Re: Futurese

In a message dated 05/06/2002 07.46.52 AM, Andreas (and_yo@HOTMAIL.COM)
writes:

>I wasn't saying you were wrong - I said that according to the closest
>encyclopaedia, Mandarin |r| is [Z]. This might be outright wrong, merely
>reflect inexact use of the IPA by the encyclopaedists, or an actual Chinese
>(variant) pronuncation - I'm in no position to tell (Chang, feel like
>weighing in?).
    ::looks up startled::
    I think mayhaps some Shanghai accents _do_ have rhotics (very nice
regionalect - I can sit and listen to a female speaker for minutes at a time
and space out on all the sweet sounding tones and velvety fricatives ::BiG
GRiN::
     But Mandarin maybe different. In the past 50 or so years, Mandarin has
become a very large regionalect with many localized variants (Beijing
Mandarin, Singaporean Mandarin, Taiwanese Mandarin, even Yale Mandarin, etc.)
- so sweeping generalizations about Mandarin may not be useful any longer.
Perhaps in the decades to come, we might see a Hong Kong Mandarin emerge.

    I tried asking my mother and she could not understand what I was asking.
I will try asking my father. He has a better understanding of these things...

>In any case [Z] and [z`] are close enough that it's surely preferable to
>avoid realizing /r/ as [z`], were one to speak Futurese.
    Of course, if one were not making an IAL, I think [Z] and [z`] could be
interchangeable phonemes, or allophones. Perhaps if there was a more
pronounced difference (pardon the pun), they would be a nice contrast like
the "light" [l] and "dark" [L]...


Hanuman Zhang  {HANoomaan JAHng} /'hanuma~n  dZahN/
~§~

Sometimes the difference between noise and music is all in your head

"I like the fact that listen is an anagram of silent." ~ Alfred Brendel

_NADA BRAHMA_= < from Sanskrit > "sound is god[head]"/"god[head] is sound"
    anavriti shabdat => "Liberation by sound."
 OM ... Om Tat Sat... Tat Tvam Asi... OM

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