Re: IPA griefs

On Sun, 22 Oct 2000, Herman Miller wrote:

> On Sun, 22 Oct 2000 22:17:27 -0400, Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...> wrote:
>
> >On Sun, 22 Oct 2000, Danny Wier wrote:
> >
> >> The term varies. I've seen "postalveolar", "prepalatal",
> >> "palatoalveolar". Never use the term "palatal" however; that's reserved
> >> for the likes of IPA /c/, /ç/, /j/ "key", "ich" (German) and "you".
> >
> >Waitasec--now *I'm* confused.  I thought English "k" was /k/.  _The
> >Korean Alphabet_ lists "j" (McCune-Reischauer transliteration of Korean)
> >as /c/ and "ch" as /c^h/ (aspirate), so I thought /c/ was something very
> >similar to English /dZ/.  /c/ really is as in "key"?  <confusion>  I was
> >so happy to know what the IPA's for Korean sounds were, and now it seems
> >something is very wrong here!
>
> English /k/ has various allophones, but "k" in "key" is definitely
> aspirated. I don't pronounce "k" in "key" anything like [c_h], but I can
> imagine that being possible in some dialects. A narrow transcription of
> "key" might be something like ['k_h_ji:] (palatalized and aspirated).
Aspiration I can understand, since Korean uses it a lot.

However, now I'm convinced that _The Korean Alphabet_ is using some
strange transcription because /c/ doesn't sound anything like Korean
"j".  Grr.

YHL