in English...
All voiced plosives in English are unaspirated. :-)


> 2. Tone
>
> 2.1. The 3rd tone confuses me.
>
> 2.1.1. It is said to lower in pitch and then rise again, but this
> seems only to be true when the person is enunciating, speaking slowly,
> or speaking the character alone (as when teaching the student how to
> say it). To me it just falls into a very low pitch.  I feel that the
> 2nd tone is more accurately described with the 3rd tone's description.
> Say di3-xia4 (below) and compare with di2-ren2 (enemy).
I've always thought of tone #3 as the "low pitch" tone. Sure, when
you're pronouncing it deliberately, esp. in pedagogical settings, it
sounds like 2-1-3 (on a scale of 1-5 for pitch, like in IPA), but in
actual speech you'd never enunciate it this way. But then again, my
Mandarin is heavily colored by Southern dialects, so my perception can
hardly be construed to be normative. :-)


> 2.1.2 The 3rd tone seems to change into the second tone when it is
> followed by another character of the third tone: say yong3-yuan3
> (forever, eternal).
Yes, this is the so-called "tone sandhi" phenomenon, which is pretty
well-known. Hokkien, my L1, has a whole bunch of tone sandhi rules.


> 2.2. After repeating the 4th tone over and over, I still do not see
> how it 'falls'. It just seems to be a shorter version of the 1st tone,
> sort of like the difference in the length of the a's in "man" and
> "hat".  This also applies to other tonal languages, which seem to have
> all these tones but to me just sound like vowel length.
Huh... tone #4 definitely is falling. It starts at high pitch and drops
to mid- or low-pitch. Unless, of course, your particular idiolect
realizes it as a high or short tone. Regional dialects do tend to have
strange alternate intonation of things. :-) (E.g., in my idiolect of
Mandarin, all the unvoiced fricatives are merging into [s] except for
/f/, and all unvoiced affricates into [ts)]. I have a lot of trouble
pronouncing words "correctly" when talking to a Beijing speaker who
distinguishes between several different types of affricates.)


> 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).
[...]

Well, in the Russian pronunciation threads, Isaac Penzev & I noted that
IPA vowels do tend to vary in actual value from language to language.
The English "suppose" is either [sV"powz] or [s@"powz], but the English
schwa [@] is definitely lower than in, say, Mandarin. The Pinyin /e/
sounds closer to [@\] than [@], and so would be different from the
English [@] or [V]. But it's definitely not a back vowel like [M]
(again, unless your regional Mandarin dialect pronounces it that
way)---[M] is more like the vowel in /si/ ("four").


T

--
I see that you JS got Bach.

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