Re: OT: Phonetics (IPA)

En réponse à JS Bangs :


>Non. We regard [tS] as a single sound *in English* because it behaves as
>such--you can begin a word with it where you can't other begin a word with
>stop + fricative, and other things. In other languages this is not
>necessarily true: German has [tS] sounds, but such is not a single phoneme
>because it patterns as a cluster. Some languages, such as Polish, can
>actually contrast the two: [t_S] is a single phonemes, but [tS] is a
>cluster.
There *are* acoustic differences between [t_S] and [tS], regardless of
whether the language actually contrast the two or not.

>There's no reason that [ks] couldn't be monophonemic in some other
>language, but it certainly isn't in English. Monophonemic clusters at
>different places of articulation are rare, but not unheard-of, and my
>conlang Hiksilipsi uses /ks/ and /ps/ as single phonemes. In English [nd],
>[mb], [Ng] are clusters, but many African languages treat them as units.
Which is not surprising seen that they are at a single PoA!!! [m] and [b]
are labial, [n] and [d] can be both dental or alveolar, and [N] and [g] are
velar, and in both cases the whole thing is completely voiced. So it's not
surprising that prenasalised consonants are single phonemes. Note, here
again, that they are different from the English equivalent clusters,
acoustically speaking. The English [mb] is two phones behind each other.
The [mb] as found in some African languages is a single phone with the
nasal airstream lasting only for part of the duration of the phone (don't
forget [m] is really just [b] with nasal airstream). On the other hand, you
can never have a single *[p_s] phone. It involves much too many changes of
PoA and movements in the mouth to be realised within the duration of a
single phone. So [ps] is acoustically always a cluster. Of course, that
doesn't prevent some languages (Greek for instance) to treat it as a single
entity, but this is *not* a proof that there is no difference between
affricates and clusters (or between prenasalised consonants and clusters,
for that matter) apart from how they map in a certain language. There is an
acoustical difference between the two, independently of the language. What
is done afterwards at the phonemic level is language-dependent of course.

>In general, deciding which clusters are single phonemes and which are
>units is a language-specific process.
But if acoustically, it is recognised that we have an affricate rather than
simple cluster, we know for sure that we have a single phoneme here. The
problem is only when what we have is definitely a cluster, like [ps] in Greek.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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