Re: How to Make Chicken Cacciatore (was: phonetics by guesswork)

Philippe Caquant wrote:

>Ah, at least that's a concept I can understand (Rad #
>Rat). I personnally would pronounce them a different
>way, but 1/ I guess some people won't, and 2/ maybe I
>believe I pronounce them differently because I'm very
>much influenced by written form (personal
>subjectivity), and some listener would distinguish
>nothing at all. Anyway, this idea of "archiphonetic"
>notation seems to me something interesting, and (sorry
>to say that) it rejoins the idea I gave yesterday,
>without knowing yet about this, of presenting IPA or
>X-SAMPA by families of sounds, like an arborescence,
>and having the possibility to stop at the distinction
>level you wish.
>
>Now I can't see what this has to do with "maison".
>Nearly everybody pronounces "mézõ", even if usually
>"ai" represents the open "e" like in "même", for ex.
>It is the same with "pays" (pé-i, and not "pè-i). So I
>just can't see the point.
>
>I also tried to distinguish, with the help of my
>fingers put on my throat, which of the "d" and the "t"
>is voiced, or voiceless. I felt nearly exactly the
>same vibration in my fingers. Maybe it was'nt the
>right test to do. I know in French, one is called
>"sourde" and the other one "sonore", I never remember
>which is which: wait a minute, I think "d" should be
>"sonore" and "t" should be "sourde", although
>personnally (when thinking of the usual meaning of the
>word "sourde"), I would say exactly the contrary. But
>I'm quite aware of what is a "d" and what is a "t",
>since about 45 years I guess.
>
>
Well, I think another name for voiceless in relation to consonants in
English is 'surd', so I would suppose that _sourde_ would be the French
description for [t]. Of course, when I hear 'surd', I think of bad year
ten maths teachers more than unvoiced consonants...

>Thank you guys for trying to explain me something
>about phonology, but I'm afraid I'm definitely dumb.
>Nevertheless, you didn't completely lose your time, I
>at least shall try to remember that:
>- "2" is like in French "deux" and "9" is like in
>"neuf"
>- "voiced" means that the chords are supposed to
>vibrate, even if you cannot feel it at all, and
>"unvoiced" (or: voiceless ?), that they won't (hope
>I'm right)
>
>
Yep. Unvoiced and voiceless are synonyms; I think the former is more common.

>- "phoneme" is about differentiation in some real
>language (like: t # d, because for ex in French "tes"
>is something different from "des"). The only problem
>being that you won't know in which language this
>differentiation is relevant. Maybe in 999 languages it
>is not, and in the 1000th it is.
>
>
No. 'Phoneme' is about differentiation *in a particular language*. Or
more accurately, a particular phonology (the phonemes for one dialect of
a single language may differ from the phonemes of another dialect of the
same language). If say the phones [e] and [E] don't contrast in a given
language, then the language only has the phoneme /e/. For example, in
Spanish (as far as I know), [e] occurs in open syllables and [E] in
closed ones, but because in that language, it's entirely predictable
which phoneme will occur and the phonemes are close enough in sound or
pronunciation to be considered as potentially one (and perhaps that the
Spanish consider them one sound, but I'm not sure if it's true and not
everyone agrees it's necessary), we say that there's only one phoneme.
On the other hand, in a language like French where [e] and [E] can't be
predicted based on the other, we say that French has two phonemes: /e/
and /E/.

Phonemes are entirely decided within their context, just like we don't
say that English has an illative case (motion towards or into) simply
because Finnish does.

However, the motivation for the selection of IPA characters is that
there is a language (if only one in a thousand) that makes that
distinction (though there are exceptions, and some distinctions, such as
voicing, are first-class and get characters, and others, like
aspiration, are second-class and don't. The motivation for first- and
second-class is probably just the roman alphabet's native
repertoire...). (The original IPA vowels, though, were defined based on
the cardinal vowels, which were in turn based on the French vowels IIRC.
Since then, additional (central) vowels have been added. I have no idea
when [&] (a-e ligature), [I] or [U] (small caps I and U) were added, but
I suppose it was early on for English.)

>- barking is used in Arabic :-)
>
>I think I won't go much further, because I don't want
>to specialize in this field (yes, I know, obviously
>it's a wise decision). Nevertheless, I would suggest
>that somebody would think for a little while about the
>following question:
>- when the student doesn't understand a point that the
>teacher understands, does it mean :
>1/ that the student is an idiot, and the teacher is
>clever
>2/ that the teacher didn't explain the point the right
>way, or is not able to understand the student's
>problem
>3/ that the whole method of teaching (pedagogy) is not
>quite adapted, or is inexistant, and then
>reconsidering it a bit, perhaps even by listening what
>the idiot student says, might be worth in the long
>term (for future students).
>
>
It clearly means the student is a fool. I've always understood
everything the first time round... :)

>(And, ah, just a last question: how should "X-Sampa"
>be pronounced ? Eks-Sampa, Cross-Sampa or Christ-Sampa
>? Or other ? Just in order to make me look a little
>less dumb).
>
>
:) Eks-sampa, it means Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic
Alphabet, but you don't need to know that to use it.

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