Re: Re : Consonantal length

"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
engaged 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 historical 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 a
retroflex sound

>
> Do you mean the Arabic emphatics?
>
>I admit that's what I wrote.
>
> As far as
> I know, the only emphatics in North Asia are in Korean. Which has a
> nostrilfull, that for sure. Ever try and say a word like:
>
> ttok.ttok-hae.yo^
>
> where the tt (written with 2 separate Ts in Korean, by the by) is strongly
> glottalised, voiced, and given length?
>
>I did. What do I earn now ?
>
>Occulist : "Can you read that line over there ?". (He points a line hardly
>reading "SZPRWLCZK" on the wall). Patient : "I do.". Occulist : "Your
>eyesight is very good". Patient : "I'm Polish."
>
>>>
>
>Mathias
>
>
Brian Betty, Front Desk
Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders
http://www.glad.org
Tel. (617) 426-1350