Re: Some natlang questions?

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\]. 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