Re: Furrin phones in my own lect!

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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