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Re: Furrin phones in my own lect!

From:Steven Williams <feurieaux@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 28, 2006, 17:03
--- Carsten Becker <carbeck@...> schrieb:

> From: "Herman Miller" <hmiller@...> > Sent: Sunday, March 26, 2006 8:07 PM > > > You'd think so, but one of the harder sounds for
me
> > to learn was [k]. [...] > > You mean unaspirated [p t k], don't you? [R] isn't > that hard for me. Neither is [X]. ;)
I personally find uvular [X] easier to pronounce than velar [x]; when I try the velar articulation, it often comes out as a raspy spittle-flinging trill, that sounds more like a throat infection than a viable phoneme! [X] comes out smoothly and sounds wonderful (which is why I almost always use it in my conlangs).
> I don't know how to pronounce [q] properly, though.
I
> always haven an uvular offglide there somehow.
My trick: for the velar [k], bring your tongue _up_ to the soft palate, and for uvular [q], pull the root of your tongue _back_ to close the throat. That's the way it was taught to me by an Arabic speaker, at least.
> But yeah, there are many sound I don't know how to > pronounce, especially most of the central vowels > except [3], [@] and [6]. I attestedly don't get [1] > right as well. A Russian friend of mine: "Ah, it's > typical. Germans *never* get that one right."
Nor does this American, despite [1] being a phoneme in my dialect! (the only minimal pair I can think of off-hand: /Rosa's/ [r\OUz@z] vs. /roses/ [r\OUz1z]) Unstressed [I] seems to shift to [1] a lot, it seems, which makes sense. I always pronounce jery as [y] or [I].
> Better don't ask me about [_j] either. However, it > also seems typical for German speakers to have > difficulties with [H], i.e., many people in my
French
> class say [pyi] for [pH] <puis>. Also, vi Tshermens > are known for mixing up [T] and [s] and [w] and [v].
You guys (understandably, since the distinction is not phonemic in German) mix up [æ] and [E]; this led to a huge number of misunderstandings between me and a German friend of mine, where I'd think she was saying 'lend' for 'land', 'Ent' for 'ant' (my Tolkien-obsessed mind at work), and so on. ___________________________________________________________ Telefonate ohne weitere Kosten vom PC zum PC: http://messenger.yahoo.de

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Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>