Re: Phonetics

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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