Re: CHAT: IPA Question

On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 10:55:00AM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> H. S. Teoh scripsit:
>
> > OK, I only have a faint clue what a velarised 'l' might be. I don't think
> > I've encountered it in English. Not that I noticed, anyway.
>
> It's so pervasive in English, especially in N.A., you probably don't
> notice.  You can hear a clear (non-velar) l in RP before front vowels.
You're right, I don't notice it. In fact, I'm probably so used to hearing
both l's as allophones that I probably can't tell the difference until
somebody points it out to me IRL. :-)

> > Oh yeah, we're [a:t@ g&tS@]. :-P
>
> I make that [au4@ gEtS@].
Yeah, close enough. :-)

> > "American"? LOL... obviously you don't realize that Californians can't
> > understand Bostonians, and both can't understand Texans. And the Kanucks
> > among whom I live despise all three. :-)
>
> Despise is one thing, fail to understand is another.  Cultivated
> Bostonians don't sound like cultivated Texans, and don't want to, and
> vice versa
True, now that I think of it, it's usually the L2 English speakers that
complain they can't understand Texan.

> (a thing which non-anglophones have trouble grasping, with their
> hierarchically arranged social dialects),
Perhaps. I suppose it's a similar thing when Americans who have learned
Mandarin walk up to me and start speaking to me in this unnaturally thick
Beijing accent and wonder why I have trouble keeping myself from smiling.
:-)

Then there are subtle things like Hokkien tone 2 being 35 instead of 52 in
my hometown: pronouncing it as 52 is a "foreign accent"  and no local
would do such a thing. If you pronounce the more original Hokkien tones,
you're immediately classified with the East Malaysians and/or Taiwanese;
if you pronounce otherwise Penang-like Hokkien tones but with tone 2 as
52, then you're a [ki~a5 su1](*) Singaporean. And saying [mN=3] instead of
[mui3], or [li] instead of [lu] indicates you're an old, outdated person,
probably immigrated from mainland China. There are also even finer
distinctions: [hui21] "blood" marks you as a countryboy; the city
pronunciation is [hue21].

(*)[ki~a5 su1], or [ki~a5 su2] in Singaporean parlance, literally means
"afraid of losing". Basically a pejorative of the stereotypical
Singaporean who must always be better than others and must always take
advantage of others.

> but short of Gullah or its variant, basilectal AAVE, you have a lot of
> trouble finding two native North Americans who can't understand each
> others' dialects.
True, true.

[snip]
> > Personal? LOL... I was just [p_hleIn= @lo:N wiDja]. :-P
>
> My daughter says [p_hleIn= widZ@].
[snip]

Yeah, that's regarded as quite American in these parts. :-)


T

--
Today's society is one of specialization: as you grow, you learn more and
more about less and less. Eventually, you know everything about nothing.

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