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

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