Re: Cerebral consonants & transliterarion

At 4:05 pm -0800 13/2/99, Danny Wier wrote:
>Pablo Flores eskribe:
>
>>Just a question to the list: are "cerebral" consonants the same
>>as retroflex consonants? I encountered the term while reading
>>about Sanskrit. Isn't it annoying when someone calls things
>>in a different way than you're accustomed to?
Yes, they are the same.  It is a little annoying - but generally one gets
used to it, e.g. 'stop' = 'occlusive' = 'plosive'.

>>Why would you
>>call something "cerebral" (unless the etimology of the word
>>differs from current "brain").
No - it is from Latin 'cerebrum' "brain"

>I've only heard the term 'cerebral' used in indological terms -- the
>literal translation of the Sanskrit term used to describe retroflexes in
>both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages.  Maybe it's because the tongue
>points towards the brain in forming these.
That is exactly my understanding of the term also.
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At 1:08 am -0800 14/2/99, Sally Caves wrote:
>What's a retroflex consonant?
A retroflex sound is made with the tip of the tongue curled back toward the
front part of the hard palate just behind the alveolar ridge.  The degree
of retroflexion varies very much between languages & dialects.

Retroflex vowels are characteristic of American English and of many rural
dialects in England, especially in the west midlands and southern England;
they are often called "r-colored" vowels.

Retroflex versions of /t/, /d/, /n/, /l/ are characteristic of both
Dravidian and IE languages of India.  Native Indian speakers habitually
pronounce English alveolars with retroflexions (which makes the parents of
some of my students difficult to understand - the studenrs, however, have
south-west London accents!).  Retroflex sibilants, both fricative &
affricate, occur in Mandarin Chinese where they are spelled 'sh' & 'r'
(voiceless & voiced fricatives) and 'ch' & 'zh' (aspirated & unaspirated
affricates).   Similar consonants also occur in (some of) the Scandinavian
languages (Philip Jonsson can enlighten us on this :)
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As for representing them in one's conlang, that depends on what other
sounds it has and how letters are used.  For example, if {z} were unused,
one could use combinations such as {tz}, {dz} etc.

The obvious digraphs, of course, would be {rt}, {rd} or {tr}, {dr} etc. But
it may well be that /r/ can occur as an independent consonant.

Another possibility is simply writing {tt}, {dd} etc. if your conlang does
not have geminated consonant sounds.

Of course diacritics are another possibility if you do not want to restrict
yourself to 7-bit ASCII.

Ray.