--- In conlang@y..., Marcus Smith <smithma@U...> wrote:
> Danny wrote:
>
> >Second, how do you pronounce /ti/, /di/, /si/ and /zi/ in Japanese?
I see
> >them
> >so often written as chi, ji and shi, but I hear something more like
[ci],
> >[Ji],
> >[Ci].
>
> Unfortunately, there aren't any SAMPA characters for these sounds.
They
> involve a alveolo-palatal fricatives, rather than the postalveolar
> fricatives of English. In IPA these are c and z with a loop at the
lower
> right end. So, to make up some symbols on the fly, the voicless
> alveolo-palatal is [C\] and the voiced version is [Z\].
In X-SAMPA the symbols are <s\> and <z\>. See
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/x-sampa.htm
I also used X-SAMPA for my previous post about Hebrew, so if you
were confused by that, check out that URL.
JDM
ps. a friend of mine made a wonderful IPA > X-SAMPA chart that we use
allthe time on IRC. Let me see if he still has it up on his website.
> This gives /ti/
> [tC\i], /di/ and /zi/ [dZ\i], and /si/ [C\i]. You do, in fact, hear
[Ci] in
> Japanese, but that is for the sequence /hi/.
>
>
>
> Marcus Smith
>
> Unfortunately, or luckily,
> no language is tyrannically consistent.
> All grammars leak.
> -- Edward Sapir