Re: laterals (was: Pharingials, /l/ vs. /r/ in Southeast Asia)

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Isaac Penzev wrote:

> Great! [John's] encyclopaedism is amazing and more than useful! I'm very
> glad there are such precedents in real life. I'll do sth similar in
> Rumean. Just need to decide how to show [&]~[A] difference in Latin
> spelling; Arabic is easy: fatha for [&], alif for [A]. Arabic script
> is official, anyway...
John is, as ever, amazing.

> -------------------
> Tristan McLeay eskribiw:
>
> <<Okay. Russians seem more able to arbitrarily lengthen vowels when
> singing
> than Australians, then :)>>
>
> Abyssolutely!!! As much you lengthen Russian vowel, it won't change
> the meaning :)))
Let me tell you that that feels bizarre :) At the very least you could
have the common decency to finish your vowels slightly shorter :) Ah, how
our native speech influences us so.

> You have a good ear! Many Russian native speakers get shocked when
> they learn about [&] existing in Russian. Anyway, this is learnt
> only at Philology classes in universities...
Well, I do speak a language that has a native /&/ phoneme. If I couldn't
tell the difference between [&] and [a], I wouldn't be able to laugh at
Dougy (just a random character) for saying 'Pizza Hat' on a Pizza Hut ad
accidentally :)

> <<Some English borrowings look like that from my pespective... Some
> words
> borrowed with an [a] have the [a] become /a:/ if it's got the
> primary
> stress by the English rules and either /&/ or /a/ if it's
> not.[...]>>>
>
> I don't think I understood you well,
Hmm... more simply, the Japanese word _kamikaze_ is Anglicised (IMD at
least) as /k&m@ka:zi/ because in a nother edition of the language it was
*/,k&mI"kA:zI/, and J. /a/ was borrowed as /A:/ in the primary stress and
/&/ in the secondary stress, but now whatever difference in stress there
is is relatively irrelevant.

> but anyway what you say gives
> another good precedent for splitting Spanish /a/ into [&] and [A],
> that already constitute a phonemic opposition in Arabic words
> (though I haven't yet found a minimal pair: hunting through a
> dictionary is pretty hurting).
Yes indeed.

--
Tristan.