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

On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:

> 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.
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....

> >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?
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>

YHL

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