Re: CHAT: "T's okay" and initial /ts/ affricates

On Sat, 26 Sep 1998 23:30:26 -0500 Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
writes:
>Laurie Gerholz wrote:
>
>> I'm not really sure. I suspect that I use both in speech. I never
>really
>> thought about it. The /tsoukei/ shouldn't really be a violoation of
>> Standard English phonology because it's *actually* a contraction of
>> "it's okay".
>
>Well, I meant by that that for most English speakers, /ts/cannot be
>used in initial position
>(the ones already mentioned excepted
>of course). I remember one time I was eating at a Chinese restaurant
>with my parents, and I thought I'd order Capt. Tsou's something-
>or-other (can't remember what now).  I asked the waiter about it,
>and I distinctly remember him saying /souz/, not /tsouz/ (the waiter
>was a native English speaker, not as is often the case natively
>a speaker of one of the Chinese languages).  Also, for most speakers,
>"tse-tse fly" is pronounced as /sisi/, not /tsitsi/. The same goes for
>initial
>/N/ (as in kiNG).
I'm able to pronounce /ts/ in initial position, probably because of my
looooong experience with Hebrew, which has /ts/ as a single consonant
sound, the letter _tzadi_ (i just transliterate it <tz> because that's
how i'm used to seeing it).
However, my pronounciation of Hebrew /ts/, and English /tS/ (as in
_chicken_) and /dZ/ differs audibly in my pronounciation of the affricate
/dz/.
As i mentioned once before in a thread about (i think) consonant
mutation, i've found that it's possible to pronounce these affricates as
either one sound or two.  In one-sound form, the consonant blend is
quick, with both sounds blending into one.  In two-sound form, there is
an extremely short vowel-like pause during the change from the /t/ or /d/
to the fricative, and the fricative is lengthened slightly.  That's the
only way i've figured out to describe it.  I can pronounce /ts/, /tS/,
and /dZ/ as one sound or two, but i can't do that with /dz/, which almost
always comes out as two sounds.
I always knew that a /ts/ and /tS/ are made out of two sounds, and the
Rokbeigalmki-Ziifer (R-Z) letters i made for them reflect it - it's an
_s_ or _sh_ curve slashed by a _t_ line.
(http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Dunes/8515/conlang.html to see it).
However, not until reading a book on phonology about a month or so ago
did i learn that /dZ/ is actually /dZ/, and not one single sound.  The
R-Z letter for /dZ/ reflects this - it looks like a simple undotted "j",
one sound.  But there is no /dz/ sound in Rokbeigalmki, because i never
realized that it's related to the English "j".
Words in Rokb. can begin with the /ts/ letter, the /tS/ letter, the /dZ/
letter, and the /N/ (actually it's more of a /n"/, the uvular nasal), but
the /d z/ (two-sound form) can only occur as that, two successive
letters.
/ts/ - _tz a th_ /tsaT/ , "thing"
/tS/ - _ch a k_ /tSak/ , "yell"
/dZ/ - _j y e` m ih l_ /dZyE:mIl/ , "deep valley"
/n"/ - _ng e d_ /n"ed/ , "newness"

but

/d z/ - _d z u w au r g_ /d zuwOrg/ , "festival"

The spaces in the transliterations separate the different letters - _tz_,
_ch_, and _j_ are all single characters, but _d z_ are two.

Incidentally, my brother either can't or doesn't want to pronounce the
initial /n"/ sound in Rokbeigalmki...when he was reading my translation
of the Babel text once, he insisted on pronouncing the
preposition/case-prefix _nga'_ /n"a/ as *two sounds*, sounding something
like a syllabic /N/ or /n/ followed by /ga/.


-Stephen (Steg)

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