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

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

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...

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).

-----

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} :)

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

I know the difference between those two sounds because my elder sister, who
lives in Sweden, pronounces all her s'es in the apical way (as it's done in
Swedish, I'd think), while we pronounce ours thickly laminal; her apical
s's sound very "girly" to us! :)

Regards,
Óskar

Replies