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Re: What's your favorite sounding word in any language?

From:Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>
Date:Thursday, December 18, 2003, 20:52
At 07:38 PM 12/18/03 +0000, you wrote:
>Isidora Zamora wrote: > >>My favorite is probably the Danish word "marmalade" for the way that it >>shows off the intervocallic allophone of /d/ in the Danish >>language. Sorry, no transcription available, because the sound is so >>unusual that there isn't any standard (nor, prehaps, any non-standard) >>transcription of it. >> >>Isidora >Well, surely you must be able to describe it. How does one articulate it?
Well...for an intervocalic /d/...First of all, I think that the /d/ is produced laminally (with the tongue blade) instead of apically (with the tongue tip.) This is the way that I started pronouncing them, because I sounded more like a native speaker if I pronounced it laminally. I know we have at least one Dane on the list. If he's reading this, perhaps he could chime in and transcribe the pronounciation of the vowels, because I have trouble transcribing those. (And perhaps he can correct me if I'm wrong about the laminal articulation of /d/.) But for the intervocalic /d/ itself, place your tongue tip behind your lower teeth, and practice pronouncing a /d/ that way. (There was a thread on this earlier this week when someone discovered the voiceless lamino-alveolar stop on his own and wondered what it was.) Now turn the voiced stop into an approximate. That's right, an approximate, not a voiced fricative. It should sound a good deal like [D] but very clearly not be [D]. It's a lot blurrier than [D] and not articulated at the same point, nor with the same degree of stricture. I'm not sure that I can do better than that. Sorry. It's a very peculiar sound. Isidora

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Joe <joe@...>