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Re: Furrin phones in my own lect!

From:Stephen Mulraney <ataltane.conlang@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 28, 2006, 16:08
On 28/03/06, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> > On 3/28/06, Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...> wrote: > > Марк Рид (Mark J. Reed) гирщэпсэть: > > Of course, in Cyrillic cursive my last name looks for all the world > like "Pug". > > > Sorry to point to that, but _нь_ is [n_j], not [J]. > > OK, I get the difference between [nj] and [J], but what's the > difference between [n_j] and [J]?
<mallurk> I can describe the difference in terms of articulation, but I'd probably be hard pressed to distinguish them if I heard them. [n_j] is a dental (ok, alveolar) nasal with a palatal secondary articulator, while [J] is a palatal nasal - that is, a nasal with the point of articulation in the palatal zone. The former, [n_j], just has an 'extra' contact between the dorsum (or pre-dorsum or whatever) and the palatal zone. Incidently, this makes me think about what was one of my most significant realisations on the long, hard path to articulatory awareness: copping on that front vowels (and [j]) are not made by positioning the blade or tip of tongue, but by the position of the bunched-up dorsum. The indistinctness of sensation from the mouth made me incorrectly perceive the near-contact of the tip of the tongue as the articulation, and the position of the actual articulator (the dorsum) was obscured - it's as if only the sensation in my tongue nearest to the tip drowned out all sensations from further back. What this has to do with [n_j] versus [J] is that I had a notion that all of these various things labelled 'palatal', 'soft' (in Slavic terminology) or 'narrow' (in Irish terminology) were made by articulating (say) /n/ with a slightly flattened tongue tip - or some equally murky notion. </mallurk> s. --
> Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> >

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Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...>