Re: Sibilants (was: Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?)

2008/8/15 Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...>:
> But if so, isn't T_- = s?
Well, if T isn't sibilant, why should T_- be?

It's true that if you look at an IPA chart, there's an assumption that
each PoA has only one sort of fricative -- alveolar and post-alveolar
fricatives are sibilants, dental ones are not -- and that there's no
need to indicate otherwise (like a non-sibilant diacritic).

But this turns out to be less than universally true for close
transcription. When you actually have a non-sibilant (post-)alveolar
fricative, like in Danish rødgrød med fløde ["R9?D_-gR)D_- mE
fl9D_-:], you have to base the notation on another non-sibilant
fricative, and a retracted dental fricative is what you end up with.

I don't know if anybody has ever tried to teach the IPA about red
jelly with cream, but it's not like Danish is newly discovered so they
might have corrected their oversight. On the other hand, Danish
phonological literature universally uses D for the phoneme, since
there's no need to contrast it with a dental fricative and the
printers used to have loads of the curly d's around from printing
Icelandic.

--
Lars

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