Re: Status of Italian rising

Incidentally, your subject looks like a headline from a newspaper: "Status
of [the] Italian [language is] rising [in popularity]!" :)

Quoth Mangiat:

> I can't figure out why linguists tend to describe both the components of
> falling diphthongs as vocoids (with high /i/ and /u/ lacking sillabicity),
> while only the second element of rising diphthongs is hold as a vocoid and
> the first one is described as an approximant (a contoid).
<rant>
This whole method of describing diphthongs (or even vowels in general)
irritates me just a bit from a phonetic perspective, because it's at best
not really descriptive of what's going on, and at worst relentlessly
inaccurate. If I look at a spectrogram of the vowel [i], for instance, I see
F1 and F2 (first and second formants) at a steady state through the duration
of the vowel. For the English diphthong commonly transcribed [AI], though,
there is no steady state at any point: the formants move smoothly throughout
the production of the diphthong, starting at [A] and ending at [I], but not
actually sitting at either of them. In the case of this particular sound,
the duration of formant values *resembling* [A] is probably longer than
those of [I], for which reason I suppose it's termed a "falling" diphthong,
but really this terminology is a bit meaningless. What can it really mean
for a vowel to be "non-syllabic?" Anyway, moving on to your actual
issue...:)
</rant>

> When /u/ is a syllabic nucleus [u] appears; otherwise we get [w].
> ...
> This description would also introduce the distinction between 4 different
> phonemes, /i/, /j/, /u/ and /w/, where 2 (/i/ and /w/) would work.
Looks good to me--I don't have much of a knowledge of Italian phonetics, but
from your examples there certainly don't seem to be four phonemes.

> If we considered [j] an allophone of /i/ appearing in some given syntagmatic
> contexts characterized by a particular suprasegmental condition similar to
> the one we postulated for Italian, we'd obtain *an yard, which is
> ill-formed.
...unless we assert that English has different rules for determining article
form than Italian: you could say that the indefinite article appears in the
form [@n] *only* before vowels, and as [@] in every other case, including
semivowels. With English, though, I'm not sure whether describing the
phonology this way would necessarily be helpful or useful--if, indeed, [j]
and [w] are allophones of vowels in certain circumstances, which vowels
would we select? It would be a bit of an arbitrary choice, since /VVV/
sequences don't really exist in English (would "Maya," as in the
Mesoamerican civilization, be /maja/ or /maia/? It seems to me that, once
again, the choice would have to be fairly random). And then, of course,
there are words like "Iliad" and "Joshua" which, at least in careful speech,
preserve the quality of the high vowels; whereas in "yard" the first segment
*never* has full vocalic status.

Anyway. :) In conclusion, I think your analysis (from the data you've shown)
sounds right-on, and I look forward to reading the next edition on German.


-Josh

----------
Josh Brandt-Young <vionau@...>
"After the tempest I behold, once more, the weasel."
(Mispronunciation of Ancient Greek)

Replies