Re: Phoneme winnowing continues

En réponse à Mark J. Reed :

>MJR = Mark J. Reed (me)
>CG  = Christophe Grandsire (does that mean "grandpa" in French? :))
Not at all :)) . It doesn't have a meaning as far as people now (it looks
like "grand": tall + "sire": sire, but that's only in the looks. The
etymology is actually unknown).


>Let me correct myself - it has eleven syllables, because of the
>palatalization in "uchyuu"; that word is written "u", "chi", small "yu",
>"u".  So the symbol mapping is not one-to-one for either syllables or
>morae, but it's closer to morae.
Indeed.


>Yeah, that was going to be my next question.  Of what use is the
>classification of one- and two-morae chunks as "syllables"?
Not much.


>Okay, I'll buy the nasals, but I don't understand what you mean by
>"truly pronounces long vowels as long vowels".  What is the phonetic
>difference between [to:] and [too]?
One is two phones, the other three. Tell me, you can make the difference
between a long vowel and a sequence of two identical short vowels can't
you? Especially since it's important in Japanese, which does distinguish
between the two (I don't know any minimal pairs, but I wouldn't be
surprised to find them). For instance, in adjectives ending in -i, like
"yasashii", the two last i's are pronounced separately: [jasaSi.i], not
*[jasaSi:]. It's like words with one syllable ending in the nasal and the
following one beginning with a vowel: the nasal stays in the previous
syllable. It doesn't become the onset of the following syllable, even
phonetically. "ten'ou" ("emperor", IIRC) [ten.o:], doesn't at all sound
like "tenou" [te.no:] in Japanese.

>And let's not forget gemination.  Doesn't it also create an additional mora,
>so that "makka" has three morae rather than two?
Three morae indeed. And they are considered as such, I've heard enough
Japanese songs to be convinced of that fact. Indeed, even in slow
movements, a word like "makka" takes three beats, not two (the actual
pronunciation makes it actually quasi-identical to "maaka". To my ear, the
way they render it sounds like [ma?a_xka], i.e. with an ultra-short second
[a], but the glottal stop is nearly imperciptible).

>   Is there also a discernible
>difference between [mAk:A] and [mAkkA]?
In the absolute? Yes. [k:], again, is a single phone (kept longer), while
[kk] is two. The difference is strong (at least to my ear), and I can
produce both quite differently.

>(What's the etymology of that word, anyway?  I thought it came from "ma" +
>"aka", but if so, why isn't it "maaka"?)
The wonders of Japanese :))) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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