Re: Chinese Dialect Question
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, October 2, 2003, 18:43 |
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En réponse à Paul Bennett :
>On the question of different points of articulation, French distinguishes
>between a
>voiced uvular fricative and an alveolar trill. German has alveolar trill,
>uvular trill,
>uvular friactive and an asyllabic unrounded open central vowel. Norwegian has
>alveolar trill and uvular trill. Welsh has a phonemic contrast between
>voiced and
>voiceless {r} and {rh}. Upper Sorbian has /R/ and /S_j/ for {r} and
>{r-caron}. Lower
>Sorbian has /R/ and /R_j/ for the same letters. Czech has two {r}s, which
>appear to
>be complex to describe phonetically. Pre-Soviet Latvian has /r/ and /r_j/,
>but the
>Post-Soviet reinstatement of /r_j/ with it's own character {r-undercomma}
>is still up
>for debate.
>
>All these examples are from Daniels & Bright "The World's Writing Systems".
Well, the book is incorrect at least on one thing: French *doesn't*
distinguish between a voiced uvular fricative and an alveolar trill. French
*doesn't* have an alveolar trill. Otherwise how would you explain that it
took me three months to master the Spanish alveolar trill?! What you have
in French is a single rhotic which is a voiced uvular fricative in almost
all accents, except a few which have an alveolar trill instead (in the
South of France). But there's no contrast between the two: they are the
same phoneme.
Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.
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