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Re: CHAT: Blandness (was: Uusisuom's influences)

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Friday, April 6, 2001, 12:27
On Fri, 6 Apr 2001, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:

> On Thu, 5 Apr 2001 21:59:37 -0800, Barry Garcia <Barry_Garcia@...> > wrote: > > >CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes: > >>My book on Turkish says dotless i is "i as in nation," which I find > >>utterly helpful, since for me "ti" goes to [S] and "on" to [@n]. <sigh> > > > >The World's Writing Systems book I have says that the turkish dotless I is > >"close, back, unrounded" vowel. In the kirschenbaum system, it's /u-/. > >Apparently SAMPA doesnt have a way of representing it. > > But it does: [M] > > SAMPA actually has representations for all the IPA sounds, though the more > advanced ones are rather clumsy (taking up more than one space); to see > them all, go to http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/x-sampa.htm
Wow. :-p I guess SAMPA can't be blamed, though; there's an awful lot of IPA sounds!
> But I didn't know that Turkish vowel was a back unrounded sound; I didn't > know it because the few text-books I had read didn't use transcriptions (at > least not standard ones), and didn't seem to find it important enough to > describe this sound properly. Irritating how back unrounded vowels get > misrepresented in Western teaching...
Back unrounded. <purr> (Sorry--forgot to mention. Korean has it. I'm always happy when I find I *can* pronounce, or do a good approximation, of a sound in a foreign language.)
> But that makes more sense - "Istanbul" has a dotless i, which is now > logical to me in light of its original "Constantinopolis" name. But > wouldn't it really be pronounced "Istambul", though? - [Mstambul] or > something like that (don't know where the stress falls).
Wish I knew. I did look at a website that had all sorts of Turkish sound samples--ah, here it is, I think: http://www2.egenet.com.tr/mastersj/ I can't find the subpage au moment, but it said that many Turkish speakers claim there's no stress even though foreign speakers will *hear* stress. Oh, here it is (sorry, I'm slow at finding things): http://www2.egenet.com.tr/mastersj/turkish-accenting.html You have to scroll down a bit for it, though. Fascinating website...wish I had more time to go through it and correct my very bad pronunciation.
> On Thu, 5 Apr 2001 22:37:16 -0400, Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...> wrote: > > >> Hmm... s has a "wider opening between the tongue and the roof of the > >> mouth"? As in, is the air going through a wider/less narrow passage, so > >> that there is no friction (as there is in {ss})? If so, it really sounds > >> like {s} is an approximant - an unvoiced alveolar approximant. That would > >> be (rather clumsily) rendered [r\_0] in SAMPA, as far as I can see from > the > >> SAMPA home page. Hmm, English {r} is an alveolar approximant, so there's > a > >> comparison. > > > >It doesn't really sound like English {r}, though. I thought of a better > >example: if you're familiar with Japanese when they say something like > >"soo desu" or "soo desu ka," the soft-sounding s in "soo" is pretty much > the > >Korean "s" and the hissier s at the end of "desu" is pretty much the > >Korean "ss" (at least in the anime I've been watching...). Or maybe I'm > >imagining things.... > > Well, I meant an unvoiced English {r} :)
Oh. Gotcha.
> But now you have me thinking the difference is something like laminal (ss) > ~ apical (s), though I've never heard of such a distinction. That is to > say, that {ss} would be pronounced with the flat of the tongue (or rather, > the flat of the tip of the tongue) against the alveolar ridge, but {s} with > only the very tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge... Does that > make sense to you? :p
<rueful look> Well, I haven't been able to find out about any language besides Korean that has tensified (vs. aspirated vs. voiced/nonaspirated) stops, either, so the language seems to be an oddball phonologically. That may well be the distinction! But I would want to pronounce the sounds and get your opinion before being sure. :-) Has anyone here heard Korean who could tell us if this is in fact the difference? YHL