Re: THEORY: more questions

Carsten:

Others have answered some of these questions, so I'll try to fill in
some holes.

On Tuesday, November 25, 2003, at 06:30  AM, Carsten Becker wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I've got more thinks I don't know what they mean or I just wanted to
> know why it is as it is:
>
> •     open/close syllables
Mark and John answered this one (though I would argue with John's
characterization of English as "favoring" closed syllables, but that's
for another day).

> •     oblique (as an aspect or mood or so)
Answered.

> •     in my conlang, there's a special mood for purposes, how could this
> be called with the grammatical term? I mean, something like
> "permittive" for the mood you must use when you ask for something that
> must be permitted - still I'm not sure if "permittive" is right there,
> but at least it sounds Grammticalese...
'Permittive' sounds fine, though I probably would have used
'permissive'. I have seen 'purposive', but I'm not sure that it's used
in the way you describe.

> •     I deleted all those "Weekly Vocab" Mails, but then I saw these
> mails are aids for inventing words ... a discipline I'm not very good
> in, too. How can I tell the server to send me all those first "Weekly
> Vocab" mails from 1 to the current number (30)? Or have I to search
> the archive and download that stuff by hand? I mean, that's not
> difficult, but boring and getting this delivered by email would be
> more comfortable.
Don't know. I'd be inclined to just download the posts by hand; you can
learn a lot by doing boring, repetitive things (like checking a Hopi
vocabulary list for attested forms ... ).

> •     Seeing where a consonant is pronounced and how it should sound like
> from the chart works pretty well already ... but what about vowels?
> How do I know that e.g. the <i> in <feet> is a front and close? Or
> that [O] is open-mid back?
Listen carefully to sound files and memorize the vowels. Using
articulatory descriptions for vowels is a matter of convenience;
unfortunately they give the misleading impression that the vowel sounds
can be replicated with any kind of accuracy; they can't. An example
springs to mind. When I learned German, I pronounced the long mid vowel
(/e:/) as the English tense mid vowel (/eI/), but without the offglide.
When I went to Germany, I found that the native pronunciation was
considerably higher than I had thought. It was definitely a mid vowel,
but not "my" mid vowel.

So your best bet for learning and pronouncing vowels is to listen to a
native speaker (or IPA demonstration sound files -- there are some on
the Web) and imitate.

> •     What are "sonorants"?
Mark's characterization of sonorants as "vowel like sounds" and "sounds
which can constitute a syllable by themselves" is pretty close.
However, the fact that sonorants can be syllabic is
language-particular; English allows syllabic sonorants but Shoshoni
(for example) does not. Voiced sounds like /b/, /z/, etc require an
active vocal fold gesture to bring them into a position where they can
vibrate. Sounds like /n/, /l/, and /r/ do not require an active vocal
fold gesture; the vocal folds vibrate spontaneously as a result of the
articulatory arrangement required to produce those sounds. Sounds
produced with this "spontaneous voicing" are sonorants.

> •     What is an "umlaut"? I'm German, so there are umlauts in my native
> language, but I saw this already in other contexts than German /a/ >
> /E/, /o/ > /2/, /u/ > /y/ (a>ä, o>ö, u>ü). How does umlauting work for
> other vowels or does it work for other vowels at all?
Answered.

> •     The optional question that I actually should be able to look up on
> the internet myself if I'd know where: Why is German e.g. <ei>
> pronounced [aj], <eu> and <äu> [oj] and <ie> [i:]? Or even more
> odd, /a_u/ changes to /oj/ in the plural: [ha_us] > ["hojz@]. Or
> sometimes, <chs> is pronounced [k_s], and sometimes [xs]. Is it
> because of some sound changes during the middle ages?
John answered this one.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"No theory can exclude everything that is wrong, poor, or even
detestable, or
include everything that is right, good, or beautiful."    - Arnold
Schoenberg