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Re: IPA block in Unicode

From:Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
Date:Friday, August 12, 2005, 17:36
Herman Miller skrev:
> John Vertical wrote: > >>> Herman Miller wrote: >>> >> *"Squat reversed esh" and "turned r with fiskhook" (&#645; &#639;): I >>> >> have heard that these are "retroflex vowel" and "alveolar vowel", but >>> >> that makes little sense. >>> > >>> >These are used for the sounds in Mandarin Chinese written as "i" in >>> >pinyin, in words such as "shi" and "si". Not officially part of the >>> IPA. >>> >They sound like prolonged versions of [z`] and [z], but without >>> friction. >> >> >> >> Alright ... but then, how are they different from [r\`] and [r\]? >> > > They're used as vowels, like [i] (compared to [j]) or [u] (compared to > [w]). I suppose [r\`=] would be the IPA equivalent of "squat reversed > esh". (Note that [r\`] is a recent addition to the IPA and probably > wasn't around when the Chinese phonetic conventions were established.) > Also, [r\] is typically used for sounds like the English "r-", but > Chinese "-i" in "si" is very z-like (as I recall; it's been a long time > since I've heard Chinese). (Yale romanization writes "si" as "sz" and > "shi" as "shr".) On the chart [r\] looks like it ought to be a z-like > sound, but I don't think it's typically used for sounds like that. > >
I have [z=:] as an allophone of /i/ in my childhood accent of Swedish (from Orust, Bohuslän,if anyone wonders) and to my ear and my limited experience Mandarin _si_ sounds exactly the same. -- /BP 8^)> -- Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant! (Tacitus)

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Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>