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

I just finished reading all of this thread in one go (!). Seems that most
here have thrown their lot in the "what's your prettiest, and what's your
ugliest?" poll. Since it's always a token of social good-will to
participate, I'll throw in my 5 cents and summarize my (non-)favorites,
among other things:

* I love Japanese; especially in cartoons; I'd also vote Japanese as the
sexiest language, when spoken by those silky-voiced young women :p

* Mandarin Chinese can sound very nice, sometimes; especially those
unrounded back vowels, and the "neutral" vowels - the ones where you hardly
move your tongue after pronouncing the initial consonant, as in {si} 'four'.

* Swedish and Dutch are my fave Germanic languages - Dutch may have an
unharmonizingly high frequency of that uvular [X] fric, but apart from that
little thorn, it's a beautiful language.

* Spanish is probably the only Romance language I like; I'd vote it the
second-sexiest language, though its female speakers don't usually
adopt "silky" voices (rather to the contrary, especially in the case of
European Spanish). I speak more French than Spanish, though; I'm quite
fluent in French; but I've hardly ever liked it :p

* I wouldn't accept Finnish as a "beautiful" language; "cool"
and "relaxing"  are better descriptions of it. Thus, I do like Finnish. And
yes, Turkish and Korean too; those are beautiful. I think Altaic languages
most be my favorite language family :p

Ok, I'm sure that's enough of my personal opinions for now :)

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On Mon, 2 Apr 2001 17:25:42 -0400, Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...> wrote:

[about Korean Latinized orthography]

>NOTE: What's the difference between s and ss?  I would describe ss as
>what one might hear in "see" in American English (and possibly also
>British English), while s has a wider opening between the tongue and the
>roof of the mouth and sounds "softer."  I apologize for my ignorance of
>sound production in not being able to pin it down further, but my
>observation is that Americans learning Korean invariably conflate s and
>ss by pronouncing both as ss.
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.

>eu (you may also see u-breve) [i"] (barred i--hey, I wonder if that's how
>  the dotless i in Turkish is to be pronounced?)
According to the books I've seen about Turkish, the dotless i is [I]; any
Turkish-speakers on the list, btw?

I believe SAMPA has [1] for the barred i. I'd like to ask the Swedes on
this list: isn't there [1] for some/all {i} in some/most Swedish dialects?
Or at least I've noticed a rather weird sounding vowel in Swedish in words
that I know to contain an etymological (and thus orthographic) {i}.

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On Wed, 4 Apr 2001 19:35:11 -0000, Bjorn Kristinsson <bjornkri@...> wrote:

>I'd say my favourite ones (apart from my "ástkæra, ylhýra" (if anyone can
>translate that adequetly, please do. For now I'll just say it means
>"Icelandic" :)))
I guess I could translate: "beloved, heart-warming" (approximately); I
assure you all that there is a healthy amount of sarcasm in this native
epithet of the Icelandic language :)

>or/and some sort of a voiceless uvular (velar? pharyngl.?) consonant,
Arabic style.

All three, I think (!) :) That is, Arabic (er, the standard one -
Egyptian?) has consonant phonemes in the various posterior positions:

(Recalling from not too reliable memory - please correct :)

* unvoiced glottal fric - [h]
* unvoiced glottal stop - [?]
* unvoiced uvular fric - [X]
* voiced pharyngeal or epi-glottal (?) fric - [?\]

Did I get it right? Close to right? :p

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On Thu, 5 Apr 2001 12:49:24 +0300, Dan Sulani <dnsulani@...> wrote:

>On 4 April, Henrik Theiling wrote:
>
>>I'll throw in some other beautiful languages from my point of view: I
>>like Icelandic very much as it is spoken (my L1 is German if anyone
>>wants to interpret that).  I have this `Einu sini teildu
>>Nordhanvinturinn og Solin, hvort theirra vaeri sterkari' in mind.
>>Very nice sound.  Voiceless nasals are really cool.  Especially when
>>they try to shout: e.g. `Sveinn' and only [svEI] can be heard...
>
The transcription there is a bit weird; it's not standard orthography, and
not a phonetic transcription either. In our orthography (excluding special
chars), it should be "Einu sinni deildu Nordanvindurinn og Solin [um thad]
hvort theirra vaeri sterkara". I correct the endings and commation a bit.

>    Does that mean that the voiceless nasals are dropped when
>shouting, or are they produced quietly and simply not heard?
>What about voiceless nasals in the middle of a shouted word?
>(I would think that trying to produce a voiceless nasal with the
>intensity of a shout would be a little hard on the nose!)
>I'm curious as to how it's actually done.
>
>Dan Sulani
Well, I think that it just means that foreigners generally don't hear the
voiceless nasals when they're word-final, especially in shouts and such.
I've never noticed anyone actually dropping out a final nasal in an
utterance like {Sveinn} (that's a name); it's a question of perception, IMO.

But hard on the nose, not really - I think most native speakers of
Icelandic find devoicing 'easier', because it's a strong phonological
condition in our speech. I admit the existence of some northern dialects
where devoicing is not a condition, though; but that's not the standard in
our language (though not devoicing is actually considered kind of
prestigious).


Regards,
Óskar

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