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There are 18 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: USAGE: pronunciation mimicry (was: rhotics)
From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: USAGE: pronunciation mimicry (was: rhotics)
From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: USAGE: pronunciation mimicry (was: rhotics)
From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: calendars (was: samhain?)
From: Tim May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: USAGE: pronunciation mimicry (was: rhotics)
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
8. Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
From: John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11. Re: calendars (was: samhain?)
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
12. Re: Looking for IPA symbol
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
13. Looking for IPA symbol
From: Adam Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
14. Re: Looking for IPA symbol
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
15. Re: Looking for IPA symbol
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
16. Re: Disgusting thread... ;-)
From: "Pascal A. Kramm" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
17. Re: USAGE: rhotics (was: Advanced English + Babel text)
From: "Pascal A. Kramm" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
18. Re: Japanese Long Consonants
From: Simon Richard Clarkstone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 10:16:31 -0500
From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: USAGE: pronunciation mimicry (was: rhotics)
This finally showed up, while I was composing the other letter. Please
disregard and read my more recent letter which responds to the rest of J's
comments. For some reason, it's taking almost twelve hours for my posts to
arrive in my mailspool.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sally Caves" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 10:16 PM
Subject: Re: USAGE: pronunciation mimicry (was: rhotics)
> Oh, but it's not totally acquired! Of the gifts of foreign language
> learning, I count a good mimicry of the sounds the easiest. There is all
> the rest, of course. The mastery of vocabulary, idiom, reading and
> writing
> knowledge, comprehension, and so forth and so on. Actually, I wish it
> came
> more easily to me. I have friends who can pick up a language in six
> months,
> and are babbling away cheerfully with thick accents.
>
> Sally
etc.
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Message: 2
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 10:13:47 -0500
From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: USAGE: pronunciation mimicry (was: rhotics)
For some reason, this post I sent last night didn't show up in my mail
spool, so I'm sending it again. Sorry if it reduplicates a message the rest
of you got but I didn't! I've expanded it.
----- Original Message -----
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>Is mimicry of pronunciation that remarkable? I'm fairly good at accents,
>>too, but not flawless. A lot of Americans like to make fun of a southern
>>accent, assuming that it is monolithic and not multifarious and regional.
In response to me, J. wrote:
> That kind of mimicry is not remarkable, but it is remarkable that somebody
> can so totally acquire a foreign language that even native speakers of the
> same region are cheated!
Oh, but it's not totally acquired! And nobody's cheated! Of the gifts of
foreign language learning, I count a good mimicry of the sounds the easiest,
and actually the most trivial. There is all the rest, of course. The
mastery of vocabulary, idiom, reading and writing knowledge, comprehension,
and so forth and so on. Actually, I wish it came more easily to me. I have
friends who can pick up a language in six months, and are babbling away
cheerfully with thick accents. It's probably better to have an okay accent
and speak fluently than it is to have a good accent and speak haltingly,
groping for words.
> <off-topic>
But interesting!
>>>>Are you Swiss? Do you or have you live(d) in Switzerland?
>>>
>>> Yes, I do, I live in Berne and speak Bernese German.
>>
>>I had a very pleasant visit to Berne. We went in December of 1985. We
>>clocked the time it took for the signs to change from "sortie" to
>>"Ausfahrt" on the Autobahn. We fed carrots to the bears, all of them very
>>antic, and I took a picture of my friend next to a wall near the bear pit
>>that had graffiti written on it: Ba"r oder nicht Ba"r: das ist hier die
>>Frage. I have a picture here of store on a corner (a no entry sign on the
>>street). The building has a corner tower on it next to an arcade.
>>Painted
>>on the cement wall is "Apotheke und Drogerie: Scheidegger," and above it
>>is
>>a mural of customers dressed in seventeenth century clothing. IS THAT
>>STILL THERE?
>
> I don't know. I've been in the old city and have had a look at the
> pharmacy
> I thought you were talking about, but it wasn't that one...
What a pity...I'm sure the corner still exists. There's a sign on the edge
of the building between the covered archway and the sightly arched window of
the Apotheke that says "Bim Zytglogge." I don't know if that's a street
name or a direction. I'm standing with my camera across the street taking a
picture of the front of the building. The corner is to the left, with the
archway and the little tower set into the first (i.e., second for Americans)
storey of the building. The street running perpendicular to the one I'm on
is one-way: there is a "no entry" sign (the ubiquitous round red sign with a
white bar through it), the cars are parked toward me, and I see on that
street on the left side a swinging oval sign that says "Restaurant
Harmonie."
Now of course this was taken nineteen years ago! If all these businesses
have changed hands, then there's no way to find the corner except by the
little tower and the sign which might still be there: "Bim Zytglogge." I
don't know what this means in dialect. Something to do with a bell?
Bim=beim? Zyt=Zeit? I don't know how Bernese dialect works. Near/to the
clocktower [time bell]? Is it a streetname? Because of the order of my
pictures, my guess is that it's on or near the avenue that ends with the
clock tower, the one with the fountains in the middle. I hope I'm not being
too naive in suggesting that the Old Town has not changed its basic
structure, and people today, or at least in the last twenty years, don't
demolish architectural features in a city with so much history.
> By the way, the name "Scheidegger" is very Swiss, even in its spelling:
> The
> |gg|-digraph is only used in Switzerland for a fortis /k:/, which is
> represented by |(c)k| in standard German. Swiss German "der Egge"
> (corner/hill) corresponds to standard German "die Ecke/das Eck" (corner).
So then of course Glogge is Glocke.
>>I had no Schwiizertu"tsche, much less the Bernese German
>
> In Bernese German, it'd be "Schwytzerd�tsch"! ;)
Okay. I'll use only that spelling when conversing with you. :)
Sally
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/contents.html
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Message: 3
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 06:53:49 -0800
From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: USAGE: pronunciation mimicry (was: rhotics)
On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 22:16:16 -0500, Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: Constructed Languages List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Poster: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: USAGE: pronunciation mimicry (was: rhotics)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Oh, but it's not totally acquired! Of the gifts of foreign language
> learning, I count a good mimicry of the sounds the easiest. There is all
> the rest, of course. The mastery of vocabulary, idiom, reading and writing
> knowledge, comprehension, and so forth and so on. Actually, I wish it came
> more easily to me. I have friends who can pick up a language in six months,
> and are babbling away cheerfully with thick accents.
>
> Sally
Mimicry of sounds is I think easiest. I think though I have a
perceptible American accent to my Spanish, but I'd often get asked
where I was from rather than people asking me where in the US i'm
from. I remember the facilitators in college would always commend me
on my pronunciation. Of course those who'd always compliment me on my
accent said I pronounced things very well, but they may have just been
polite.
Funnily, in Mexico, one of the professors at the university we were
visiting had been in Queretaro for over 20 years and she still had a
very noticeable American accent. She pronounced it well, but I could
still figure out when she spoke she was an American by the way she
pronounced things. Sort of like a very slight Mexican accent to those
who learned English as a second language who emigrated from Mexico,
but speak otherwise impeccable English.
--
You can turn away from me
but there's nothing that'll keep me here you know
And you'll never be the city guy
Any more than I'll be hosting The Scooby Show
Scooby Show - Belle and Sebastian
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Message: 4
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 15:29:04 +0000
From: Tim May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: calendars (was: samhain?)
Mark J. Reed wrote at 2004-11-05 00:00:58 (-0500)
> On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 06:52:13PM +0000, Ray Brown wrote:
> > Yep - the Jewish calendar is certainly more interesting than the
> > Gregorian. The Mayan calendar is even better :)
>
> Yeah, but calendars with a built-in expiration date make me nervous. :)
>
> (According to the Mayan long count, the end of the world - to be
> followed by the birth of a brand new one - will take place on Dec
> 21, 2012. So we only have a little over 8 years to prepare. :))
>
That's not true. Or, at least, it's only one possible interpretation,
and not the one held by the actual Mayanists I've read.
As I'm sure we're all aware, the Long Count gives the number of days
elapsed since a zero date in mainly base-20 units. These are:
1 day kin
20 kins uinal
18 uinals tun (a 360-day "year")
20 tuns katun
20 katuns baktun ... and so on, but given the actual length of
historical time inhabited by the Maya, you
don't generally need the higher units.
The modern format for representing Long Count dates is to seperate the
numbers with periods, most significant first. Now, the zero day of
this calendar is August 13, 3114 B.C. (by the best correlation we
have). The weird thing, and the thing which is responsible for this
"end of the world" theory, is that the Maya didn't write this
0.0.0.0.0
but
13.0.0.0.0
That 13 seems to be functionally zero. 144,000 days later,
13.19.19.17.19 was succeeded by 1.0.0.0.0, and from there onwards
things proceed much as you'd expect.
We are currently living in the 13th baktun, which will be completed on
2012-12-23. On that day the long count will again read 13.0.0.0.0.
The big question is whether the world is supposed to end and be
recreated then, and whether the baktun after that is 1, again, or 14.
The late Linda Schele, one of the foremost mayanists of her
generation, certainly believed that the baktun cycle was vigesimal
(like all the other cycles in the Long Count except the uinal) and
that the Maya did not expect the world to end in 2012. There are a
number of pieces of evidence for this view:
| On three stelae at Coba, the zero date is recorded with Long Counts
| that include twenty cycles above the katun, each prefixed by the
| number thirteen. We write this number in our transcription system:
|
| 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.0.0.0.0
|
| At Yaxchilan, there is another Long Count date corresponding to the
| day 9.15.13.6.9 3 Muluc 17 Mac, or October 21, A.D. 744. The date
| is a standard Long Count, one within Bird Jaguar's life, but it is
| written in a very special way, with eight cycles above the baktun,
| each prefixed by the number 13 as follows:
|
| 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.9.15.13.6.9 3 Muluc 17 Mac
|
| This number is not a Distance Number between two dates; it simply
| records that for this date, as for all dates in Maya history, the
| cycles above the baktun are set at thirteen. On this Yaxchilan
| date those higher cycles had not yet changed, because not enough
| days had accumulated to cause the odometer of time to click over to
| the next number. At Palenque, we learn one more fact. In the
| Temple of Inscriptions, Pacal tied his accession date by Distance
| Number to the end of the first pictun, the next higher unit after
| baktun, in the Long Count system. This calculation tells us two
| important facts: it takes twenty baktuns to make a pictun (or 8,000
| years), and the number that follows thirteen in the system is one.
|
| ...
|
| The numbers in the Coba date do not mean that on 4 Ahau 8 Cumku
| [the zero date], thirteen of each of the Long Count units had been
| completed. It is clear from the arithmetical operations in Maya
| inscriptions that the thirteens are functionally zero. They set
| the syppetry of this universe to replicate the Tzolkin; there are
| twenty cycles set at thirteen, just as there are twenty day names
| and thirteen numbers in the Tzolkin. We simply do not know how
| much time the Maya perceived to have been encompassed by the
| previous era.
(From _The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art_ by Linda
Schele and Mary Ellen Miller)
The alternative interpretation, that there is a cycle of 13 baktuns at
the end of which the world is destroyed and recreated, is popular with
kooks on the Internet. What the prevailing view is among serious
mayanists at the present time I have not been able to establish, and
if anyone has any further information I'd be interested to hear it.
The one thing that is clear is that we are working from a very
restricted set of data. My money's on Schele, but it's probably not
wise to attach too much certainty to any theory in this case. I can
certainly imagine that not everyone who ever inscribed a Long Count
date necessarily understood its large-scale operation in quite the
same way, for example.
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Message: 5
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 10:47:18 -0500
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: USAGE: pronunciation mimicry (was: rhotics)
On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 06:53:49 -0800, B. Garcia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 22:16:16 -0500, Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> Oh, but it's not totally acquired! Of the gifts of foreign language
>> learning, I count a good mimicry of the sounds the easiest. There is all
>> the rest, of course.
The mimicry of sounds is one thing, but another thing is the accent of your
native language. I think that most people once they're about ten or twelve
years old won't ever get rid of their native languge's accent for the rest
of their lives. They may learn other languges perfectly, but native speakers
will still notice that they're foreigners.
Only very few people have the remarkable gift of being able to speak a
foreign language so well that nobody notices they're foreigners. The person
I was talking about seemingly had that gift.
>Sort of like a very slight Mexican accent to those
>who learned English as a second language who emigrated from Mexico,
>but speak otherwise impeccable English.
That's what I'm talking about. I'm also thinking of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
of the Kwik-E-Mart or of Rainier Wolfcastle (the first time I heard Arnold
Schwarzenegger I was surprised he talked exactly like him!).
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
j. 'mach' wust
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Message: 6
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 12:14:53 -0500
From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > Like our
>> "lie/lay" confusion that is fast becoming standard, alas, in the US.
>
> The confusion is quite an old one in the UK. I think if prescriptivists
> had not insisted on _lie_ (intrans.) ~ lay (trans.), _lay_ would have
> become the norm for both long ago. My parents used only _lay_, reserving
> _lie_ exclusively for "telling a falsehood". This seems to be common to
> colloquial dialect over much of Britain.
It's an old confusion. In early ME, or in the transition from OE to ME, I
believe, "lay" and "set" were established as transitive alternatives to the
intransitives "lie" and "sit." But the confusion has abounded since then;
you see it in Renaissance English and later, and the 18th-century
grammarians made it a "rule" for standard English. In formal writing,
especially among my dissertationers, I insist on it, and I hope that doesn't
stir John Cowan's sense of elitist prescriptivism. :), especially since even
I am slipping into this tendency, but orally, never literarily. Because it
is so prevalent, I believe the distinction will die, and "lay" will cover
the intransitive meaning as well. Interestingly, the same thing is not
happening with "set" in educated writing. This may be due to the fact that
"lie" (sustain a prostrate or prone position) shares a meaning with its
homonym "lie" (prevaricate), as you suggest, whereas "sit" has no prominent
alternative meaning.
Ray:
>>> [R\] = uvular trill
>>> [R] = uvular approximant and/or voiced uvular fricative
>>> [X[ = voiceless uvular fricative
>>
>> What does [x] mean, then?
>
> [x[ is the voiceless velar fricative, and [G] is the voiced velar
> fricative.
I knew that; I was confused by the capital "x," which is different, I now
realize, from [G]. I had better reconsider the difference between uvular
and velar. I have been confusing these terms as a number of you conlangers
have pointed out to me. Now that I'm getting good at my uvular trill, :) I
see that there is a subtle difference between the velar and the uvular,
whereas I had simply thought that [x] and [R] were the voiceless and voiced.
This distinction is perhaps harder to make for English speakers since we
don't normally have [X] and [R]. I still find it difficult to see much
difference between [x] and [X]. My [X] comes out as a voiceless uvular
trill. If I say Bach, however, I find the fricative issuing from the soft
palate and NOT the uvula, though, sans trill.
>>> The symbol ` is used to show rhotacized or r-colored vowels: [a`], [EMAIL
>>> PROTECTED],
>>> [i`] etc.
>>
>> As in "idear"? "He had an idear I liked, and that was to go to Africar
>> in
>> the winter." My Swansea barrister friend would say this, and my
>> Bostonian
>> friend says it as well.
>
> That looks to me more like the 'intrusive r' - it's common in dialects
> that don't use retroflex vowels. I mean the -ere in a word like _here_ in
> a rhotic dialect.
What I need help with is understanding "rhotic" and especially
"approximant." Is rhotacized the same as rhotic? Does rhotacized mean a
pulling back of the tongue to form the whisper of a retroflex "r"? (whereas
"rhotic" means "having to do with r's and their differences)? Somebody else
told me that my American "r" (in "American" and "car") was probably an
approximant, and he distinguished it from a "retroflex." Have I
misunderstood him? (Can't remember who it was; I'm trying to consolidate my
responses into one big one here.) If I REALLY retroflex my "approximant" r,
I sound like some midwesterners I know. You refer to the uvular
"approximant" above, with [R]. What's an approximant? A sound made where
the point of articulation is almost reached but isn't?
Ray:
> I imagine in fact that if a sound is at all humanly possible some language
> somewhere in the world will have it.
It used to be called "A natural language already did it even worse." ANADEW
Sally
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Message: 7
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 13:49:24 -0500
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
Sally Caves wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ray Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> > > Like our
> >> "lie/lay" confusion that is fast becoming standard, alas, in the US.
> >
> It's an old confusion. In early ME, or in the transition from OE to ME, I
> believe, "lay" and "set" were established as transitive alternatives to
> the
> intransitives "lie" and "sit." But the confusion has abounded since then;
> you see it in Renaissance English and later, and the 18th-century
> grammarians made it a "rule" for standard English. In formal writing,
> especially among my dissertationers, I insist on it, and I hope that
> doesn't
> stir John Cowan's sense of elitist prescriptivism. :), especially since
> even
> I am slipping into this tendency, but orally, never literarily.
Ho ho. I consider myself a pretty good speaker of English, but the principal
parts of lie and lay are always a problem, and I'm sure I mix them up-- not
in present tense, but in past and perfect.
Pres: I lie on my bed; I lie down (lay here only by inadvertence)
Past: I lay ?? on my bed; I lay down (or is it laid???) (remembering "Christ
_lag_ in Todesbanden" helps here)
Perf: I have lain ?? on my bed...; I had just lain down when the phone rang.
_lain_ sounds more correcter....:-))
Whereas _lay_ is laid, (have) laid. I think.........
But somehow these are two verbs I seldom use.
---------------------
> I had better reconsider the difference between uvular
> and velar. I have been confusing these terms as a number of you
> conlangers
> have pointed out to me. Now that I'm getting good at my uvular trill, :)
Pas moi; I was the despair of my French tutor years ago. _Fauteuil_ also
defeated me... (this was before I studied Phonetics, of course; now I can
approximate "fauteuil" and Dutch "huis", but still can't trill the damn
uvula.)
> If I say Bach, however, I find the fricative issuing from the soft
> palate and NOT the uvula, though, sans trill.
That is as it should be.
>
> >>> The symbol ` is used to show rhotacized or r-colored vowels: [a`],
> >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED],
> >>> [i`] etc.
I'm not sure "rhotacized" and "r-colored" are synonyms.....but could be
wrong. I've always thought "rhotacize ~rhotacism" referred to the change of
some sound to [r], as in Latin and Germanic intervocalic s > r.
> What I need help with is understanding "rhotic" and especially
> "approximant." Is rhotacized the same as rhotic?
I don't think so. See above re rhotacized; rhotic seems to mean 1. "r-like",
and 2. a class of sounds ([r, r\, R] et al.) that cause specific changes in
the formants of a preceding vowel.
Does rhotacized mean a
> pulling back of the tongue to form the whisper of a retroflex "r"?
I think that's simply "retroflexion".
(whereas
> "rhotic" means "having to do with r's and their differences)?
Yes, see above.
Somebody else
> told me that my American "r" (in "American" and "car") was probably an
> approximant, and he distinguished it from a "retroflex." Have I
> misunderstood him?
1. It's an approximant-- as you say, "the POA is almost reached but isn't".
The gap between tongue and POA is insufficient to produce friction. Cf. also
the difference between the usual Spanish fricative /y/ and English
approximant /y/(1). 2. Whether truly retroflexed or not, I'm not sure;
retroflexed means, strictly IMO, that the tip of the tongue is pulled back
and raised toward the POA. If you've ever seen an X-ray picture of American
[r\] or a drawing of the same, the main feature seems to be that the body of
the tongue is bunched up, while the tip is only slightly curled, if at all
(various YAEPTs have discussed this, it seems to vary individually).
American /r/ may be more a matter of "retracted tongue root", but that's
something I'm not up on (oops, ...up on which I'm not :-)
--------------------
(1) Surely the same failure to reach the POA accounts for the changes/loss
of intervoc. voiced stops in French and Spanish. We can easily produce a
continuum from fully stopped [d] for ex., to laxed [D], to an even more
laxed [D...] where the tongue is still sort-of in [D] position, but
producing little or no friction (don't think there's an IPA or SAMPA for
this), finally to zero, where the tongue doesn't make any transition between
V1...V2. Same with [s]; eventually you end up just making [h]-- lo and
behold, a very common sound change.
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Message: 8
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 14:19:57 -0500
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
On Fri, Nov 05, 2004 at 12:14:53PM -0500, Sally Caves wrote:
> What I need help with is understanding "rhotic" and especially
> "approximant."
Well, "rhotic" is basically used to describe the family of sounds which
have been represented by the letter R in Latin scripts, or its
equivalents in other scripts. It is a "family" relationship because
there is no set of isolated traits you can point to and say "that
constitutes rhoticity". Any two rhotics will have some features which
overlap, but there will be other rhotics which completely lack the
feature shared by the first two (overlapping elsewhere).
Fundamentally, what makes them rhotics is that people think they sound
similar to other rhotics. And, in fact, there may be some *acousttic*
properties that are shared by all rhotics, but there don't seem to be
any *articulatory* ones.
> Is rhotacized the same as rhotic?
No. The term "rhotacized" (or "rhoticized"; I've seen both spellings
and tend to use the latter) refers to the influence of a rhotic on an
adjacent non-rhotic sound. For example, most Americans have [a] in
both the words "car" and "father", but the vowel in "car" sounds
different because of the following [r\]. Basically, you start to
pronounce the [r\] before you're done pronouncing the [a], and the
result is a mixture of the two sounds, spelled [a`]. (In IPA, there is a
little hook that looks like a small r used instead of the `.)
Vowel rhotacization tends to happen with *sonorant* rhotics - the ones
that can double as vowels, because they can be pronounced at the same
time as a vowel. It's easy to see that [r\] is such a sound; in fact,
the sequence schwa + r decomposes into just [r\=] ("=" means
"syllabic") for many speakers in words like "speaker" [spikr\=].
> Somebody else told me that my American "r" (in "American" and "car")
> was probably an approximant, and he distinguished it from a
> "retroflex." Have I misunderstood him? (Can't remember who it was;
> I'm trying to consolidate my responses into one big one here.)
That was me. I didn't intend to contrast "approximant" with
"retroflex"; "approximant" is manner of articulation, while "retroflex"
is place of articulation. I certainly don't have a retroflexion
in [r\], and would be surprised to find that most Americans do.
> What's an approximant? A sound made where
> the point of articulation is almost reached but isn't?
Precisely. The sounds [l], [r\], [w] and [j] (the English consonantal Y
sound) are all approximants; there's no friction involved in producing them,
because the closure isn't tight enough to produce any. Nevertheless, the
partial closure affects the sound of the air stream, so you can make out
the sounds.
Approximants are sometimes called "glides". The sounds [w] and [j] are
also called "semi-vowels" because they are basically shortened versions
of [u] and [i] (or [U] and [I], or some other vowels in that area). The
sounds [l] and [r] aren't generally called semivowels because they don't
correspond to any vowels, although as I said [l=] and [r\=] do serve *as*
vowels in some languages.
-Marcos
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Message: 9
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 14:30:42 -0500
From: John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
Sally Caves scripsit:
> It's an old confusion. In early ME, or in the transition from OE to ME, I
> believe, "lay" and "set" were established as transitive alternatives to the
> intransitives "lie" and "sit."
Which is why we either lay or set the table.
> especially among my dissertationers,
What a great word! Apparently it's a coinage: searching Google shows no
hits for "dissertationer" except in Swedish text (pl. of "dissertation",
I suppose).
> I insist on it, and I hope that doesn't stir John Cowan's sense of
> elitist prescriptivism. :),
Not too much.
> Because it is so prevalent, I believe the distinction will die, and
> "lay" will cover the intransitive meaning as well.
Though I hear and see plenty of hypercorrect forms: "I was tired, so I
lied down." For some reason, this upsets me much more than the opposite.
There is also transitive "lay" = "have sex with" (either party can be
the subject) to further muddy the waters.
> "lie" (sustain a prostrate or prone position)
ObPedantic: I think these are synonymous. Do you perchance mean
"a prone or supine position"? (If there is a ten-dollar word for lying on
your side, I don't know it.)
--
John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ccil.org/~cowan
Female celebrity stalker, on a hot morning in Cairo:
"Imagine, Colonel Lawrence, ninety-two already!"
El Auruns's reply: "Many happy returns of the day!"
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Message: 10
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 20:36:07 +0100
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
Quoting John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Sally Caves scripsit:
> > especially among my dissertationers,
>
> What a great word! Apparently it's a coinage: searching Google shows no
> hits for "dissertationer" except in Swedish text (pl. of "dissertation",
> I suppose).
That's correct.
Andreas
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Message: 11
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 15:16:43 -0500
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: calendars (was: samhain?)
On Fri, Nov 05, 2004 at 03:29:04PM +0000, Tim May wrote:
> (According to the Mayan long count, the end of the world - to be
> followed by the birth of a brand new one - will take place on Dec
> 21, 2012. So we only have a little over 8 years to prepare. :))
>
> That's not true. Or, at least, it's only one possible interpretation,
> and not the one held by the actual Mayanists I've read.
Well, aren't you Mr. Spoil-Sport. :)
Thanks for the post, though. I had been confused by the 13 vs. 0 thing
and the various sources I used to research the Mayan calendars seemed to
disagree on the implications. I didn't realize there was more general
evidence that they used the 13 glyph to mean 0. Seems odd that they
didn't use 19, though.
> Now, the zero day of this calendar is August 13, 3114 B.C. (by the best
> correlation we have).
First, that's August 13th in the retrojected *Gregorian* calendar. In
almost all contexts, B.C. dates are given in the Julian calendar, so you
need to signify when you're doing otherwise. In the Julian calendar,
your correspondence date is September 8, 3114 BC.
Further, there seems to be some dispute there, as well. My Dec 21,
2012, date for (the next) 13.0.0.0.0 was using the
Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation for zero date, which places it two
days earlier (on August 11th Gregorian = Sept 6th Julian).
> The alternative interpretation, that there is a cycle of 13 baktuns at
> the end of which the world is destroyed and recreated, is popular with
> kooks on the Internet.
I'll try not to take that personally. :) But I should point out, in
case it's not obvious, that I have never taken this theory seriously and
do not expect the world to end in 2012. That is, of course, unless Gaia
herself objects to the reelection of Hillary Clinton for a second term
as President . . . ;-)
-Marcos
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Message: 12
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 21:23:56 +0100
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Looking for IPA symbol
Quoting Adam Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> One of my conlangs has a phoneme which sounds somewhere in between /s/ and
> /T/. Does anyone know the IPA symbol for it?
>
We'd need a more precise description, but most likely you're thinking of a
dental 's' sound; X-SAMPA and JXS [s_d]. In IPA, it's [s] with a diacritic
below looking like an '[' tilted 90 degrees clockwise.
It's the sound of Swedish /s/. IIRC Russian also has it, and Tamil even
contrasts it with an alveolar (English-style) [s].
Andreas
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Message: 13
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 15:17:36 EST
From: Adam Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Looking for IPA symbol
One of my conlangs has a phoneme which sounds somewhere in between /s/ and
/T/. Does anyone know the IPA symbol for it?
[This message contained attachments]
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Message: 14
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 21:48:26 +0100
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Looking for IPA symbol
Adam Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious wrote:
> One of my conlangs has a phoneme which sounds somewhere in between /s/ and
> /T/. Does anyone know the IPA symbol for it?
>
Probably a dental grooved sibilant.
It is s̪ s̪ in Unicode, s_d in CSX.
--
/BP 8^)
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
(Tacitus)
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Message: 15
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 15:41:29 -0500
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Looking for IPA symbol
On Fri, Nov 05, 2004 at 03:17:36PM -0500, Adam
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious wrote:
> One of my conlangs has a phoneme which sounds somewhere in between /s/ and
> /T/. Does anyone know the IPA symbol for it?
There's no separate symbol for any point of articulation in between
alveolar ([s]) and dental ([T]). I guess you can use the diacritic
for "advanced" (plus sign under the symbol, _+ in CXS) or "retracted"
(minus sign under the symbol, _- in CXS). Using those, your phoneme
could be written either [s_+] or [T_-].
If both /s/ and /T/ are also phonemes, then you have a mighty fine
distinction; if not, then I would just pick one of those symbols
for use at the phoneme level and only worry about the _+/_- stuff in
phonetic transcription.
-Marcos
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Message: 16
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 18:17:58 -0500
From: "Pascal A. Kramm" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Disgusting thread... ;-)
On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 18:30:10 +0000, Jan van Steenbergen
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> --- Pascal A. Kramm skrzypszy:
>
>> Well, it's not that far from the border, but the Dutch border.
>
>Yeah? Were exactly, if I may ask?
North-Rine Westphalia, or Ruhrgebiet (Ruhr area), to be more precise.
So where do you come from? You have a Dutch name, a British email address, a
French website and an indeciphrable consonant cluster as introduction line...
>> French names (like mine) can be easily found, and there's lots of
>> French stuff in the supermarkets, esp. camembert. I *love*
>> camembert. I also love croissants and baguettes.
>
>The combination French first name with German last name is
>particularly common in Luxemburg. As a matter of fact, you could
>easily have presented yourself as a Luxemburger.
I see... Luxemburg isn't that far either. My middle name is also French, btw.
>All the French stuff you describe (I don't like camembert; I quite
>like Brie and Port-Salut, though; I adore croissant, and I don't mind
>a baguette from time to time) is quite common here, too. As a matter
>of fact, I wonder if France really needs to be close in order to have
>those thins in the supermarkets.
That's probably true, but I guess if you're farther away from France, you
won't have quite that much stuff, and it will be a good bit more expensive.
--
Pascal A. Kramm, author of Choton
official Choton homepage:
http://www.choton.org
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Message: 17
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 19:10:57 -0500
From: "Pascal A. Kramm" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: USAGE: rhotics (was: Advanced English + Babel text)
On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 07:18:50 +0100, Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 18:17:03 +0100, Steven Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> --- "Pascal A. Kramm" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [r\VUt_?]:
>> > If someone here in Germany wants to imitate a French
>> > dialect, he'll most notably omit the initial "h"
>> > sound (e.g. turning "hotel" into "otel"), and
>> > pronounce the German "ch" as "sh".
>>
>> Is [x] turned to [S] _all_ the time
>
>ITYM "Is /x/ turned to [S] all the time"; in my opinion, you don't
>have [x]'s that sometimes turn into [C]'s (does that even make sense?)
>but rather /x/'s that are realised as [x] or [C] depending on the
>environment. (If, indeed, they are one phoneme, which is, I believe,
>still a question debated by Germanists.)
[C] and [x] are two clearly distinct sounds, even though they are both
written "ch", and exchanging one for the other would sound *really* awkward...
>> or only when it appears palatalized as [C]?
>
>I'd say that this is the case -- i.e. [C] -> [S] but not [x] -> [S].
>Not sure what becomes of [x]; I'd be inclined to say that it remains
>[x] in a mock French accent.
I'd rather say that both are turned into [s] since neither [C] nor [x]
actually exist in French.
>The accent/rhythm/melody also changes, though that's more difficult to notate.
>
>> As a native speaker of
>> English, I sometimes catch myself doing the same
>> thing; i.e., I'd pronounce /machen/ pretty much
>> perfectly, as ["ma.xn=], but I'd realize the phrase
>> /ich d�chte/ as [IS."[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>Interesting, especially since [C] occurs in my lect of English, as an
>allophone of /hj/ (probably via something like [hj] > [h_j] > [C]) --
>for example, in |huge|, roughly [Cu:dZ].
Most English speakers I've witnessed this far don't make a distinction
between [hj] and [C], so it seems to be quite common.
--
Pascal A. Kramm, author of Choton
official Choton homepage:
http://www.choton.org
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Message: 18
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 00:31:32 +0000
From: Simon Richard Clarkstone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Japanese Long Consonants
Chris Bates wrote:
> THat's what I was thinking, but to be honest I'm not sure I want to do
> long vowels + glottal stops. My brain keeps trying to cut them off
> early and make them short.
That, of course provides a nice method for introducing realistic-seeming
apparently-historical irregularities into your language. Or, you could
have a 3-way system (to what use, I don't know):
* long vowel
* short vowel
* short vowel + glottal stop
--
Simon Richard Clarkstone
[EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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