Re: Name mangling (Was: Re: First Sound Recording of Asha'ille!)

Philip Newton wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 15:14:55 +0000, Stephen Mulraney
> <ataltanie@...> wrote:
>
>>Philip Newton wrote:
>>
>>
>>>off the top of my head, I can't think
>>>of any other language that has [Ew], though perhaps Belarusian or
>>>Polish does?
>>
>>Not Polish.
>
>
> I guess that Russian пел (he sang?)
My Russian is rapidly decaying as knowledge of Polish takes over (very
confusing sometimes, especially when I start mixing languages talking to
my girlfriend's family...), but I guess that's "he was singing" (imperfect).

 > might be peł in Polish, and a
> quick Google did turn this word up a few times... would that not be
> [pEw]?
Of course, you're right about the combination <eł>. Don't know what I
was thinking... :). "He sang" is actually <śpiewał> [s\p_jEvaw], though.
I can't find any obvious relation to <пел> in the dictionary; though it
is a bit to short to make the search easy. An example of <eW> might be
<krzyszeł> [kSi\SEw] "he was shouting" (surely that must be something
like the Platonic ideal of a Polish word? All it needs is a nasal..).

Going further along the path of Polish [Ew]-like diphthongs that I was
blinded to by the orthography earlier, there's also (how did I miss all
of this?!) the nasals. I'll explain in a bit more detail for the benefit
of others who aren't familiar with it. Polish has two "nasal" phonemes,
nasal-e and nasal-o, written somewhat confusingly as e-hook <ę> and
a-hook <ą>. The letters seem to be called "e ogonek" and "a ogonek",
where "ogonek" means "little tail", but Poles don't usually use those
names, instead just pronouncing their sound. The funny thing is that
these letters never actually represent the [E~] and [O~] that you'd
expect them to.

First of all, before stops & affricates, they're pronounced as oral vowel
+ homorganic nasal; so that <wstęp> "way in" is [fstEmp], and <krąg>
"circle" is [krOnk] (NB: consonants assimilate in voicedness to those
following; and final consonants are voiceless). Also, a word-final <ę>
is pronounced like plain [E} (except in very "correct" speech), and before
<ł> they're both pronounced plain, as [E] and [O]. However, it's only before
fricatives that they sound actually nasalised (also word-finally, for <ą>),
and in these cases they're actually pronounced as [Ew~] and [Ow~], by which
I'm trying to indicate: oral vowel + nasalised [w]. I've heard this called
an "asynchronous nasal", as opposed to the synchronous nasals of French etc
(i.e. [E~], [O~]).

So, Polish has not only [Ew] in copious quantities, but also a nasalised
form! Oops!

s.
--

Reply