daedalus
Chen Ho An
How do you pronounce Daedalus? I thought it should be deedalus (as in
haemoglobin and aesthetic) but my friend insisted that it should be
daydalus. He knew some Latin and Greek (but not a lot), so he might be
right but I can't think of any word with ae in it that's pronounced ay.
Is he correct and why?
--
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|_______________________________________________________________________|
Mads Orbesen Troest
On Sat, 14 Mar 1998 18:04:41, ch...@bsm.bioc.ucl.ac.uk (Chen Ho An)
wrote:
> How do you pronounce Daedalus? I thought it should be deedalus
You're right, the /official/ pronounciation is ['di:d@l@s]
> haemoglobin and aesthetic) but my friend insisted that it should be
> daydalus. He knew some Latin and Greek (but not a lot), so he might be
> right but I can't think of any word with ae in it that's pronounced ay.
> Is he correct and why?
He is right in a way. This is because the "ae" sound (originally
written - like we still do in Danish - as an ae-ligature) is no longer
present in English. The original Latin pronounciation (as far as
scholars have deduced) is approximately the sound we Danes use as the
æ phoneme; this sound approximates the "ay" in English (it's not
quite the same, as it's not a diphtong).
So from a true-to-origins point of view, your friend is right - from
an official standard English point of view, you are. :-)
These were the incoherent ramblings of ...
... Mads Orbesen Troest <mot...@RemoveThis.sprog.auc.dk>
M. Ranjit Mathews
Polar wrote:
> >How do you pronounce Daedalus? I thought it should be deedalus (as in
I've always said dae d'l's where "ae" is pronounced like the first two
letters of "air".
and the apostrophes are neutral schwas (as opposed to open or closed ones)
This is not, however, an "authoritative" correction.
> I've always said "dead-a-lus", and would welcome *authoritative*
> corrections, if any.
That reminds me of a time when a hobbyist in San Diego, an intelligent but
impractical man who was good at building prototypes of mechanical
contrivances but very poor at turning them into market successes, showed me
a plane he was building. I wryly observed that he might have to call it the
"Icarus".
Stan Brown
In article <1998Mar14.1...@ucl.ac.uk>, ch...@bsm.bioc.ucl.ac.uk
(Chen Ho An) seems to have written:
>How do you pronounce Daedalus? I thought it should be deedalus (as in
>daydalus. He knew some Latin and Greek (but not a lot), so he might be
>right but I can't think of any word with ae in it that's pronounced ay.
In the U.S. the first syllable is pronounced with the same vowel as in
"bed" or "led" or "red".
As do most languages, English tends to "nativize" foreign names that are
in fairly common use, as "Daedalus" is. To pronounce them as in their
original languages smacks of pedantry.
--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
http://www.concentric.net/%7eBrownsta/
Please do not send me mail with a false return address.
Reinhold Aman
M. Ranjit Mathews wrote:
> I've always said dae d'l's where "ae" is pronounced like the first two
> letters of "air".
> and the apostrophes are neutral schwas (as opposed to open or closed ones)
> This is not, however, an "authoritative" correction.
There is only *one* schwa, no "neutral," "open" or "closed" ones.
--
Reinhold Aman
Editor, MALEDICTA
Santa Rosa, CA 95402-6123, USA
http://www.sonic.net/maledicta/
http://www.ucd.ie/~artspgs/mal/ (Ireland)
Charles A. Lee
On Sat, 14 Mar 1998 18:04:41 GMT, ch...@bsm.bioc.ucl.ac.uk (Chen Ho An)
wrote:
>How do you pronounce Daedalus? I thought it should be deedalus (as in
>haemoglobin and aesthetic) but my friend insisted that it should be
>daydalus. He knew some Latin and Greek (but not a lot), so he might be
>right but I can't think of any word with ae in it that's pronounced ay.
>
>
>Is he correct and why?
RHUD2 shows the first syllable pronounced with a short e as in dead.
It also shows a British pronunciation with the long e as in deed.
Charles A. Lee
http://www.concentric.net/~azcal
================================
= "Nobody goes there anymore; =
= it's too crowded. =
= - Yogi Berra =
================================
Susan Umpleby
Polar <s.m...@ix.netcom.com> wrote in article
<350ef381...@nntp.ix.netcom.com>...> >How do you pronounce Daedalus? <SNIP>
----------------------
> I've always said "dead-a-lus", and would welcome *authoritative*
> corrections, if any.
>
> Polar
--------------------------
I've always pronounced it that way too. I don't know that this group
would call it authoritative, but I got curious after reading your
post and checked it on a CD-Rom dictionary that "talks" and it
pronounced it "dead-a-lus" too.
BTW, I find it handy to have a talking dictionary to help with
pronunciation.
Lee Rudolph
Reinhold Aman <am...@sonic.net> writes:
> There is only *one* schwa, no "neutral," "open" or "closed" ones.
I have it on the authority of several linguists, at least one quite
eminent, that in at least some English accents (though not mine!)
there are indeed two distinct [1] schwas. Some evidence for that is
the hoax e-mail that circulates purporting to solicit charity for a
cancer-stricken little girl named "Jessica Mydek" Apparently in a
two-schwa accent, the vowels represented by the "e" and the "i" in
"Jessica" can both be reduced to schwas, differently pronounced, and
the whole name then becomes a poor rhyme (particularly poor in the
last syllable of the surname) for "just suck on my dick".
It's the "i"-schwa that I don't produce naturally and can barely
perceive, or produce unnaturally.
Lee Rudolph
[1] I'm not sure at what levels they are claimed to be distinct--
certainly phonological, but I'm hazy on phonetic and phonemic.
Maybe some native speaker of a two-schwa dialect (or else some
very model of a modern phonetician, with rich hoards of examples
and a gold-trimmed pot to piss in) will chime in.
Mads Orbesen Troest
> I've always said dae d'l's where "ae" is pronounced like the first two
> letters of "air".
That would be close to the original Latin sound, as far as Scholars
have deduced. This is also the sound I'd opt for (or rather, its close
Danish equivalent).
Cheryl L Perkins
Polar (s.m...@ix.netcom.com) wrote:
: On Sat, 14 Mar 1998 18:04:41 GMT, ch...@bsm.bioc.ucl.ac.uk (Chen Ho An)
: wrote:
: >How do you pronounce Daedalus? I thought it should be deedalus (as in
: >haemoglobin and aesthetic) but my friend insisted that it should be
: >daydalus. He knew some Latin and Greek (but not a lot), so he might be
: >right but I can't think of any word with ae in it that's pronounced ay.
: >
: >
: >Is he correct and why?
: I've always said "dead-a-lus", and would welcome *authoritative*
: corrections, if any.
: Polar
I've said 'DAY-de-lus', but have never studied Latin or Greek. Any experts
out there?
Cheryl
--
Cheryl Perkins
cper...@calvin.stemnet.nf.ca
M. Ranjit Mathews
Consider the word "lesser". "er" may be described as an "open schwa" in a
non-rhotic rendition of this word. As for a closed schwa, I don't know if
it's used in non-Sanskritic languages. If you know how to pronounce "rishi"
or "krishna" the same way a Sanskrit scholar does, the letter "i" after the
"r" is pronounced as a closed schwa and would be similar to the "i" schwa
described by Lee Randolph below. The neutral schwa would be pronounced like
the last "e" in "lessen".
If one were to name schwas after letters, I would call the closed schwa the
"i" schwa, the neutral schwa the "e" schwa and the open schwa the "a" schwa.
John Nurick
>That reminds me of a time when a hobbyist in San Diego, an intelligent but
>impractical man who was good at building prototypes of mechanical
>contrivances but very poor at turning them into market successes, showed me
>a plane he was building. I wryly observed that he might have to call it the
>"Icarus".
That reminds me of an early British airship called the "Mayfly".
John
To e-mail me, drop clanger from address.
Sean Holland
Polar <s.m...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> I've always said "dead-a-lus", and would welcome *authoritative*
> corrections, if any.
>
I've always said "dead-a-lus" too. I'm almost always right, so I'd say
there's a good chance that your pronunciation is correct.
--
Sean
To e-mail me, take out the garbage.
Reinhold Aman
M. Ranjit Mathews wrote:
> Consider the word "lesser". "er" may be described as an "open schwa" in a
> non-rhotic rendition of this word. As for a closed schwa, I don't know if
> it's used in non-Sanskritic languages. If you know how to pronounce "rishi"
> or "krishna" the same way a Sanskrit scholar does, the letter "i" after the
> "r" is pronounced as a closed schwa and would be similar to the "i" schwa
> described by Lee Randolph below. The neutral schwa would be pronounced like
> the last "e" in "lessen".
> If one were to name schwas after letters, I would call the closed schwa the
> "i" schwa, the neutral schwa the "e" schwa and the open schwa the "a" schwa.
Sorry, my friend, but you don't understand the principle of IPA (the
International Phonetic Alphabet): one specific written symbol for one
specific sound. Schwa is schwa (ASCII IPA = @, standard IPA =
upside-down lower-case "e"). If your "schwas galore" sound like an "i"
or "e" or "a," they are not true schwas but different sounds represented
by their own distinctive characters or symbols, one of which looks like
an "e" turned vertically 180 degrees and has a little wiggly tail on the
right, and another (non-rhotic) looks like an "a" turned upside down.
Please don't continue to argue this point. You simply don't know IPA
well enough. Use AltaVista or another search engine to find the
complete IPA chart, to get an idea what IPA is. We have several IPA
specialists in this group who either will back me up or correct me and
who could explain in greater detail that there are no such things as
"neutral," "open" and "closed" or "e," "i" and "a" schwas.
> Lee Rudolph wrote:
>
> > Reinhold Aman <am...@sonic.net> writes:
> >
> > > There is only *one* schwa, no "neutral," "open" or "closed" ones.
> >
> > I have it on the authority of several linguists, at least one quite
> > eminent, that in at least some English accents (though not mine!)
> > there are indeed two distinct [1] schwas. Some evidence for that is
> > the hoax e-mail that circulates purporting to solicit charity for a
> > cancer-stricken little girl named "Jessica Mydek" Apparently in a
> > two-schwa accent, the vowels represented by the "e" and the "i" in
> > "Jessica" can both be reduced to schwas, differently pronounced, and
> > the whole name then becomes a poor rhyme (particularly poor in the
> > last syllable of the surname) for "just suck on my dick".
> >
> > It's the "i"-schwa that I don't produce naturally and can barely
> > perceive, or produce unnaturally.
> >
> > Lee Rudolph
> >
> > [1] I'm not sure at what levels they are claimed to be distinct--
> > certainly phonological, but I'm hazy on phonetic and phonemic.
> > Maybe some native speaker of a two-schwa dialect (or else some
> > very model of a modern phonetician, with rich hoards of examples
> > and a gold-trimmed pot to piss in) will chime in.
Well, Lee, I just don't believe that there are, or can be, two
different schwas. If there is another sound that is *almost* like a
schwa, it's not a true schwa, and therefore a different name and symbol
are needed to represent the "near-schwa" schwa. Many linguists, eminent
or not (like scholars of literature, anthropology, etc.) have their pet
theories that they defend with their lives but which are ridiculed by
their colleagues.
This reminds me of 1967, when I studied linguistics at the University
of Texas with the most eminent Professor Edgar Polomé and listened to
his theories about three different kinds of Hittite laryngeals, and how
he ripped his almost-as-eminent colleages apart who disagreed with him.
I do agree with you that our top IPA experts and phoneticians should set
the record straight and either support me or correct me, if I'm wrong.
--
Reinhold Aman
M. Ranjit Mathews
Reinhold Aman wrote:
> Sorry, my friend, but you don't understand the principle of IPA (the
> International Phonetic Alphabet): one specific written symbol for one
> specific sound. Schwa is schwa (ASCII IPA = @, standard IPA =
> upside-down lower-case "e"). If your "schwas galore" sound like an "i"
> or "e" or "a," they are not true schwas but different sounds represented
> by their own distinctive characters or symbols, one of which looks like
> an "e" turned vertically 180 degrees and has a little wiggly tail on the
> right, and another (non-rhotic) looks like an "a" turned upside down.
>
> Please don't continue to argue this point. You simply don't know IPA
> well enough.
I know the IPA vowel quadrilateral well enough, but I'm not necessarily following
the IPA standard, which has only one schwa. I've seen the two schwas in German
distinguished by calling one of them an "open schwa", giving the "er" in "besser"
as an example of its usage. Following that convention, whether it be standard or
non-standard, I call the sound at the center of the triangle made by i, u and
schwa (on the IPA vowel quadrilateral) a "closed schwa". I don't concern myself
with the question of whether they are true or false schwas; only with the
question of whether there is a representation assigned for them on the IPA chart
and it so happens that there isn't. The closest sounds to the one I designated a
"closed schwa" are (on the IPA chart)
1) schwa
2) Y (capital y)
3) i- (i with a line through it)
4) u- (u with a line through it)
If you object to my calling it that in such an ad-hoc fashion, I would be most
obliged if you could suggest an alternative name for that sound.
M. Ranjit Mathews
Reinhold Aman wrote:
> M. Ranjit Mathews wrote:
>
> > Consider the word "lesser". "er" may be described as an "open schwa" in a
> > non-rhotic rendition of this word. As for a closed schwa, I don't know if
> > it's used in non-Sanskritic languages. If you know how to pronounce "rishi"
> > or "krishna" the same way a Sanskrit scholar does, the letter "i" after the
> > "r" is pronounced as a closed schwa and would be similar to the "i" schwa
> > described by Lee Randolph below. The neutral schwa would be pronounced like
> > the last "e" in "lessen".
>
> > If one were to name schwas after letters, I would call the closed schwa the
> > "i" schwa, the neutral schwa the "e" schwa and the open schwa the "a" schwa.
>
> Sorry, my friend, but you don't understand the principle of IPA (the
> International Phonetic Alphabet): one specific written symbol for one
> specific sound. Schwa is schwa (ASCII IPA = @, standard IPA =
> upside-down lower-case "e"). If your "schwas galore" sound like an "i"
> or "e" or "a," they are not true schwas but different sounds represented
> by their own distinctive characters or symbols, one of which looks like
> an "e" turned vertically 180 degrees and has a little wiggly tail on the
> right, and another (non-rhotic) looks like an "a" turned upside down.
There's one upside down "a" that represents the sound of "a" in "all". I don't
remember seeing another upside down "a" (in another typeface) that goes just
below a schwa (halfway to the bottom of the quadrilateral. This would be the
sound I've seen described as an "open" schwa. I do remember, however, seeing a
rounded schwa which looks like an epsilon facing backwards, represending the
sound of "er" in "berg".
M. Ranjit Mathews
M. Ranjit Mathews wrote:
> There's one upside down "a" that represents the sound of "a" in "all". I don't
> remember seeing another upside down "a" (in another typeface) that goes just
> below a schwa (halfway to the bottom of the quadrilateral. This would be the
> sound I've seen described as an "open" schwa. I do remember, however, seeing a
> rounded schwa which looks like an epsilon facing backwards, represending the
> sound of "er" in "berg".
Come to think of it, I was wrong about the upside down "a". I think it represents
the sound of "o" in "hot". The sound of "a" in "all" is represented by a backwards
"c". The British pronunciation of "all", that is. If I'm wrong, please point out my
errors. Alternatively, I'll re-study the IPA chart one of these days to verify my
assertions.
cheerio.
Peter T. Daniels
M. Ranjit Mathews wrote:
>
> Consider the word "lesser". "er" may be described as an "open schwa" in a
> non-rhotic rendition of this word. As for a closed schwa, I don't know if
> it's used in non-Sanskritic languages. If you know how to pronounce "rishi"
> or "krishna" the same way a Sanskrit scholar does, the letter "i" after the
> "r" is pronounced as a closed schwa and would be similar to the "i" schwa
> described by Lee Randolph below. The neutral schwa would be pronounced like
> the last "e" in "lessen".
>
> If one were to name schwas after letters, I would call the closed schwa the
> "i" schwa, the neutral schwa the "e" schwa and the open schwa the "a" schwa.
>
>
> > Reinhold Aman <am...@sonic.net> writes:
> >
> > > There is only *one* schwa, no "neutral," "open" or "closed" ones.
> >
> > I have it on the authority of several linguists, at least one quite
> > eminent, that in at least some English accents (though not mine!)
> > there are indeed two distinct [1] schwas. Some evidence for that is
> > the hoax e-mail that circulates purporting to solicit charity for a
> > cancer-stricken little girl named "Jessica Mydek" Apparently in a
> > two-schwa accent, the vowels represented by the "e" and the "i" in
> > "Jessica" can both be reduced to schwas, differently pronounced, and
> > the whole name then becomes a poor rhyme (particularly poor in the
> > last syllable of the surname) for "just suck on my dick".
> >
> > It's the "i"-schwa that I don't produce naturally and can barely
> > perceive, or produce unnaturally.
> >
> > Lee Rudolph
> >
> > [1] I'm not sure at what levels they are claimed to be distinct--
> > certainly phonological, but I'm hazy on phonetic and phonemic.
> > Maybe some native speaker of a two-schwa dialect (or else some
> > very model of a modern phonetician, with rich hoards of examples
> > and a gold-trimmed pot to piss in) will chime in.
This thread doesn't seem to have been on sci.lang before. I suspect what
you're talking about is what we call "barred i" (from its IPA symbol): a
high central vowel. Shwa proper [it's a Hebrew loanword, there's no good
reason to spell it with a <c> as if it were German] is a mid central
vowel; and the low central vowel is IPA upside down a, which is the
usual transcription for Portuguese /a/. I've never heard them called
"neutral," "open," and "closed"; maybe those terms reflect a literal
translation of the Sanskrit names for the sounds.
The standard American descriptivist phonemicization of English includes
9 simple vowel phonemes, but the shwa/barred-i contrast is marginal in
most English dialects. An example used often was two different
pronunciations of "just", the barred-i one used in the 'merely' word,
the shwa one in the 'fair' word. This contrast is not found in most
English dialects!
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@worldnet.att.net
P&DSchultz
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> ... Shwa proper [it's a Hebrew loanword, there's no good
> reason to spell it with a <c> as if it were German] ...
Maybe not a good reason, but the reason is that it we got it from
German. If you want to spell it more Hebrewly, then don't use a "w"
either, and spell it "shva".
//P. Schultz
M. Ranjit Mathews
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> This thread doesn't seem to have been on sci.lang before. I suspect what
> you're talking about is what we call "barred i" (from its IPA symbol): a
> high central vowel. Shwa proper [it's a Hebrew loanword, there's no good
> reason to spell it with a <c> as if it were German] is a mid central
> vowel; and the low central vowel is IPA upside down a, which is the
> usual transcription for Portuguese /a/. I've never heard them called
> "neutral," "open," and "closed"; maybe those terms reflect a literal
> translation of the Sanskrit names for the sounds.
I've seen a German low central called an open schwa with the "er" in "besser" as an
example of its usage. If it's allophonic with a Portugese low central, it can be
considered the same phoneme even if it's not phonetically identical. On the other
hand, German might have another "a" sound that's allophonic with the Portugese low
central "a" which might be why this particular paper chose to use the term "open
schwa" for a sound approximately halfway between a schwa and the bottom of the
quadrilateral.
Unfortunately, there's no IPA symbol allophonic with the "i" after "r" in "rishi" or
"krishna". This is why I referred to it as a "closed schwa". It is halfway between a
schwa and a barred "i". Because there's no symbol, it's often omitted entirely
(unfortunately) in transliterations from Sanskrit to a romanized phonemic alphabet.
For example "rig" as in "Rig Veda" is often transliterated "rg" with a dot below the
"r". If I were to choose a convention, I would represent it by a semivowel "Y" as "Y"
is reasonably close on the IPA chart and is not used for any other purpose (i.e.,
it's phonetic value is not used) in Sanskrit. It might confuse a lay Indian to have
both a consonant y and a semivowel y in romanized Indian languages, but then again,
such texts are read only by researchers, who shouldn't have much trouble sorting out
the two, especially if they are accustomed to the two "y" semivowels (upper and lower
case) of English rendered in IPA.
If the Indian government weren't such a bunch of nincompoops, India could have
unified all her alphabets in the Unicode standard, which would have been piece of
cake compared to the massive effort undertaken by the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans
to achieve the Han unification. With such a unification, you could write a letter in
the Indian script of your choice and the reader could read it in another Indian
script or a romanized script. So a Bengali who can speak but not write Bengali would
then be able to enter Bengali into a computer in Roman or Devanagari and the reader
could read it in Bengali.
M. Ranjit Mathews
Apologies, Comrade Rheinhold and other long suffering readers of this thread. I
should have consulted the IPA before rambling on.
The IPA does indeed have a turned "a" in a position close to if not identical to
the sound I've seen described as an open schwa. Perhaps the writer was using this
term as an alternate for "turned script a" or whatever this letter is called.
Likewise, the sound that I called a "closed schwa" is close to the one
represented by a laterally turned "e" in IPA.
I would, however, place the Sanskrit vowel in "rishi" halfway between the
laterally turned "e" and a barred "i" and I'd give it a front to back range
somewhere between a capital "Y" and a turned omega. Similarly, it's conceivable
that the folks who wrote the paper referring to an "open schwa" in German placed
it a little away from a Portugese turned "a".
In any case, given where I've placed the sound after consulting the IPA
quadrilateral, I was quite wrong in calling it a "closed schwa". Thanks for
pointing out my error; it's taken a while to sink in.
FYI, this Sanskrit character is sometimes rendered as a "u" because of the front
to back range that I mentioned above. For example, we have the word "amrit"
(elexir of life) and a commercial product (similar to "Tiger Balm" or "Vicks
Vaporub") spelt "Amrutanjan". Alternately, in these two words, the vowels
between the "r" and the "t" are identical but are spelt differently because
context sensitive phonological rules applied by Indians reading English require
different letters in the two contexts to get closest to the correct vowel.
Reinhold Aman wrote:
> M. Ranjit Mathews wrote:
>
> > Consider the word "lesser". "er" may be described as an "open schwa" in a
> > non-rhotic rendition of this word. As for a closed schwa, I don't know if
> > it's used in non-Sanskritic languages. If you know how to pronounce "rishi"
> > or "krishna" the same way a Sanskrit scholar does, the letter "i" after the
> > "r" is pronounced as a closed schwa and would be similar to the "i" schwa
> > described by Lee Randolph below. The neutral schwa would be pronounced like
> > the last "e" in "lessen".
>
> > If one were to name schwas after letters, I would call the closed schwa the
> > "i" schwa, the neutral schwa the "e" schwa and the open schwa the "a" schwa.
>
> Sorry, my friend, but you don't understand the principle of IPA (the
> International Phonetic Alphabet): one specific written symbol for one
> specific sound. Schwa is schwa (ASCII IPA = @, standard IPA =
> upside-down lower-case "e"). If your "schwas galore" sound like an "i"
> or "e" or "a," they are not true schwas but different sounds represented
> by their own distinctive characters or symbols, one of which looks like
> an "e" turned vertically 180 degrees and has a little wiggly tail on the
> right, and another (non-rhotic) looks like an "a" turned upside down.
>
> Please don't continue to argue this point. You simply don't know IPA
> well enough. Use AltaVista or another search engine to find the
> complete IPA chart, to get an idea what IPA is. We have several IPA
> specialists in this group who either will back me up or correct me and
> who could explain in greater detail that there are no such things as
> "neutral," "open" and "closed" or "e," "i" and "a" schwas.
>
> > Lee Rudolph wrote:
> >
> > > Reinhold Aman <am...@sonic.net> writes:
> > >
> > > > There is only *one* schwa, no "neutral," "open" or "closed" ones.
> > >
> > > I have it on the authority of several linguists, at least one quite
> > > eminent, that in at least some English accents (though not mine!)
> > > there are indeed two distinct [1] schwas. Some evidence for that is
> > > the hoax e-mail that circulates purporting to solicit charity for a
> > > cancer-stricken little girl named "Jessica Mydek" Apparently in a
> > > two-schwa accent, the vowels represented by the "e" and the "i" in
> > > "Jessica" can both be reduced to schwas, differently pronounced, and
> > > the whole name then becomes a poor rhyme (particularly poor in the
> > > last syllable of the surname) for "just suck on my dick".
> > >
> > > It's the "i"-schwa that I don't produce naturally and can barely
> > > perceive, or produce unnaturally.
> > >
> > > Lee Rudolph
> > >
> > > [1] I'm not sure at what levels they are claimed to be distinct--
> > > certainly phonological, but I'm hazy on phonetic and phonemic.
> > > Maybe some native speaker of a two-schwa dialect (or else some
> > > very model of a modern phonetician, with rich hoards of examples
> > > and a gold-trimmed pot to piss in) will chime in.
>
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
>I've seen a German low central called an open schwa with the "er" in "besser" as an
>example of its usage. If it's allophonic with a Portugese low central,
The term "allophones" is not normally used cross-linguistically: a
German phone cannot have a Portuguese allophone...
>Unfortunately, there's no IPA symbol allophonic with the "i" after "r" in "rishi" or
>"krishna". This is why I referred to it as a "closed schwa". It is halfway between a
>schwa and a barred "i". Because there's no symbol, it's often omitted entirely
>(unfortunately) in transliterations from Sanskrit to a romanized phonemic alphabet.
>For example "rig" as in "Rig Veda" is often transliterated "rg" with a dot below the
>"r".
The <r.> [r-dot below] and <r.:> [r-dot below-macron above] are
entirely accurate for the transcription of Vedic and Classical
Sanskrit where these sounds were pronounced as short and long syllabic
/r/ (cf. modern Czech and Serbo-Croat). It would be an extremely bad
idea to use two symbols ("rY"?) where the script uses only one (a
little single or double hook below). The way Sanskrit is pronounced
nowadays is hardly relevant.
As to IPA, it recognizes 5 different "schwa-like" symbols:
@ (turned e) for any old schwa
e" (reversed e) for an unrounded closed schwa (going on /e/)
E" (reversed epsilon) for an unrounded open schwa (going on /E/)
e* (closed reversed e) for a rounded closed schwa (going on /o/)
E* (closed reversed epsilon) for a rounded open schwa (going on /O/)
You can also use /a*/ (upside-down a) for a schwa going on /a/, /A*/
(upside down V) for a schwa going on back /A/, and /I/ (E. "pin") and
/U/ (E. "put") for sounds intermediate between /i/ and schwa and /u/
and schwa. Finally, /i-/ barred-i, can be used for the close-central
variety of schwa, although I would prefer barred-capital-i (not in
IPA), to distinguish it from the sound intermediate between /i/ and
/u/ of Russian <ty> /ti-/ "you", Turkish dotless-i, etc.
Going from the "cardinal" vowels to schwa in two steps:
[i- I- @ u- U- @]
i I @ u U @
e e" @ o e* @
E E" @ O E* @
a a* @ A A* @
==
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal ~ ~
Amsterdam _____________ ~ ~
m...@wxs.nl |_____________|||
========================== Ce .sig n'est pas une .cig
Peter T. Daniels
I like my Hebrew Classical rather than Modern; notwithstanding, the
spelling of the English word shwa follows the English pronunciation, and
<v> is never [w] or /w/ in English.
Peter T. Daniels
M. Ranjit Mathews wrote:
>
> If the Indian government weren't such a bunch of nincompoops, India could have
> unified all her alphabets in the Unicode standard, which would have been piece of
> cake compared to the massive effort undertaken by the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans
> to achieve the Han unification. With such a unification, you could write a letter in
> the Indian script of your choice and the reader could read it in another Indian
> script or a romanized script. So a Bengali who can speak but not write Bengali would
> then be able to enter Bengali into a computer in Roman or Devanagari and the reader
> could read it in Bengali.
>
This wouldn't actually work: the 10 Indic scripts [including Sinhala]
are not entirely interconvertible. Letters one would want to keep
together on paleographical grounds have come to be used for different
descendant sounds; and some scripts have added new letters for new
sounds in different ways (so that in both cases different letters in
various scripts would have to be assigned the "same" coding slot).
Conjuncts can be formed in systematically different ways between
scripts. (This became especially clear to me as I was creating the Oriya
font used in *The World's Writing Systems*; it was not possible to model
the character-position assignments on any of the 9 previously existing
Indic fonts, all of which already differed slightly from each other.)
Mike Barnes
In alt.usage.english, Stan Brown <brow...@concentric.net> spake
thuswise:
>In article <1998Mar14.1...@ucl.ac.uk>, ch...@bsm.bioc.ucl.ac.uk
>(Chen Ho An) seems to have written:
>>haemoglobin and aesthetic) but my friend insisted that it should be
>>daydalus. He knew some Latin and Greek (but not a lot), so he might be
>>right but I can't think of any word with ae in it that's pronounced ay.
>
>"bed" or "led" or "red".
>
>As do most languages, English tends to "nativize" foreign names that are
>in fairly common use, as "Daedalus" is. To pronounce them as in their
>original languages smacks of pedantry.
I pronounce it "DEEDalus", simply because until this thread I never knew
there was any other way to pronounce it. That's how everyone pronounces
it round here.
--
-- Mike Barnes, Stockport, England.
-- If you post a response to Usenet, please *don't* send me a copy by e-mail.
M. Ranjit Mathews
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Well, the Han unification gave the three languages a common core and allowed each of them
to have characters beyond that. So, a unified Indian alphabet might conceivably have
twice as many positions as any individual alphabet. The so-called "common core" of the
Han unification has characters that non only look different but also sound different in
Japanese, Korean and Chinese. Likewise, in a phonemic (rather than phonetic) Indian
alphabet, a given position can encode a given character even if that character is
pronounced slightly differently in different languages as you've indicated in "different
descendant sounds". We would, of course, have to establish an entirely new ordering of
letters so that we wouldn't have the problem you have highlighted of different letters
occupying the same coding slot. The number of conjuncts could conceivably be reduced
considerably using techniques of separating conjuncts like Malayalam typesetters did
earlier this century to make the script less of a typesetter's nightmare There is already
a word processor or font vendor that unifies Devanagari and Romanized Sanskrit in the
manner that I suggest; it's just not standardized. I forget the name of the vendor that
sells it; perhaps it's Gamma-Universe or some other vendor that specializes in Eastern
languages. The character encoding in their scheme allows you to view a document in either
Roman or Devanagari style - without converting the Sanskrit document to
ASCII/8859/Unicode.
Avi.Ja...@pbdir.com
[soc.culture.indian snipped from Group list]
In article <350C95...@sonic.net>,
am...@sonic.net wrote:
>
> M. Ranjit Mathews wrote:
[snip]
> > If one were to name schwas after letters, I would call the closed schwa the
> > "i" schwa, the neutral schwa the "e" schwa and the open schwa the "a" schwa.
>
> Sorry, my friend, but you don't understand the principle of IPA (the
> International Phonetic Alphabet): one specific written symbol for one
> specific sound. Schwa is schwa (ASCII IPA = @, standard IPA =
> upside-down lower-case "e"). If your "schwas galore" sound like an "i"
> or "e" or "a," they are not true schwas but different sounds represented
> by their own distinctive characters or symbols, one of which looks like
> an "e" turned vertically 180 degrees and has a little wiggly tail on the
> right, and another (non-rhotic) looks like an "a" turned upside down.
>
> Please don't continue to argue this point. You simply don't know IPA
> well enough. Use AltaVista or another search engine to find the
> complete IPA chart, to get an idea what IPA is. We have several IPA
> specialists in this group who either will back me up or correct me and
> who could explain in greater detail that there are no such things as
> "neutral," "open" and "closed" or "e," "i" and "a" schwas.
>
> > Lee Rudolph wrote:
[snip]
> > > I have it on the authority of several linguists, at least one quite
> > > eminent, that in at least some English accents (though not mine!)
> > > there are indeed two distinct [1] schwas.
[Delicious "Jessica Mydek" stuff, snipped. Does snipping Mydek qualify as a
bris?]
> This reminds me of 1967, when I studied linguistics at the University
> of Texas with the most eminent Professor Edgar Polomé and listened to
> his theories about three different kinds of Hittite laryngeals,
Well, as long as we're doing free-asociation "This Reminds Me", let me
indulge. This reminds me of the late-1950s Certs TV commercial: "Certs is a
breath mint!" "Certs is a candy mint!" "Stop! You're both right!"
Stop. You're both right -- or, to be precise, both equally guilty of
imprecision.
In discussing the principles of IPA, I shall limit myself in this posting to
a discussion of the vowels.
One must distinguish between the vowel symbols of IPA as used as "goalposts"
-- i.e., the so-called "Cardinal Vowels" -- and the same symbols as used in
the transcription of actual utterances. I will call these the "theoretical"
and "practical" functions, respectively.
THE THEORETICAL FUNCTION
In their "goalpost" function, the symbols used by the International Phonetic
Alphabet -- particularly vowel symbols -- are meant as abstractions, not as
depictions of actual sounds existing in an actual language. (There may be
some actual sounds in actual languages which APPROACH the cardinal values,
but this is pure happenstance.)
The cardinal vowel symbols are defined as points on a sort of symbolic map of
the vocal cavity, shaped like a trapezoid. The vertical dimension represents
the distinction between "higher" and "lower" vowels (otherwise known as
"closed" and "open" vowels respectively), realized respectively by raising or
lower the lower jaw and with it the tongue. The horizontal dimension
represents the distinction between "front" and "back" vowels, realized
respectively by pushing the tip of the tongue forward toward the teeth or
drawing the back of the tongue backwards toward the throat. There is a third
dimension, not usually modeled in a linear fashion (this would require a
three-dimensional model), which is lip-rounding. The fact that the standard
IPA convention places the symbols for "rounded" vowels NEXT TO their
"unrounded" counterparts, creates the mistaken impression that lip-rounding
is a binary value, rather than a continuum.
This map is used as a sort of coordinates grid onto which the actual sounds
of language can then be mapped.
In the sense of this "theoretical" or "goalpost" function of the cardinal
vowel symbols, Aman is absolutely correct. There is only one symbol for
schwa (I don't remember who in this thread pointed out the Hebrew origins of
the word schwa and suggested that the c is erroneous: it is not. The word
was first transcribed into Latin characters by German-speaking Hebrew
grammarians, which is how it got its traditional spelling in English. But I
digress.), and this unique symbol represents a single, unique, THEORETICAL
sound.
THE PRACTICAL FUNCTION
When the IPA symbols are used to transcribe actual language, two important
principles come into play:
- NARROW VS. BROAD TRANSCRIPTION. In actual speech, each of the
psychological units of sound in the language (known as phonemes) may be
realized by more than one physical (= phonetic) rendition, depending upon the
context in which the phoneme appears. The set of phonetic renditions which
can realize a single phoneme are that phoneme's ALLOPHONES. Each of these
allophones may also be performed differently by different speakers, or by the
same speaker within a single corpus of speech.
In transcribing speech, the phonetician must decide how "narrowly" he/she
wishes to transcribe. At the broad end of the broad/narrow spectrum is
so-called "phonemic transcription", in which the transcription symbolizes the
phonemes (the psychological units) which the speaker wished to realize. This
level of transcription is the least faithful to the "one sound, one symbol"
principle. At the narrow end of the spectrum is a phonetic transcription
which provides a separate symbol for each discrete physical sound in the
corpus. ("Physical sound" can denote either the choreography of the vocal
apparatus -- the "articulatory" approach to phonetics -- or the acoustic
analysis of the sonic frequencies produced -- the "acoustic" approach.)
- ALL REAL SPEECH SOUNDS ARE APPROXIMATIONS. Broad, quasi-phonemic
transcription is a relatively easy task, hindered only by theoretical
questions of what constitutes a phoneme. ABSOLUTELY narrow phonetic
transcription, on the other hand, is IMPOSSIBLE to achieve, since vowel
renditions are as unique as snowflakes: No two speakers have the same vocal
apparatus, and no two speakers will produce precisely the same timbre or
spectrogram when purportedly pronouncing the same vowel (in fact, neither
will a single speaker when repeating the "same sound"); thus, an infinite
number of symbols would be required to capture, say, all pronunciations of
the word "oh" EVEN BY SPEAKERS OF THE SAME DIALECT.
To overcome this obstacle in "narrow" transcription, phoneticians typically
adopt two approaches: (1) A textual explanation of how each symbol is used
within the corpus, and how it differs from the symbol's theoretical, cardinal
value. (This approach is adopted in the section of the gray IPA booklet
which presents transcriptions of the "The North Wind and the Sun" corpus in
dozens of languages.) (2) Various diacritical marks which indicate how the
sound produced differs from the cardinal value. (For example, a cardinal
vowel symbol may be accompanied by a "high", "low", "front", "back", "nasal",
"rounded", or "unvoiced" symbol. In very narrow transcriptions, many of
these diacritics may be superimposed, making the transcription extremely
difficult to read.)
Even using both of these devices, no phonetic transcription can be absolutely
narrow, since by definition the number of symbols in the written repertoire
will always be countable and finite, whereas the number of posible physical
renditions will be uncountable and infinite. It follows that in practical
transcription, a single symbol must be used to represent two or more
non-identical renditions.
Thus, in this "practical" use of the IPA symbols, Ranjit is absolutely
correct in saying that there can be "two schwas" in a given dialect of
English -- as right as he would be when we say there are "two Ls" in RP, or
"two Ts" in Standard American English. (Compare the first T in "night rate"
with the first T in "nitrate", or the T in "stop" with the T in "top".)
Stated precisely, Aman's premise ("there is only one cardinal schwa symbol
which represents a single, unique, abstract, THEORETICAL sound") and Ranjit's
("there may be more than one PHYSICAL sound -- from the articulatory or
acoustic standpoint -- which can correctly be represented by the schwa-symbol
in a practical transcription of speech") are compatible and there is no
contradiction between them.
[Posted and emailed to Ranjit, Aman, and Lee.]
--
Avi Jacobson, email: Avi.Ja...@pbdir.com | When an idea is
or: Av...@amdocs.com | wanting, a word
| can always be found
Opinions are those of the poster, =NOT= of | to take its place.
Amdocs, Inc. or Pacific Bell Directory. | -- Goethe
-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==-----
http://www.dejanews.com/ Now offering spam-free web-based newsreading
Avi.Ja...@pbdir.com
In article <6ej9h0$1...@bgtnsc02.worldnet.att.net>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> P&DSchultz wrote:
> >
> > Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> >
> > > ... Shwa proper [it's a Hebrew loanword, there's no good
> > > reason to spell it with a <c> as if it were German] ...
> >
> > Maybe not a good reason, but the reason is that it we got it from
> > German. If you want to spell it more Hebrewly, then don't use a "w"
> > either, and spell it "shva".
>
> I like my Hebrew Classical rather than Modern;
There is neither a "more Hebrew" nor a "less Hebrew" pronunciation of
Classical Hebrew -- just as there is neither a "more Latin" or "less Latin"
pronunciation of Classical Latin. There are "more historically authentic"
pronunciations of both, and (as my friend Miguel Carrasquer Vidal scathingly
proved to me several years ago), both Hebrew and Latin historically had [w]
rather than [v].
> notwithstanding, the
> spelling of the English word shwa follows the English pronunciation,
I'm afraid not. The word entered the English language through German, and I
have yet to find an English dictionary that lists <shwa>.
[posted and emailed to Peter]
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
[posted and e-mailed]
On Mon, 16 Mar 1998 14:54:11 -0600, Avi Jacobson wrote:
>There is neither a "more Hebrew" nor a "less Hebrew" pronunciation of
>Classical Hebrew -- just as there is neither a "more Latin" or "less Latin"
>pronunciation of Classical Latin. There are "more historically authentic"
>pronunciations of both, and (as my friend Miguel Carrasquer Vidal scathingly
>proved to me several years ago), both Hebrew and Latin historically had [w]
>rather than [v].
Not being a native speaker of English, I had to look up "scathingly"
just to make sure there wasn't a bit of semantic tension between that
word and the word "friend" [I'm still not sure]. In any case, as I
recall, the scathing came first (exacerbated by slow newsfeeds on
either side) and the friendship followed. What I don't recall is
whether my fulminations about [w] were simultaneous with your modem
getting hit by lightning, or prior to that event.
Amistosamente,
Peter T. Daniels
Avi.Ja...@pbdir.com wrote:
>
> Well, as long as we're doing free-asociation "This Reminds Me", let me
> indulge. This reminds me of the late-1950s Certs TV commercial: "Certs is a
> breath mint!" "Certs is a candy mint!" "Stop! You're both right!"
Less filling! Tastes great!
And, currently in New York State: Win for life! Tax-free millions!
>
> Stop. You're both right -- or, to be precise, both equally guilty of
> imprecision.
>
> In discussing the principles of IPA, I shall limit myself in this posting to
> a discussion of the vowels.
>
> One must distinguish between the vowel symbols of IPA as used as "goalposts"
> -- i.e., the so-called "Cardinal Vowels" -- and the same symbols as used in
> the transcription of actual utterances. I will call these the "theoretical"
> and "practical" functions, respectively.
Recall, though, that Cardinal Vowel Doctrine (I really want to say
Kardinalvokallehre!) isn't an official part of IPA: the numbers don't
occur in the IPA chart, for instance. Daniel Jones was intimately
involved in the IPA, but didn't get his scheme into the final product.
Peter T. Daniels
Avi.Ja...@pbdir.com wrote:
>
> > notwithstanding, the
> > spelling of the English word shwa follows the English pronunciation,
>
> I'm afraid not. The word entered the English language through German, and I
> have yet to find an English dictionary that lists <shwa>.
>
It's the spelling used in *The World's Writing Systems* (edited by me
and William Bright), and in the many, many other works edited by Bright,
such as the *International Encyclopedia of Linguistics*.
M. Ranjit Mathews
Avi.Ja...@pbdir.com wrote:
> will a single speaker when repeating the "same sound"); thus, an infinite
> number of symbols would be required to capture, say, all pronunciations of
> the word "oh" EVEN BY SPEAKERS OF THE SAME DIALECT.
There are theoretically an infinite number of vowels but in computational
psychoacoustics or speech recognition, the number is discrete. The numbers below
are educated guesses to some extent but are based on real data I've seen.
From a phsychoacoustic point of view, 32768 encodings are more than sufficient to
encode all vowels that can be distinguished from each other by most if not all
humans. This would be 32 cardinal points in each of the three dimensions of the
vowel prism. (A quadrilateral with a third dimension would, from a geometric point
of view, be called a prism).
Following a harmonic analysis approach, a fourier series of 32 frequencies spanning
about 2 1/2 octaves with a coefficient range of 256 (24 decibels) is sufficient to
encode speech in any accent imaginable.
Harlan Messinger
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Shwa proper [it's a Hebrew loanword, there's no good
>reason to spell it with a <c> as if it were German]
Color me curious that you've picked this one word to respell on the
grounds given. Did I miss something that led up to this? Or--it occurs
to me now--are you likening the introduction of "schwa" into English
to the transliteration into English of Yiddish words having /S/
(spelled by the letter shin)? Is it that, when it comes to Yiddish
transliteration, you are an ardent <sh>-ist and a vehement
<sch>-phobe, and are extending this philosophy to "schwa"?
Harlan Messinger
Are German-derived "schwa", a weak sound, and German "schwach", weak,
another one of those pairs like "day" and "dies" that show just how
easy it is by random chance to find similarities between Lower
Slobovian and East Freedonian?
Reinhold Aman
Mimi (The Obnoxious Bitch) Kahn wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Mar 1998 14:33:07 -0600, Avi.Ja...@pbdir.com wrote:
>
> >[Delicious "Jessica Mydek" stuff, snipped. Does snipping Mydek qualify as a
> >bris?]
>
> It depends on where you snip it. It could also be a Bobbitization.
>
> --
> Mimi
What a witless moron.
--
Reinhold Aman, Ph.D.
Editor, MALEDICTA
Greg Lee
In sci.lang M. Ranjit Mathews <ran...@austin.ibm.com> wrote:
...
: There are theoretically an infinite number of vowels but in computational
: psychoacoustics or speech recognition, the number is discrete. The numbers below
Phonologically, also, the number is arguably finite. Starting from the
SPE feature system, but using [coronal] for front vowels, the most
relevant features are: high, back, low, coronal, round, tense. That
distinguishes 64 vowels. Regarding each feature as an articulatory
gesture which is present or absent, and schwa as a neutral vowel which
is positive for none of these features, gives e.g.,
[i] high, coronal, tense
[u] high, back, round, tense
[a] low, tense
caret low, lax
bar-i high, tense
schwa -
"close schwa" high
"round schwa" round
Vowel reduction consists in removing all or most gestures. I read with
with interest Miguel Vidal's previous posting on the taxonomy of schwas,
but it seemed to me to confound reduction with laxing.
--
Greg Lee <l...@Hawaii.edu>
Peter T. Daniels
[soc.culture.indian removed]
Hunh?
I have little occasion to write Yinglish words, but I might spell <shmo>
but <schmuck>--because I know the latter as German. The dismissive /S/
prefix would probably be <sh>.
"Shwa" isn't German-derived, it's Hebrew (with cognates throughout West
Semitic at least). It's the name of the sign that indicates the vowel we
name with the same word; it probably connects with the Biblical Hebrew
word for 'emptiness' and such. (The vowel signs didn't exist when the
Bible was being composed, so there are of course no Biblical words for
them.) Buck connects "schwach" with "Skt svaj- 'embrace', fr. a root
meaning bend, pliant' or the like."
Harlan Messinger
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>Harlan Messinger wrote:
>>
>> Color me curious that you've picked this one word to respell on the
>> grounds given. Did I miss something that led up to this? Or--it occurs
>> to me now--are you likening the introduction of "schwa" into English
>> to the transliteration into English of Yiddish words having /S/
>> (spelled by the letter shin)? Is it that, when it comes to Yiddish
>> transliteration, you are an ardent <sh>-ist and a vehement
>> <sch>-phobe, and are extending this philosophy to "schwa"?
>
>Hunh?
If I missed the mark with my stab at your personal reason for
replacing <sch> with <sh>, then I'll just go back to the first part of
my message. Are there other words that have a standard spelling in
English that you choose to spell a different way because you don't
agree with the reason for the standard spelling?
>
>I have little occasion to write Yinglish words, but I might spell <shmo>
>but <schmuck>--because I know the latter as German. The dismissive /S/
>prefix would probably be <sh>.
Side note about "schmuck": "Philologos" in the Forward attributes
Yiddish shmuck to Polish "smok" = snake. What does anyone here think
of this?
>
>"Shwa" isn't German-derived, it's Hebrew (with cognates throughout West
>Semitic at least). It's the name of the sign that indicates the vowel we
>name with the same word; it probably connects with the Biblical Hebrew
>word for 'emptiness' and such. (The vowel signs didn't exist when the
>Bible was being composed, so there are of course no Biblical words for
>them.) Buck connects "schwach" with "Skt svaj- 'embrace', fr. a root
>meaning bend, pliant' or the like."
I was being rhetorical. I knew this was one of those pairs, and about
the origin of "schwa" in Hebrew "shva", though I didn't know the
origin of "schwach".
Aaron J. Dinkin
In article <6elt7i$j...@bgtnsc02.worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> [soc.culture.indian removed]
>
> Harlan Messinger wrote:
>
> > Are German-derived "schwa", a weak sound, and German "schwach", weak,
> > another one of those pairs like "day" and "dies" that show just how
> > easy it is by random chance to find similarities between Lower
> > Slobovian and East Freedonian?
>
> "Shwa" isn't German-derived, it's Hebrew (with cognates throughout West
> Semitic at least).
English borrowed "schwa" from German, which had already (sometime earlier)
borrowed it from Hebrew. German spelled it, according to standard German
spelling rules, to represent the Hebrew pronunciation of the word, /Sva/.
English borrowed the spelling <schwa> from German and applied English
pronunciation to it. Had English borrowed the term from Hebrew, it would
have been spelled "shva". Yes, "schwa" is German-derived; yes, it is also,
more importantly (though more distantly) Hebrew-derived; yes, the
similarity between "schwa" and "schwach" is coincidence.
-Aaron J. Dinkin
Dr. Whom
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
On 17 Mar 1998 13:07:09 GMT, Greg Lee <l...@Hawaii.edu> wrote:
>Phonologically, also, the number is arguably finite. Starting from the
>SPE feature system, but using [coronal] for front vowels, the most
>relevant features are: high, back, low, coronal, round, tense. That
>distinguishes 64 vowels.
But that is only because you (they) have "binarized" two essentially
continuous parameters: high and low and back and front. If you take a
two-bit sample, what you'll get will be 4 distinct values. That's a
property of the sampling method, not of the data.
> Regarding each feature as an articulatory
>gesture which is present or absent, and schwa as a neutral vowel which
>is positive for none of these features, gives e.g.,
> [i] high, coronal, tense
> [u] high, back, round, tense
> [a] low, tense
> caret low, lax
> bar-i high, tense
> schwa -
>"close schwa" high
>"round schwa" round
>
>Vowel reduction consists in removing all or most gestures. I read with
>with interest Miguel Vidal's previous posting on the taxonomy of schwas,
>but it seemed to me to confound reduction with laxing.
Hmm. There is a shady area in the inner reaches of the IPA
parallellogram where laxed vowels, centralized vowels and schwa's
fuse. I'm not sure if this is a geometrical (topological?) illusion.
I do tend to see laxing, diachronically, as a step towards schwadom
(and viceversa: schwa's can become full vowels again).
Your 64 vowels [What can you say about #33? That one really puzzles
me]:
Vowel 1: -
Vowel 2: high
Vowel 3: low
Vowel 4: high low
Vowel 5: front
Vowel 6: high front
Vowel 7: low front
Vowel 8: high low front
Vowel 9: back
Vowel 10: high back
Vowel 11: low back
Vowel 12: high low back
Vowel 13: front back
Vowel 14: high front back
Vowel 15: low front back
Vowel 16: high low front back
Vowel 17: round
Vowel 18: high round
Vowel 19: low round
Vowel 20: high low round
Vowel 21: front round
Vowel 22: high front round
Vowel 23: low front round
Vowel 24: high low front round
Vowel 25: back round
Vowel 26: high back round
Vowel 27: low back round
Vowel 28: high low back round
Vowel 29: front back round
Vowel 30: high front back round
Vowel 31: low front back round
Vowel 32: high low front back round
Vowel 33: tense
Vowel 34: high tense
Vowel 35: low tense
Vowel 36: high low tense
Vowel 37: front tense
Vowel 38: high front tense
Vowel 39: low front tense
Vowel 40: high low front tense
Vowel 41: back tense
Vowel 42: high back tense
Vowel 43: low back tense
Vowel 44: high low back tense
Vowel 45: front back tense
Vowel 46: high front back tense
Vowel 47: low front back tense
Vowel 48: high low front back tense
Vowel 49: round tense
Vowel 50: high round tense
Vowel 51: low round tense
Vowel 52: high low round tense
Vowel 53: front round tense
Vowel 54: high front round tense
Vowel 55: low front round tense
Vowel 56: high low front round tense
Vowel 57: back round tense
Vowel 58: high back round tense
Vowel 59: low back round tense
Vowel 60: high low back round tense
Vowel 61: front back round tense
Vowel 62: high front back round tense
Vowel 63: low front back round tense
Vowel 64: high low front back round tense
Neil Coffey
In article <6elsht$5...@news.Hawaii.Edu>, Greg Lee
<URL:mailto:l...@Hawaii.edu> wrote:
> relevant features are: high, back, low, coronal, round, tense. That
> distinguishes 64 vowels.
What's a [+high +low] vowel, then?
Neil
Greg Lee
In sci.lang Neil Coffey <neil....@st-annes.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
: In article <6elsht$5...@news.Hawaii.Edu>, Greg Lee
: <URL:mailto:l...@Hawaii.edu> wrote:
I don't know. This is a well-known problem of the SPE system. The
only idea I've had about it is that one might associate [+high]
with raising the tongue body (as in SPE) and [+low] with lowering
the jaw. Doing both ought to give something that is positionally
mid, but involving more tension than [-high,-low], since contrary
gestures are involved.
--
Greg Lee <l...@Hawaii.edu>
Greg Lee
In sci.lang Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <m...@wxs.nl> wrote:
: On 17 Mar 1998 13:07:09 GMT, Greg Lee <l...@Hawaii.edu> wrote:
: >Phonologically, also, the number is arguably finite. Starting from the
: >SPE feature system, but using [coronal] for front vowels, the most
: >relevant features are: high, back, low, coronal, round, tense. That
: >distinguishes 64 vowels.
: But that is only because you (they) have "binarized" two essentially
: continuous parameters: high and low and back and front.
...
Well, that is one of the topics of discussion, isn't it? Whether
the parameters are continuous. I say they're not. You might
be right, but I don't want us to *presuppose* that you're right.
...
: Your 64 vowels [What can you say about #33? That one really puzzles
: me]:
#33 = #1. My definition of tense/lax is that lax segments have
whatever gestures are proper to them to a lesser degree than
tense segments have. Schwa has no gestures (other than those that
make it an ordinary voiced vowel), so there is nothing there that
one could distinguish a greater or lesser degree of.
: Vowel 1: -
...
: Vowel 33: tense
--
Greg Lee <l...@Hawaii.edu>
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
That's what I thought.
If we get rid of the other redundancies (+hi+lo, +front+back), we're
left with a system of 36+1 vowels, a bit oversized in the low
department, like all square vowel arrangements.
One thing that I like about the SPE scheme is the way /e/ ~ /E/ is
interpreted as a tense ~ lax opposition. If we consider length to be
a feature akin/identical to tenseness, then we see indeed a universal
tendency for /e:/ > /e/ and /e/ > /E/ (although I've seen
counterexamples, e.g. Old Slavic <e^>). In the Romance languages,
this is certainly what happened with Latin long e: (> close /e/) and
short e (> open /E/).
However, in (Eastern Peninsular) Catalan, we see a strange reversal of
this pattern: Latin long e: and short i > /E/, while Latin short e >
/e/. What happened? Well, in Mallorcan we have e: > /@/ and e >
/e/~/E/. The likely development was (/E./ for the sound intermediate
between /e/ and /E/, /e"/ and /E"/ for hi-front schwa and lo-front
schwa):
Latin Proto-Rom P-ECat Mall Penin
e: e (I?) I > e" > @ > E" > E
e E E. E. e
We can also compare English non-rhotic "fir"/"fur", alternatively
notated as /@:/ [long schwa] or /E"/ [lax /E/ ~ tense /@/ (number 33?)
~ low front unrounded schwa...]
P&DSchultz
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> ... "Shwa" isn't German-derived, it's Hebrew ...
It's Hebrew, but according to the American Heritage Dictionary 3d ed.
the word came into English from German, hence the sch- spelling.
Also, there are two kinds of schwas in Hebrew, only one of which
is pronounced like our schwa. The other one makes no sound at all.
Also, the the vowel following the -sh- consonant in the Hebrew word
is the very kind of schwa that makes a sound like our schwa, so if
we're going to base the English spelling on the Hebrew word, it
should be "sheva" or "shewa" with the stress on the final syllable.
//P. Schultz
Reinhold Aman
Harlan Messinger wrote:
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> >Harlan Messinger wrote:
> >> Color me curious that you've picked this one word to respell on the
> >> grounds given. Did I miss something that led up to this? Or--it occurs
> >> to me now--are you likening the introduction of "schwa" into English
> >> to the transliteration into English of Yiddish words having /S/
> >> (spelled by the letter shin)? Is it that, when it comes to Yiddish
> >> transliteration, you are an ardent <sh>-ist and a vehement
> >> <sch>-phobe, and are extending this philosophy to "schwa"?
American dictionaries show the "sch-" and/or "sh-" spelling of Yiddish
(Yinglish) words such as schmuck, shlep, schmo, shnook, schmooze,
shlock, Clinton -- Shminton. Among the scholars who argue for the "sh-"
spelling are those who say that this spelling looks more natural to
speakers of English and that "sch-" looks "too German." I have heard
this argument from American-Jewish scholars whose intense dislike or
hatred of *anything German* includes the letter combination "sch-" in
Yiddish words.
> If I missed the mark with my stab at your personal reason for
> replacing <sch> with <sh>, then I'll just go back to the first part of
> my message. Are there other words that have a standard spelling in
> English that you choose to spell a different way because you don't
> agree with the reason for the standard spelling?
> >I have little occasion to write Yinglish words, but I might spell <shmo>
> >but <schmuck>--because I know the latter as German. The dismissive /S/
> >prefix would probably be <sh>.
> Side note about "schmuck": "Philologos" in the Forward attributes
> Yiddish shmuck to Polish "smok" = snake. What does anyone here think
> of this?
Years before "Philologos" published his column, I had argued for a
Slavic source (*smok) for "schmuck," especially for reasons of semantics
(snake=penis=fool) and to counter Leo Rosten's popularized nonsense that
Yiddish "shmok" (U.S. "schmuck") is from German "Schmuck" meaning
'jewelry, jewels.' (Please don't bother mentioning the slangy "family
jewels" in support of Rosten.) Prof. Gerald Cohen has published several
articles and notes on the etymology of "schmuck" in his quartely
"Comments on Etymology."
--
Reinhold Aman
Editor, MALEDICTA
Santa Rosa, CA 95402-6123, USA
http://www.sonic.net/maledicta/
http://www.ucd.ie/~artspgs/mal/ [mirror site in Ireland]
Peter T. Daniels
Harlan Messinger wrote:
>
> If I missed the mark with my stab at your personal reason for
> replacing <sch> with <sh>, then I'll just go back to the first part of
> my message. Are there other words that have a standard spelling in
> English that you choose to spell a different way because you don't
> agree with the reason for the standard spelling?
archeology
Achemenid
However, I consider the authority of the editor of *Language* for 22
years counts for a great deal in the spelling of linguistic terms.
Greg Lee
: left with a system of 36+1 vowels,
Wait. We can't do that. The features are supposed to represent
independently controllable aspects of articulation. If some
combination of feature specifications is uninterpretable, we
just have to redesign.
+front+back is really +coronal+back (according to me, anyway).
Coronal refers to a thrusting of the front, apex and blade, of the
tongue upwards and forwards. It's quite possible to do that while
backing the tongue body. As an example, consider "peel" with the
"l" uvularized (-high+back-low) and vocalized, where the coronal
articulation of the [i] continues through the "l".
By the way, Chomsky & Halle shouldn't be blamed for all this. I'm
interpreting... They do not say, e.g., that the features are
phonetically binary.
I don't know enough about vowel systems to make any sensible comment
about the vowel shifts you mention. I don't want to be taken, though,
as proposing a markedness theory in which a given feature always
tends to be lost or gained, regardless of circumstances.
--
Greg Lee <l...@Hawaii.edu>
Keith C. Ivey
>>>How do you pronounce Daedalus? I thought it should be deedalus (as in
>>>haemoglobin and aesthetic) but my friend insisted that it should be
>>>daydalus. He knew some Latin and Greek (but not a lot), so he might be
>>>right but I can't think of any word with ae in it that's pronounced ay.
>>
>>In the U.S. the first syllable is pronounced with the same vowel as in
>>"bed" or "led" or "red".
>>
>>As do most languages, English tends to "nativize" foreign names that are
>>in fairly common use, as "Daedalus" is. To pronounce them as in their
>>original languages smacks of pedantry.
To pronounce "Daedalus" in its original language would require
something more like "died" (/daId/) rather than either "deed" (/did/)
or "dead" (/dEd/) for the first syllable. I wouldn't recommend it.
>I pronounce it "DEEDalus", simply because until this thread I never knew
>there was any other way to pronounce it. That's how everyone pronounces
>it round here.
Over here we generally use /E/ in "Daedalus" as well as in "aesthetic"
(which we often write "esthetic") and "anesthetist" (which I believe
you pronounce with /i/). "Hemoglobin" is /'him@,gloUbIn/ (HEE-muh-
GLO-bin), though.
Keith C. Ivey <kci...@cpcug.org>
http://cpcug.org/user/kcivey/
Washington, DC
Skitt
Keith C. Ivey wrote in message
<3511e07e...@newsreader.digex.net>...
>To pronounce "Daedalus" in its original language would require
>something more like "died" (/daId/) rather than either "deed" (/did/)
>or "dead" (/dEd/) for the first syllable. I wouldn't recommend it.
Having studied the Latin language as part of the mandatory curriculum
in the Latvian (no, not Latin) high school, I tend to pronounce Latin
words the original way. As for that being not the recommended way, I
can say that I get a lot of strange looks from my buddies, as most of
them use the Americanized or very localized pronunciations. If one
does not want to be "different", one must conform to the local ways,
doesn't one?