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Re: Phonetics

From:Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 22, 2006, 7:04
On 22/03/06, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> On 3/21/06, Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...> wrote [quoting Mark]:
> OK, got it. Except . . . "non-syllabic vowel"? Isn't that something > like "bright darkness"??
No. A glide/semi-vowel is a non-syllabic vowel. [j] is the non-syllabic version of [i]; [w] of [u]; [M\] of [M]. All the rest are specified with the diacritic _^.
> > > [M] is the Japanese /u/... > > > > Japanese /u/ has a different sort of liprounding to normal [u], but it > > Yes? Do go on. :)
Oh, I meant to delete that (typos & thinkos like this happen when I'm typing in a hurry on a qwerty keyboard). But I'll say it anyway. Japanese /u/ has a different sort of liprounding to normal [u], but it still has liprounding. The difference can't but expressed in the IPA, but it's the same difference as between Swedish /y:/ and /u\:/, which are often considered to be distinguished solely by this feature (rather than by height). I think the proper discussion of this is in the archives somewhere and I don't think I ever quite understood which rounding was front and which one was back... But Swedish /y:/ and Japanese /u/ have the same rounding, and Swedish /u\:/ and most languages /u/ have the same rounding. This difference is to some extent perceived as unrounding.
> Friggin' Aborigines, screwing up a system that's perfectly adequate > for everyone else. Poof! Diacriticitis. :)
Well I get the impression that what the distinction is between postalveolar and retroflex as encoded by the IPA is still up for debate. The column marked "postalveolar" are typically used to describe palato-alveolars (partially palatised alveolars), whereas the column marked "retroflex" are frequently used to mark simple postalveolars (i.e. sounds made without retroflexion, behind the alveolar ridge but before the hard palate). And so a distinction between dental and postalveolar is reasonably common (I think very frequent in India, at least), where the postalveolars are called retroflex, but don't necessarily involve retroflexion. I think that there's also other, non-australian-aboriginal languages that have a distinction between at least dental and alveolar stops---I just didn't mention them because I don't know them. (Tho I'm now reminded of English---some Irish speakers at least use [t_d d_d] for /T D/, and even in connected speech other English speakers sometimes do the same. I think there's a corollary to "anadew", that being "seddit": some English dialect's done it too.) (On the subject of this, one sound I've recently mastered, a postalveolar ejective plosive, sounds very fun :)
> > I agree, though in handwritten notes I find 6 and @ a *lot* harder to > > distinguish. > > @ or @\? 6 and @ are backwards and upside down relative to each > other, while @\ looks summat like a 6 flipped horizontally...
I meant e and 6. e also looks summat like a @\ flipped horizontally :) -- Tristan.

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Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>