Re: OT: English and schizophrenia

Luís Henrique wrote:

> >I'm sure there are also other widely spoken languages with a tense/lax
> >distinction.  I gather that it's a fairly common distinction in Nilotic
> >languages of Sub-saharan Africa.
>
> I am sorry; when I wrote "widely spoken languages", I meant the "big six":
> Castillian (Spanish), Russian, Arabic, Hindi and Chinese, besides of
> English, of course.
I am aware of this, but this begs the question of how you're defining the
difficulty of properties in the first place.  Are you definining it by its likeliness
to appear across all languages typologically, or are you asserting that the
number of speakers of a language has is in some way related to its structural
properties?  If the latter, there are no studies which in any way show such
a correlation.   Note also that four of the six languages you mention are Indo-
European;  how could this possibly be a representative sample?

> I am certain that Castillian does not have a lax/tense
> opposition.
That's true, but it does have a voiceless interdental fricative [T], which
is one of the other supposedly difficult sounds you mentioned.

> Since Chinese is a tonal language, I am afraid even to think
> what it would sound like if it had this distinction... :).
What does a language's tonality have to do with having a tense/lax
distinction in its vowel inventory?  The two are entirely different:  tone
is a supersegmental property, while tenseness is a segmental one.

> In more detail about lax/tense, some posters seem to imply that ALL lax
> vowels are schwas -
I mentioned that English regularly reduces unstressed vowels to schwa,
but that is hardly the same as shifting unstressed tense vowels to their
lax counterparts, or vice versa.

> And the unrounded back (as u in "bus"), is it a schwa? or is it not lax?
You seem to be confusing two different things here:  schwa is a particular
vowel (a particular arrangement of vocalic properties), while tenseness is
a possible property of vowels.

> >Mandarin Chinese and Hindi both have "cacuminal" (by this I take it you
> >mean retroflex) /r/.  That accounts for about a billion people between
> them.
> >I believe Bengali has one, too, which would move that figure up to about
> >1.2 billion people.
>
> OK. I was probably being westerncentric. Let me restate it as "th", "ng"
> and retroflex /r/ are difficult form most foreigners in Europea or America.
Don't Icelandic and Danish have the voiced interdental fricative [D]?
Certainly, Mexican Spanish* regularly shifts intervocalic** voiced stops
to their fricative counterparts:

    /abogado/ 'advocate, lawyer'  --> [aBoGaDo]

*(This regional dialect of Spanish has close to 100 million speakers, not that
matters typologically;  it does say that "most foreigners" may be a much smaller
category than you think, though)
** (It's more complicated than that, but intervocalic position is the most obvious
place)

> Most of the remaining excerpts weren't written by me, but by the original
> poster, Danny Wier, whose ideas I was criticizing.
I also realize this.  I didn't see the original post. Can't I criticize along with you?

===================================
Thomas Wier | AIM: trwier

"Aspidi men Saiôn tis agalletai, hên para thamnôi
  entos amômêton kallipon ouk ethelôn;
autos d' exephugon thanatou telos: aspis ekeinê
  erretô; exautês ktêsomai ou kakiô" - Arkhilokhos

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