Re: Danish, English _g_ shifts (was Chinese Dialect Question)

On Monday, October 6, 2003, at 11:45  AM, Isidora Zamora wrote:

>> It's alveolar, but in onsets it's a fricative just like English /D/;
>> the best notation is [D_-] (with the diacritic for retracted), since
>> the IPA seems to believe that all alveolar fricatives are sibilants.
>
> I didn't think that there was any really good IPA symbol for it.
> Danish
> spiriantized /d/ is anything but sibilant.  Is it pronounced with the
> blade
> of the tongue rather than the tip?  (I ask because that is the way
> that I
> found to imitate the sound credibly.  Pronouncing /d/ and /t/ with the
> laminally rather than apically got me a credible versions of the
> sounds in
> videnskab, mad, and Turkiet.)
>
>> The last time this was discussed on the list, someone noted that the
>> same phoneme exists in an American Indian language --- Shoshoni?
>
> That's interesting to hear.  I happen to like the sound a lot.  I just
> whish that there were a decent transcription for it.
Your talking about non-strident alveolar fricatives, right? (I've been
deleting most of this thread). Shoshoni has the voiceless fricative as
a conditioned variant of /t/:

[tow1T_-ia] 'to pour'

It's usually described in the literature as a "voiceless tap", but I've
looked at spectrograms and it's definitely a fricative. The same is
true for the voiced version (also a conditioned variant of /t/),
although it's often an approximant rather than a fricative (or a tap).

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"I believe that phonology is superior to music. It is more variable and
its pecuniary possibilities are far greater." - Erik Satie