Re: word derivation in sabyuka (some principles)

On 15 July, Wesley Parish wrote:

> On Mon, 15 Jul 2002 22:16, Dan Sulani wrote:
> <snip>
> >  I, personally, would have trouble imagining an 's' followed by
> > a _retroflex_ 'r', such as are found in langs spoken in India.
> > It's too far, IMHO, for the tongue-tip to travel quickly and
efficiently.
> > I would suppose that an 's' would show an allophonic
> > retroflex form before a retroflex 'r'.
>
> But in the Indian languages you have a nice palatal /s/, hence names like
Sri
> Lanka.  I guess they worked that out, because in the Indian grammatical
> traditions, /r/ _is_ retroflex.

.

    First, a caveat: I am not an expert in the phonology of Indian langs.
(I _did_ study Sanskrit from an Indian linguist, but that was about
30 years ago! )
    Wesley, I am somewhat confused by your term "palatal /s/".
What is normally thought of as an 's' sound ,AFAIK, must be produced
further front in the mouth than the palate; otherwise it sounds like
an 'sh' ( [S] ) or some other type of sound.
    Now, there may be langs where there is a _phoneme_  /s/, one of whose
allophones includes a palatal sibilant, but I don't think one can call the
whole phoneme "palatal" (and IMHO, if the phoneme did not include
any pre-palatal variations, it would be better described as /S/, no? )
     Anyhow, what you are describing  (as in "Sri Lanka")
might indeed function phonemically as /s/,
(like I said, I'm no expert in the phonology of Indian langs)
but I don't think the sound is, phonetically, an [s].
    Going down the IPA list, it sounds like it might be what they
describe as a "voiceless retroflex fricative" (s with right tail)
(there seems to be only one retroflex fricative that I can find.)
    I have just tried to retroflex my tongue while producing an 's' and
trying to preserve the tongue-fold --- I think I succeeded,
but the [s] morphed into something else: it may be sibilant,
and it may have the tongue-fold at more or less the proper place,
but it sure doesn't sound like what I would normally call an 's'!
(And trying to maintain the "s-ness" of the sound was fairly difficult,
and in the end, proved impossible for me to do!)
Anything further back on the tongue, however, poses no problem for my
tongue-tip: I find that I can easily retroflex the tip while producing
_palatal_  sibilants. The result, to my ear, sounds like merely lowering the
pitch of the sound, not changing its basic character altogether.)
Try it and you'll see what I mean.


Dan Sulani
---------------------------------------------------------------
likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a

A word is an awesome thing.

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