Re: OT: Phonetics (IPA)

On Fri, 2003-07-11 at 17:39, Nikhil Sinha wrote:
> I have a few questions relating to some sounds in English.
Dangerous topic, this.

> 1. Why are the sounds 'ch' and 'j' transcribed as [tsh] and [dzh] in
> phonetic alphabets, when neither of these sounds are heard in
> pronunciation?
In the major English dialects, ch and j are affricatives, actually
composed of a postalveolar stop and the fricative. This mightn't be the
case in every dialect, I guess.

> 2. The same 'ch' and 'j' sound is transcribed as [c] and [inverted f]
> in Hindi, even though I find the English and Hindi 'ch' and 'j' sounds
> undistinguishable.
Possibly in your dialect, under the influence of Hindi maybe, the
affricatives became palatal stops. I can't hear the difference between
[dZ] (voiced postalveolar affricative) and [j\] (voiced stop) either,
though [c] sounds more like [tj] to me than [tS]. Can you hear the
difference between [S] (postalveolar fricative) and [C] (palatal
fricative)? I can't.

> 3. Why does the IPA use the same letters for dental, alveolar and post
> alveolar sounds? As a result the English alveolar 't' and 'd' are
> written [t] [d] in IPA and the French dentals 't' and 'd' are also
> written [t] [d] in IPA. Both the sounds are pretty different.
I think that would be because they're pretty similar and no language has
an internal distinction.

> Can somebody help me by answering these questions?
Also, you asked about the conlang wiki, but there's been another thread
about it already, you might want to read it. It should answer your
questions.  It's just a source of information.

--
Tristan.