------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
$9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/J8kdrA/y20IAA/yQLSAA/GSaulB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
There are 7 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. (unknown)
From: Tristan Mc Leay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Spelling pronunciations (was: rhotic miscellany)
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: rhotic miscellany, and a usage note
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: Tatari Faran: volition, verb complements, phonology update, and
more
From: J�rg Rhiemeier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 2004 05:43:46 +1100
From: Tristan Mc Leay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: (unknown)
On Sat, 6 Nov 2004 19:09:51 +0200, Isaac A. Penzev
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Philip Newton wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 09:28:41 +0000, Jan van
Steenbergen wrote:
> > > > Though the j\-J\ thing occasionally comes
up...
> > > But since CXS is essentially the work of this
> > > group, I wonder if we couldn't democratically
decide to change that.
> >
> > I'd be inclined to be in favour of this particular
change.
>
> I'm ready to support this suggestion. All we need to
do now is to contact
> Tristan, methinks. IIRC, he is nomail in this list,
Yup, but I should be back on as of Tuesday, maybe
sooner.
>so I'm sending a copy of
> this msg to him personally.
Probably better if you filled me in on all the details
:) My general perspective on changing CXS is that it
needs to be in use, but CXS isn't my trademark so if
someone wants to create a more definitive version of
the CXS chart with your own rules, I can't stop you.
--
Tristan
Find local movie times and trailers on Yahoo! Movies.
http://au.movies.yahoo.com
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 2
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 19:04:12 +0000
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Spelling pronunciations (was: rhotic miscellany)
[TORTOISE & PORPOISE]
On Friday, November 5, 2004, at 09:03 , Philip Newton wrote:
>
> On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 07:20:42 +0000, Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> When I was young (chronologically) everyone called a _tortoise_ a
>> "tortus"
>> - now I often hear ['tO:tOjz} - ach!
>
> Ah. I also have ['tO:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- and ['pO:[EMAIL PROTECTED], for
> that matter.
So do I :)
----------------------------------------------------------
On Friday, November 5, 2004, at 12:34 , John Cowan wrote:
[snip]
> I believe all Americans say this (rhotically or not, as the case may be).
It wasn't the first syllable I was commenting on. I imagine all dialects
(and ideolects) of English pronounce the syllable with or withour
'rhotocity' according its normal practice. It's the second syllable I was
commenting on. When I was a youngster AFAIK practically everyone pronounce
it [EMAIL PROTECTED], as they did also with 'porpoise'. But now I too often
hear both
these words pronounced as tho they rhymed with 'toys' - ach!!
=====================================================
[WAISTCOAT]
On Friday, November 5, 2004, at 12:34 , John Cowan wrote:
> Ray Brown scripsit:
[snip]
>> For example, in English "waistcoat" had become pronounced 'weskit',
>> but the Victorian bourgeoisie that this too vulgar so the spelling
>> pronunciation now prevails.
>
> Huh. I'm surprised. The object itself is rather archaic to me,
Not the side of the Pond, it ain't. They are still often worn - especially
if colorful :)
> but
> I learned the pronunciation "weskit" (from a dictionary, probably) and
> didn't know it had changed back.
Alas, it had well before the 1940s.
> I note that in one of the last chapters of the _Lord of the Rings_,
> the Gaffer (Sam's father) says "What's become of his weskit [sic]?
> I don't hold with wearing ironmongery, whether it wears well or no."
Quite so. JRRT had to spell it 'weskit' otherwise it would not have been
read that way by most readers over here. Every so often I make a vain
attempt to revive the older pronunciation, but am regarded either as
eccentric (which is probably right) or just ignorant & vulgar.
My dictionary says of the pronunciation /'wEskIt/ "archaic and now dialect"
. I probably ought to have added, "rustic dialect".
Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 3
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 19:04:19 +0000
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
On Friday, November 5, 2004, at 06:49 , Roger Mills wrote:
> Sally Caves wrote:
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Ray Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[snip]
>>>>> 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.
That indeed is the the more common meaning of the word.
The vowels in words like _car_ and _cart_ in the common American
pronunciation are described as rhotic and are said to possess 'rhoticity'.
I suppose in theory one should say that such vowels are "rhoticized", but
the term "rhotacized" is also found. For example, David Crystal in "A
Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics" writes, under the heading
_retroflex_:
"...the vowel is said to be 'r-coloured_' or 'rhotacized'...."
>> 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.
Yes, it's not easily definable. On the 6th Feb. this year, Dirk Elzinga
wrote to the Conlang list:
"a lowered third formant is the cue for rhotacization. A lowered second
formant is the cue for backness (more
precisely, it's the difference between the second and first formant)."
Um, thinks: maybe 'rhoticity' would be a better term than 'rhotacization'.
However, when I asked Dirk to explain, he wrote back (and as it can read
in the archives, I guess Dirk won't object to my quoting it here):
"Okay, I'll try. Any body of air (such as that enclosed by a bottle or
the mouth) will vibrate in a way which depends on its size and shape.
This vibration produces pitches at certain frequency ranges; these
frequencies are entirely dependent on the size and shape of the
resonating chamber and not on the fundamental frequency (note that
vowel quality remains constant even when the pitch changes).
"During the production of vowels, we alter the size and shape of the
mouth and the corresponding resonant frequencies; this gives vowels
their particular acoustic profiles. There are two frequency regions
which are essential to the recognition of vowels: the lower one is
called the first formant and the higher one is the second formant. For
English vowels, the first formant varies from about 250 Hz to 700 Hz;
the second formant can vary from about 2900 Hz to 2200 Hz. There are
formant bands above these two, but they become decreasingly important
to speech perception. Rhoticity is defined as a lowering of the
frequency of the third formant band.
"As I understand it, rhoticity is marked only by a lowered third
formant. Since there are a number of articulatory maneuvers which will
achieve this acoustic/perceptual target, I believe that the acoustic
property of a lowered third formant is definitional for rhoticity."
This definition applies, so I understand, both to 'rhotic vowels' and to
the various seemingly disparate consonants commonly termed 'rhotic'.
> Does rhotacized mean a
>> pulling back of the tongue to form the whisper of a retroflex "r"?
>
> I think that's simply "retroflexion".
Yes it is. The term retroflex is applied to those consonants made when the
tip of the tongue is curled back towards the front of the hard palate. If
I have understood aright, all retroflex sounds are rhotic; but certainly
not all rhotic sounds - for example the uvular trill - are retroflex.
The r-colored vowels are also sometimes termed 'retroflex', but IME the
term retroflex is now normally reserved for the set of consonants made in
the retroflex place of articulation.
>
> (whereas
>> "rhotic" means "having to do with r's and their differences)?
> Yes, see above.
Amen.
> 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"
> .
Yep - the rest snipped - but I agree with what Roger wrote.
======================================================================
On Friday, November 5, 2004, at 07:19 , Mark J. Reed wrote:
[snip]
> 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).
This is more or less what I said way back in February. But two or three
members said that rhoticity was a more precise feature and that led to
Dirk's explanation which I have given above.
>> 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.
Yep. It would be better to keep "rhoticized" as the term for this feature
and to limit "rhotacized" to describe the change of another sound,
typically [z] or [l], to /r/ (or some similar rhotic). But in practice
'rhotacized' is found used for both features. However, I have never seen
the second feature termed 'rhoticized'.
> For example, most Americans have [a] in
[example snipped - but I agree with it]
>
>> 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.
Yep - and a retroflex approximant occurs in some languages. The IPA symbol
is [ɻ] or in CXS [r\`].
> I certainly don't have a retroflexion
> in [r\], and would be surprised to find that most Americans do.
Certainly not normal in Brit English either, where /r/ is usually either
[r] or [r\].
Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 4
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 19:04:15 +0000
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: rhotic miscellany, and a usage note
On Friday, November 5, 2004, at 01:07 , J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 19:52:41 -0500, Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[snip]
>> Hitler was Austrian IIRC and began his political rise in Bavaria. Is the
>> trilled r possibly a southern feature?
>
> I don't know how the /r/ is realized in Bavarian dialects. Hitler,
> however,
> didn't have no Bavarian in his speech. He spoke just the standard media
> accent of his time.
All the Bavarians I've met use the common uvular pronunciation. I had in
fact understood the French /R/ spread first among he southern dialects
before becoming almost universal.
======================================================================
On Saturday, November 6, 2004, at 05:50 , Thomas R. Wier wrote:
[snip]
> Really? I could swear I've heard recordings of him where he used
> the alveolar tap or trill rather than the uvular trill for <r> --
> especially in "das deutsche [rrrr]eich".
Eh?? I did not know anyone had dissented from this. I thought we all
agreed that Hitler used the alveolar or apical trill. The question was why?
It was suggested it was southern influence.
The standard media of his time was the apical trill - that's the point
Mach is surely making. It was particularly favored by actors, orators etc,
because it carries better than the uvular varieties.
One should also remember that the apical trill was (and possibly still is)
the officially prescribed German pronunciation and Hitler may well have
regarded it for that reason also as preferable to the frenchified uvular
variety.
But I am sure that Mach is right - it had nothing to do with Bavarian
dialect but was due to the standard media pronunciation of the 1920s &
1930s.
Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 5
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 22:22:28 +0100
From: J�rg Rhiemeier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Tatari Faran: volition, verb complements, phonology update, and
more
Hallo!
On Mon, 1 Nov 2004 17:12:24 -0800,
"H. S. Teoh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hey conlangy folks, what's up with all these squabbles that always
> come up in the absence of Tatari Faran posts? Are the AUXLANG folk
> invading us again? ;-)
>
> Tatari Faran has grown a lot since the last update. I don't even
> remember what exactly has changed since, but anyway, instead of
> inundating the list with an exhaustive coverage, I thought I'd pick
> out a few gems to show off with. So here they are, in no particular
> order:
>
>
> 1) The lexicon now has 211 entries. Lest you get the wrong idea,
> however, it should be noted that verbs and verb complements are listed
> separately, and I've entered some phonological contractions as
> separate entries to prevent my own confusion in the future.
> Nevertheless, this does show impressively fast growth compared to
> Ebis�dian.
Or Old Albic, which still has hardly more than 300 words. I am indeed
quite slow at inventing words.
> 2) Ah yes, volition, the eyebrow-raiser in my subject line. ;-)
Yeah! Volition! I have to comment as Old Albic also grammaticalizes
degrees of volition.
> I
> found out that due to the nature of Tatari Faran's core case system,
> volitive and involitive meanings of the same verb referent must be
> realized as distinct verbs. For example, in English we use "smell"
> both in the volitive sense "smell this and see" and in the involitive
> sense "I smell something burning". In Tatari Faran, two distinct verbs
> are necessary:
>
> huena ... hiim [hMna ... hi:m]
> To sniff at something (volitive)
>
> fahun ... uen [fahun ... Mn]
> To smell something (involitive)
>
> They are necessarily different because of the core cases that are used
> differently with each verb: for _huena_, the sniffer is marked with
> the originative case:
>
> simani ko huena huu na hiim.
> wolf ORG smell 1sp RCP COMPL
> ["simani kO "hMna hu: na hi:m]
> "The wolf smelled me (sniffed at me)."
>
> For _fahun_, the smeller is marked with the receptive, since the smell
> involuntarily arrived at his/her nose:
>
> huu na fahun punareis sa uen.
> 1sp RCP smell stink CVY COMPL
> [hu: na fa"hun puna4ejsa Mn]
> "I smelt an unpleasant odor."
In Old Albic, the case markings are different but the verb is the same.
The case of the subject is agentive if volitional, dative if not:
Arachchasa a valchva.
AOR-smell-1SG:P-3SG:A the:C-AGT wolf-AGT
`The wolf smelled me (sniffed at me).'
Arachama mana smalth nabenim.
AOR-smell-3SG:P-1SG:A 1SG-DAT odor-OBJ unpleasant-OBJ
`I smelt an unpleasant odor.'
See also my post from July 27 on degress of volition in Old Albic:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0407D&L=conlang&P=R15311
> [more examples and other stuff snipped]
Greetings,
J�rg.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 6
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 17:28:25 -0500
From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> On Fri, Nov 05, 2004 at 12:14:53PM -0500, Sally Caves wrote:
>> 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.)
Marcos:
> 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.
Alright, I'm doubly confused, Marcos. PLACE of articulation? So
retroflexion of the tongue would require it to touch the palate? I have
always understood a "retroflex r" to mean one in which the tongue is drawn
back and the tip curled up, so, rather, MANNER of articulation.
Retroflectere: "to bend back." The tongue pulls back and the tip curls up
towards the roof of the mouth. If we stick strictly to the meaning of the
term itself, then I indeed do pronounce my "r"s in English retroflexively,
and so, I imagine, do millions of other Americans. If I didn't retroflex my
tongue in pronouncing "r", I'd be saying something like "it's hahd to pahk
the cah in the dahk." Some Bostonians, some southerners, and most Brits
have so relaxed retroflexion that we don't hear the r at all. Am I to drop
this term "retroflex" in the description of my use of "r" because you tell
me now that it's a place of articulation? I've never heard it described
that way. I have always assumed it to be what you and others call an
approximant, but one that requires the motion or manner of retroflexion.
>> 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.
That's clear enough. My confusion is why the term "retroflexion" has been
taken out of the picture here for "r", and can't be used to describe the
approximant, whereby the tongue tip curls up and back. If what you mean by
retroflexion as a place of articulation means curling the tongue back to
touch the palette, then that's one thing. But I had always heard it used to
mean the manner, not the POA.
In an earlier post you call it an alveolar approximant. Say "r" and hold
it. (You are American, I take it? :) The tip of the tongue is almost
touching the palate, not the alveolar ridge. An alveolar approximant would
sound very strange to me. Put your tongue close to the alveolar ridge and
don't quite touch it. Make it end a syllable like /ka/. Like an "l" not
quite realized. Doesn't that sound foreign? Retroflexion, it seems to me,
is essential to the pronunciation of "r" in American English.
Sally
P.S.
If retroflexion only means place of articulation, then the Teonaht have a
sound for it. The tongue curls back and touches the palate. It's expressed
by the consonant double consonant "lr": "lre," finger, "lrapa," toe.
Frequently mispronounced as a cluster, especially by yours truly. This is
different from r', the retroflex tap, where you curl your tongue up into an
approximant palatal touch, and bring it forward against the place where
palate meets alveolar, often trilling it.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 7
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 17:38:39 -0500
From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"
----- Original Message -----
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I wrote:
>>
>>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."
>
> No, these ablaut changes must be much older. They also occur in German:
> "liegen" (from older "ligen") vs. "legen" and "sitzen" vs. "setzen", also
> e.g. "trinken" 'drink' vs. "tr�nken" (older "trenken") 'make drink'
> (cognate
> to "drench"), "sinken" 'sink (intr.)' vs. "senken" 'sink (tr.)', "h�ngen"
> (older "hangen") 'hang (intr.)' vs. "henken" 'hang (tr.)'.
You're probably right; but when did these distinctions enter the German
language? I'll trust your notion that they are entrenched in early Old
English rather than emerging in late Old English, especially since we have
these cognates, but I want to make sure that the distinction wasn't made in
say, the tenth-century somewhere on the continent and then spread all over.
But the umlauting speaks to a very early Germanic distinction, I'll admit,
as does the cognate structure. Will have to check the Old English
concordance and see if how early we find it in our extant literature.
Thanks,
Sally
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
