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

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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