Re: my iconic alphabet
| From: | Nathan Richardson <nathan000000@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, April 9, 2003, 23:14 |
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Hi Cristophe, this is Nathan again---"iconic alphabet"
guy. I had a few questions, if you don't mind me
picking your brain for linguistic information.
>> Also, your assumption about the IPA is wrong: it's
not an attempt at listing all the phones (it's
impossible: the acoustic space is a continuum), but
all the sounds that at least one language has
*phonemically*. So the IPA *is* an alphabet of
phone*m*es, it's just that it doesn't restrict itself
to a single or a few languages but tries to describe
all the phonemes of all the languages in the world. <<
Thank you for that clarification---it helps! I have a
question about that (maybe you don't have all the
resources to answer it, but I'll ask anyway). Some of
the different IPA phonemes sound very similar, at
least to my English ears. I understand that some
language speakers have no problem discerning them,
such as the Arabs with /k/ and /q/. But does every IPA
phoneme one <a
href="http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet">the
chart</a> contrast with every other IPA phoneme in at
least one language?
That is, does any one language use the postalveolar,
retroflex, and/or retroflex "sh" sound in a
semantically distinctive way? Does any one language
use the alveolar, retroflex, and/or palatal "l" sound
in a semantically distinctive way? If so, then my
reaction is "wow!" I need to come up with a lot more
base shapes for place of articulation.
>> Palatal is the position of for instance the German
fricative "ch" in "ich". It's quite different in sound
from the English "sh". <<
Does German also have a postalveolar "sh" sound?
>>In fact, the "r" belongs with the glides
("approximants" is the usual term). <<
On the IPA chart, where is the /w/ sound? I would
think it would be in the bilabial approximant box, but
that's empty.
Anyway, thanks for your time Christophe.
-Nathan
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