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

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Philippe Caquant <herodote92@Y...> wrote:

> "This sound is made by bringing the walls of the
> throat just below the tongue root and above the voice
> box closer together, it ends up sounding like a strong
> and raspy "h"." (pharyngeal, I believe ?) I tried and
> felt like barking. Which language uses barking ?
Arabic.



> And what could be "indeterminacy in French vowels" ?
I don't know.  That sounds like a description of usage
of sounds rather than of a single sound.  Maybe the
individual variation of /@/ (schwa) and /I/ (lax i) in
many words among English speakers could be called an
"indeterminacy in vowels".



> I also can't understand why "R" (like in French "roi")
> is considered as "voiced" (uvular fricative). To me,
> this is a consonant, why should it be voiced ?
See, "voiced" is one of the most basic, simple and
understandable terms in phonology.  If you'd spend
less time bitching about it and more actually trying
to learn it, you'd know by now that "voiced" means
that the vocal cords are vibrating during the sound.
The only difference between French "t" and "d", or
"f" and "v", is that the former is unvoiced and the
latter is voiced.  You can even have unvoiced vowels
(as when you're whispering).  Obviously, French /R/
is voiced.  After unvoiced consonants or at the end
of a word, it's pronounced voiceless (/X/): "prendre"
/pXA~dX/.  That's the same sound as "ch" in Swiss
German or in Welsh.

(Actually, "ch" is pronounced quite differently in
the many different Swiss dialects, but apparently you
don't want to acknowledge that.)



> And I wonder why
> there seems to be so many particularities concerning
> only Swedish: maybe because some Swede helped to work
> the IPA out ? Why should there be more of such special
> sounds in Swedish than in any other language ?
Which particularities?  The melodious accent is pretty
original, but happens in Norwegian too, IINM.  The
retroflexes happen in a lot of languages all over the
world.  I don't think any of the vowels are unique
either.  The fusion of /S/ and /x/ is pretty freaky
though (what is it in CXS again? /S\/?).



-- Christian Thalmann

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