when did European languages acquire the "sh" sound?

[anal...@hotmail.com]

From what I can tell, neither Ancient Greek nor Latin had it.

[Bohgosity BumaskiL]

On 2012-01-24 7:44 PM, anal...@hotmail.com wrote:
> From what I can tell, neither Ancient Greek nor Latin had it.

In other words, haz neither a spelling for it?

French of course, uses "ch" to spell that sound, while Welsh and
Jerman often use the same letters to speL a whispered glottal hiss,
while English, mongrel that it iz, uses both French and Jerman
spellingz for a whispered palatal hiss -- even going so far az
making the "ch" in "Pachelbel" into a glottal stop (while the French
insist that it's a "sh"). I figure both of them are wrong, and
Jermans would naturally be right: It's a whispered glottal hiss.

I can't answer your question. I'm just mulling it over, suspecting
that this sound might still not be part of Italian. Italian contains
a whispered palatal stop, often spelt with a lone C. I do not know
Italian well enough to say that it does not also contain a similar hiss.

[Ruud Harmsen]

"anal...@hotmail.com" <anal...@hotmail.com> schreef/wrote:

>From what I can tell, neither Ancient Greek nor Latin had it.

Depends on the language.

Germanic languages (English and German; not Dutch):
[sk] > [sX] > [S]

Romance (French, Portuguese, not Spanish)
[ki] > [tSi] > [Si]
([i] could also be [e] or [E]. In French also [a], cf. Charles with
Carlos.)

--
Ruud Harmsen,
http://rudhar.com/new

[Ruud Harmsen]

Bohgosity BumaskiL <brew...@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca> schreef/wrote:

>I can't answer your question. I'm just mulling it over, suspecting
>that this sound might still not be part of Italian. Italian contains
>a whispered palatal stop, often spelt with a lone C. I do not know
>Italian well enough to say that it does not also contain a similar hiss.

Italian <sci> = [Si], <scia> = [Sa], etc.
In many dialects, <ci> is [Si], not [tSi] as in standard Italian.

[António Marques]

Ruud Harmsen wrote (25-01-2012 11:35):
> "anal...@hotmail.com"<anal...@hotmail.com> schreef/wrote:
>
>> From what I can tell, neither Ancient Greek nor Latin had it.
>
> Depends on the language.
>
> Germanic languages (English and German; not Dutch):
> [sk]> [sX]> [S]

Dutch is at the [sX] stage, or not?

> Romance (French, Portuguese, not Spanish)
> [ki]> [tSi]> [Si]

No, not really. That one ended up as [si/e] in fr and pt.

Pt and fr <ch> have a number of origins and pretty much only agree where one
language borrowed from the other, not in native words. And of course it was
/tS/ in earlier stages of both languages; but besides it, pt has a native
<x> that was always /S/ (and is usually or always from earlier /sj/; though
there's also secondary /si/ in portuguese).

> ([i] could also be [e] or [E]. In French also [a], cf. Charles with
> Carlos.)

In fr (except NW) and northern occitan, ka > tSa, and in fr tS > S and a in
open syllables then turned into e, so cap(ut) >>> chef.

[Christian Weisgerber]

anal...@hotmail.com <anal...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> From what I can tell, neither Ancient Greek nor Latin had it.

Indeed. Those modern European languages that have /S/ have developed
it independently several times.

Off the top of my head and far from complete:

* Old English shifted *sk > S, spelled <sh>. This must have happened
early, because borrowings from Old Norse retain sk.
In addition, Modern English has haphazardly created S from si, sj.
* German independently shifted *sk > sx > S, spelled <sch>. German
has also shifted s > S before l, m, n, v <w> and partially before
p, t.

* Italian has S <sc> before e and i. I don't know the history.
* Early Old French uniquely shifted ka > tSa. Sometime around 1300
tS was deaffricatized, yielding modern S <ch>.
* Old Spanish had developed S <x>, which was later lost again.

* Irish consonants come in palatalized ("slender") and unpalatalized/
velarized ("broad") pairs. S is the palatalized counterpart to s.

* Common Slavic shifted *x to S before front vowels. The *x had
originally developped from PIE *s according to the ruki law.
There are more sources of S, the Slavic palatalizations are
complex.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de

[Christian Weisgerber]

Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.com> wrote:

> Germanic languages (English and German; not Dutch):
> [sk] > [sX] > [S]

Dutch only got as far as [sX], which indicates that at least the
final shift to [S] happened independently in English in German.
Dutch [S] is from loans and sj. North Germanic has retained [sk]
and most North Germanic languages don't have [S] unless you count
curly c. Gothic didn't have [S] as far as we know.

> Romance (French, Portuguese, not Spanish)
> [ki] > [tSi] > [Si]
> ([i] could also be [e] or [E]. In French also [a], cf. Charles with
> Carlos.)

No, no, no. This is more complicated. You have [k] > [ts] > [s]
before e and i throughout Gallo-Ibero-Romance.

Old French [ka] > [tSa] is a separate and unique shift. Apart from
loans and onomatopoeia, French [S] appears exclusively before
historic a. This isn't always obvious from the modern orthography
because the spelling can be unetymological (chômer) or the vowel
has shifted (chemin) or disappeared altogether (chute).

Old Spanish/Portuguese had a complicated system of sibilants:
* /ts/ <c>, <ç>
* /dz/ <z>
* /s/ <s>, <ss>
* /z/ <s>
* /S/ <x>
* /Z/ <j>, <g>
* /tS/ <ch>
I don't know how this developed, but it should be obvious that the
details must be somewhat complex.

[Christian Weisgerber]

Going off on a tangent here...

What's a "sh sound" in the first place?

I'm getting the impression that people aren't too fussy about the
sounds they subsume under /S/ as long as there's no contrast. Is
English /S/ even [S]? It seems substantially labialized to me.
Descriptions of Russian waver between [S] and retroflex s.

Is [S;] (curly c) a "sh sound"?

I recently noticed that when a French speaker pronounces a German
word with /S/, it actually sounds like /C/ to me.

It doesn't help that I'm natively confused about /S/ and /C/, because
I'm from a region of Germany where they are merged. The result is
perceived as /S/, but I don't know what it is phonetically.
I remember somebody using the realization of /S/ by a well-known
politician from my hometown as an example of how to pronounce Polish
/S;/.

[Ruud Harmsen]

António Marques <anton...@sapo.pt> schreef/wrote:

>> Germanic languages (English and German; not Dutch):
>> [sk]> [sX]> [S]
>
>Dutch is at the [sX] stage, or not?

Yes, [sX] in the north and [sx] in the south.

>> Romance (French, Portuguese, not Spanish)
>> [ki]> [tSi]> [Si]
>
>No, not really. That one ended up as [si/e] in fr and pt.

Yes, of course.

[yangg]

On Jan 25, 3:44 am, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

> From what I can tell, neither Ancient Greek nor Latin had it.

***

And you think that was a kind of superiority to "acquire" that sound?

Languages can just have it and lose it afterwards.

What is your point?

What is lurking in your sick OIT mind?

A.

[António Marques]

Christian Weisgerber wrote (25-01-2012 16:07):
> Ruud Harmsen<r...@rudhar.com> wrote:
>
>> Germanic languages (English and German; not Dutch):
>> [sk]> [sX]> [S]
>
> Dutch only got as far as [sX], which indicates that at least the
> final shift to [S] happened independently in English in German.
> Dutch [S] is from loans and sj. North Germanic has retained [sk]
> and most North Germanic languages don't have [S] unless you count
> curly c. Gothic didn't have [S] as far as we know.
>
>> Romance (French, Portuguese, not Spanish)
>> [ki]> [tSi]> [Si]
>> ([i] could also be [e] or [E]. In French also [a], cf. Charles with
>> Carlos.)
>
> No, no, no. This is more complicated. You have [k]> [ts]> [s]
> before e and i throughout Gallo-Ibero-Romance.
>
> Old French [ka]> [tSa] is a separate and unique shift. Apart from
> loans and onomatopoeia, French [S] appears exclusively before
> historic a. This isn't always obvious from the modern orthography
> because the spelling can be unetymological (chômer) or the vowel
> has shifted (chemin) or disappeared altogether (chute).

(from caduta)

> Old Spanish/Portuguese had a complicated system of sibilants:
> * /ts/<c>,<ç>
> * /dz/<z>
> * /s/<s>,<ss>
> * /z/<s>

-s-, between vowels, or between a vowel and a voiced consant.

> * /S/<x>
> * /Z/<j>,<g>

There is evidence that at least one of those was /dZ/ - it was used to
represent /tS/ in some documents from before we got <ch>. But I don't
remember which. It's unknown whether the other was /dZ/ as well or mere /Z/.

> * /tS/<ch>
> I don't know how this developed, but it should be obvious that the
> details must be somewhat complex.

All etymological, with some c/ç < ti/e and z from some ce/i. <x> < /sj/,
almost always latin -ssi-, either original or from metathesis.

Then in pt the affricates ceased being so, whereas in sp and galician the
affricates became interdentals (except for the dialects where they just
deaffricated) and the voiced became unvoiced. Some dialects of galician have
gone as far as having /s/ for all the old 7/8 phonemes.

[António Marques]

Christian Weisgerber wrote (25-01-2012 16:41):
> Going off on a tangent here...
>
> What's a "sh sound" in the first place?
>
> I'm getting the impression that people aren't too fussy about the
> sounds they subsume under /S/ as long as there's no contrast. Is
> English /S/ even [S]? It seems substantially labialized to me.
> Descriptions of Russian waver between [S] and retroflex s.
>
> Is [S;] (curly c) a "sh sound"?

(It seems 'curly c' is a term for 'vulva' (I'm certainly fond of vulva, the
thing and the word).)

This has bothered me as well. Portuguese <s/z> palatalise when not before
vowels, and the layman is inclined to think they become a 'sh'. But it is a
fact that they don't sound exactly the same as the regular 'sh'. With the
help of Nathan, I've recently become convinced s/z become curly-tail-c and
curly-tail-j. You can often tell foreigners by the way they pronounce those
s/z as normal S/Z - Lijboa, Ságr'che, etc. There is no native speaker doing
that. Otoh, there are some native speakers who do pronounce ch/x similarly
to the palatalised s/z - the former lead singer of Madredeus is one iirc. I
quite dislike it.

Supporting the view that palatalised s/z are not S/Z is the fact that most
portuguese speakers can easily imitate brazilian with [s/z] for all <s/z> -
in fact, it's the Rio dialect which has a palatalisation of s/z (that is
supposedly the same as in Portugal) that is difficult to get right.

> I recently noticed that when a French speaker pronounces a German
> word with /S/, it actually sounds like /C/ to me.
>
> It doesn't help that I'm natively confused about /S/ and /C/, because
> I'm from a region of Germany where they are merged. The result is
> perceived as /S/, but I don't know what it is phonetically.
> I remember somebody using the realization of /S/ by a well-known
> politician from my hometown as an example of how to pronounce Polish
> /S;/.

I can pronounce [S], [C] and [curly-tail-s] and I can tell the 3 apart
easily (though only /S/ is a phoneme in pt, /C/ doesn't exist at all and
curly-tail-s is an allophone of /s/ if the analysis is correct). But I
haven't formed an opinion on french and german regional pronunciations of /S/.

[António Marques]

Ruud Harmsen wrote (26-01-2012 08:25):
> António Marques<anton...@sapo.pt> schreef/wrote:
>
>>> Germanic languages (English and German; not Dutch):
>>> [sk]> [sX]> [S]
>>
>> Dutch is at the [sX] stage, or not?
>
> Yes, [sX] in the north and [sx] in the south.

Like I could tell the difference!

[anal...@hotmail.com]

On Jan 25, 2:39 am, Bohgosity BumaskiL
<brewh...@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca> wrote:

> On 2012-01-24 7:44 PM, analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> > From what I can tell, neither Ancient Greek nor Latin had it.
>
> In other words, haz neither a spelling for it?
>
> French of course, uses "ch" to spell that sound, while Welsh and
> Jerman often use the same letters to speL a whispered glottal hiss,
> while English, mongrel that it iz, uses both French and Jerman
> spellingz for a whispered palatal hiss -- even going so far az
> making the "ch" in "Pachelbel" into a glottal stop (while the French
> insist that it's a "sh"). I figure both of them are wrong, and
> Jermans would naturally be right: It's a whispered glottal hiss.
>

Wiki gives

Johann Pachelbel ( /ˈjoʊhɑːn ˈpækəlbɛl/ or /ˈpɑːkəlbɛl/;[1] German:
[ˈjoːhan ˈpaxɛlbəl][2][3] or [ˈpaxəlbɛl], or [paˈxɛlbəl];[citation
needed]

the x <> k variation is interesting. I understand why it would be
'sh' for the French - but do we know who used/uses 'x' versus 'k'?

And also - isn't it true that Germans confuse soft [ch] and [j] ?

[Ruud Harmsen]

António Marques <anton...@sapo.pt> schreef/wrote:

Very clear difference. Exercise: which one is this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvgVM2cjXQ

[Ruud Harmsen]

António Marques <anton...@sapo.pt> schreef/wrote:

>This has bothered me as well. Portuguese <s/z> palatalise when not before
>vowels, and the layman is inclined to think they become a 'sh'. But it is a
>fact that they don't sound exactly the same as the regular 'sh'. With the
>help of Nathan, I've recently become convinced s/z become curly-tail-c and
>curly-tail-j. You can often tell foreigners by the way they pronounce those
>s/z as normal S/Z - Lijboa, Ságr'che, etc. There is no native speaker doing
>that. Otoh, there are some native speakers who do pronounce ch/x similarly
>to the palatalised s/z - the former lead singer of Madredeus is one iirc. I
>quite dislike it.

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_Salgueiro

And Ana Moura.

[The General of the Faceless Anti-Franz Shadow Army]

On 26 Jan, 17:14, yangg <fournet.arn...@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> On Jan 25, 3:44 am, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > From what I can tell, neither Ancient Greek nor Latin had it.
>
> ***
>
> And you think that was a kind of superiority to "acquire" that sound?
>
> Languages can just have it and lose it afterwards.
>
> What is your point?

Its point is, I think. that we are inferior beings and we should bow
to those supermen from Bhored, I mean Bharat.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jan 27, 7:23 am, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

> Wiki gives
>
> Johann Pachelbel ( /ˈjoʊhɑːn ˈpækəlbɛl/ or /ˈpɑːkəlbɛl/;[1] German:
> [ˈjoːhan ˈpaxɛlbəl][2][3] or [ˈpaxəlbɛl], or [paˈxɛlbəl];[citation
> needed]

English has no [x], so Ger. /x/ is rendered as /k/ in English.

> the x <> k variation is interesting.  I understand why it would be
> 'sh' for the French - but do we know who used/uses 'x' versus 'k'?

There is no "variation."

[The General of the Faceless Anti-Franz Shadow Army]

On 25 Jan, 04:44, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

> From what I can tell, neither Ancient Greek nor Latin had it.

And obviously, those were the only languages spoken in ancient Europe?

[Trond Engen]

Christian Weisgerber:

> anal...@hotmail.com<anal...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> From what I can tell, neither Ancient Greek nor Latin had it.
>
> Indeed. Those modern European languages that have /S/ have developed
> it independently several times.
>
> Off the top of my head and far from complete:
>
> * Old English shifted *sk> S, spelled<sh>. This must have happened
> early, because borrowings from Old Norse retain sk.
> In addition, Modern English has haphazardly created S from si, sj.

Which also means that the Scandinavian

S < sk before front vowels or j

is a separate development from the English.

There's also

S < sj

separate from the other because they were pronounced differently
([sC]/[S]) in some dialects until recently. As we speak, Norwegian is
developing a third /S/:

C < k before front vowels or j
+ < tj

now becoming /S/.

> * German independently shifted *sk> sx> S, spelled<sch>. German
> has also shifted s> S before l, m, n, v<w> and partially before
> p, t.
>
> * Italian has S<sc> before e and i. I don't know the history.
> * Early Old French uniquely shifted ka> tSa. Sometime around 1300
> tS was deaffricatized, yielding modern S<ch>.
> * Old Spanish had developed S<x>, which was later lost again.
>
> * Irish consonants come in palatalized ("slender") and unpalatalized/
> velarized ("broad") pairs. S is the palatalized counterpart to s.
>
> * Common Slavic shifted *x to S before front vowels. The *x had
> originally developped from PIE *s according to the ruki law.
> There are more sources of S, the Slavic palatalizations are
> complex.

The point analyst wants to rub in, of course, is that palatalization is
common as dirt, happening over and over again in many languages, while
the opposite is unheard of.

--
Trond Engen

[Trond Engen]

Trond Engen:

> Christian Weisgerber:
>
>> anal...@hotmail.com<anal...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> From what I can tell, neither Ancient Greek nor Latin had it.
>>
>> Indeed. Those modern European languages that have /S/ have developed
>> it independently several times.
>>
>> Off the top of my head and far from complete:
>>
>> * Old English shifted *sk> S, spelled<sh>. This must have happened
>> early, because borrowings from Old Norse retain sk.
>> In addition, Modern English has haphazardly created S from si, sj.
>
> Which also means that the Scandinavian
>
> S < sk before front vowels or j
>
> is a separate development from the English.
>
> There's also
>
> S < sj
>
> separate from the other because they were pronounced differently
> ([sC]/[S]) in some dialects until recently. As we speak, Norwegian is
> developing a third /S/:
>
> C < k before front vowels or j
> + < tj
>
> now becoming /S/.

To avoid misunderstanding: I used C for the unvoiced palatal fricative.

--
Trond Engen

[Christian Weisgerber]

Trond Engen <tron...@engen.priv.no> wrote:

> Which also means that the Scandinavian
> S < sk before front vowels or j
> is a separate development from the English.
> There's also
> S < sj
> separate from the other because they were pronounced differently
> ([sC]/[S]) in some dialects until recently. As we speak, Norwegian is
> developing a third /S/:
> C < k before front vowels or j
> + < tj
> now becoming /S/.

Ugh. I just started to look at the Scandinavian situation starting
out with the Danish/Swedish/Norwegian phonology articles in Wikipedia.
This segues into my question just what a "sh sound" is.

Norwegian and Swedish have three sounds in that area:
* [s.] (retroflex s), which is an allophone for /rs/
* The <sj> sound, which can be realized as [S] amongst others
* The <kj> sound, which can be realized as [C] or [S;] amongst others

At least Swedish appears to have a ridiculously large, overlapping
range of realizations for <sj> and <kj>, involving [S;], [S], [S~],
[x] and more.

Danish looks more straightforward. It only has [S;], which natively
arose from [sj] But also serves to replace [S] in loanwords like
<chance>.

[Christian Weisgerber]

António Marques <anton...@sapo.pt> wrote:

> > Is [S;] (curly c) a "sh sound"?
>
> (It seems 'curly c' is a term for 'vulva'

I did a quick Google search over two large repositories of porn
prose (literotica.com, asstr.org) and neither "curly c" nor "curly cee"
turned up anything, so I think the Urban Dictionary entry is garbage.

[Trond Engen]

Christian Weisgerber:

> Trond Engen<tron...@engen.priv.no> wrote:
>
>> Which also means that the Scandinavian
>> S< sk before front vowels or j
>> is a separate development from the English.
>> There's also
>> S< sj
>> separate from the other because they were pronounced differently
>> ([sC]/[S]) in some dialects until recently. As we speak, Norwegian is
>> developing a third /S/:
>> C< k before front vowels or j
>> +< tj
>> now becoming /S/.
>
> Ugh. I just started to look at the Scandinavian situation starting
> out with the Danish/Swedish/Norwegian phonology articles in Wikipedia.
> This segues into my question just what a "sh sound" is.

Let me say it like this: It was a deliberate choice to leave out any
type of brackets.

> Norwegian and Swedish have three sounds in that area:
> * [s.] (retroflex s), which is an allophone for /rs/
> * The <sj> sound, which can be realized as [S] amongst others
> * The <kj> sound, which can be realized as [C] or [S;] amongst others

I don't perceive any difference between the first two, and for an
increasing number of Norwegian speakers even the third is merged in.

I managed to forget the first one. This is standard language, for
inherited words as well as recent loans:

<fars> [fa:s] "father's]
<kors> [kOS] "cross"
<kurs> [kü:S] "course"
<børs> [bø:S] "stock exchange"
<marsipan> [maSi'pa:n] "marzipan"
<morse> [2mOSe] "morse (code)"

It's the standard outcome even of /ls/ in broad Eastern Norwegian, by
way of retroflex l, obviously. Off the top of my head:

<hals> [hæ:S] "neck"
<Gulset> [gu:Set] "placename in Skien" (accross a morpheme boundary)

In traditional Northern Norwegian, S is the standard outcome of r before
k. ['faSken] (usually spelled <farsken> although < farken) "the devil".
Perhaps <torsk> "cod" < tork "drying". I think this is slightly voiced,
though, even if perceived as the same sound.

> At least Swedish appears to have a ridiculously large, overlapping
> range of realizations for <sj> and <kj>, involving [S;], [S], [S~],
> [x] and more.

Yes, up to and including the weird [H] (double-curl h). It can be less
fricated, more rounded than in the WP example
(<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Sv-sjok.ogg>),
something like a bilabial/velar coarticulated semi-fricative, perhaps
[HW] (double-curl h with superscript w -- is there such a thing?).

> Danish looks more straightforward. It only has [S;], which natively
> arose from [sj] But also serves to replace [S] in loanwords like
> <chance>.

I think there's some allophonic and dialectal variation even in Danish.

--
Trond Engen

[Brian M. Scott]

On Sat, 28 Jan 2012 02:24:47 +0100, Trond Engen
<tron...@engen.priv.no> wrote in
<news:jfvimn$7k4$1...@dont-email.me> in sci.lang:

> Christian Weisgerber:

[...]

>> At least Swedish appears to have a ridiculously large,
>> overlapping range of realizations for <sj> and <kj>,
>> involving [S;], [S], [S~], [x] and more.

> Yes, up to and including the weird [H] (double-curl h).

'hooktop heng'

I love that name.

> It can be less fricated, more rounded than in the WP
> example (<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Sv-sjok.ogg>),
> something like a bilabial/velar coarticulated
> semi-fricative, perhaps [HW] (double-curl h with
> superscript w -- is there such a thing?).

One of the original Ranarim singers -- I forget which one --
seems to have a bilabial/palatal coarticulation in <sjöman>,
almost like [ç] coarticulated with [ʍ].

[...]

Brian

[Hans Aberg]

On 2012/01/27 23:43, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> Trond Engen<tron...@engen.priv.no> wrote:
>
>> Which also means that the Scandinavian
>> S< sk before front vowels or j
>> is a separate development from the English.
>> There's also
>> S< sj
>> separate from the other because they were pronounced differently
>> ([sC]/[S]) in some dialects until recently. As we speak, Norwegian is
>> developing a third /S/:
>> C< k before front vowels or j
>> +< tj
>> now becoming /S/.
>
> Ugh. I just started to look at the Scandinavian situation starting
> out with the Danish/Swedish/Norwegian phonology articles in Wikipedia.
> This segues into my question just what a "sh sound" is.
>
> Norwegian and Swedish have three sounds in that area:
> * [s.] (retroflex s), which is an allophone for /rs/
> * The<sj> sound, which can be realized as [S] amongst others
> * The<kj> sound, which can be realized as [C] or [S;] amongst others
>
> At least Swedish appears to have a ridiculously large, overlapping
> range of realizations for<sj> and<kj>, involving [S;], [S], [S~],
> [x] and more.

One example is the English word star, which in Swedish first got a "j",
"stjärna", pronounced [stj], that is s, t, j separate. Later "stj" was
contracted to the single sj sound, which nowadays in the main dialect is
pronounced as [ɧ], though some dialects use [ʃ].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ɧ

Hans

[Adam Funk]

On 2012-01-27, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

> António Marques <anton...@sapo.pt> wrote:
>
>> > Is [S;] (curly c) a "sh sound"?
>>
>> (It seems 'curly c' is a term for 'vulva'
>
> I did a quick Google search over two large repositories of porn
> prose (literotica.com, asstr.org)

I'll file those corpora for future research, thanks. ;-)

> and neither "curly c" nor "curly cee"
> turned up anything, so I think the Urban Dictionary entry is garbage.

That's hardly surprising. I think a substantial number of the entries
are made up by bluffers.


--
Mathematiker sind wie Franzosen: Was man ihnen auch sagt, übersetzen
sie in ihre eigene Sprache, so daß unverzüglich etwas völlig anderes
daraus wird. [Goethe]

[Adam Funk]

On 2012-01-27, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> On Jan 27, 7:23 am, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Wiki gives
>>
>> Johann Pachelbel ( /ˈjoʊhɑːn ˈpækəlbɛl/ or /ˈpɑːkəlbɛl/;[1] German:
>> [ˈjoːhan ˈpaxɛlbəl][2][3] or [ˈpaxəlbɛl], or [paˈxɛlbəl];[citation
>> needed]
>
> English has no [x], so Ger. /x/ is rendered as /k/ in English.

Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,
and I think most English speakers who also know German would probably
keep the /x/ in German personal names even in English contexts.


--
Anything invented before your 15th birthday is the order of nature.
Anything invented between your 15th and 35th birthday is new and
exciting. Anything invented after that day, however, is against
nature and should be prohibited. [Douglas Adams]

[Christian Weisgerber]

Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:

> > English has no [x], so Ger. /x/ is rendered as /k/ in English.
>
> Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
> music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,

And then there are Liverpudlians.

[Adam Funk]

On 2012-01-28, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

> Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
>
>> > English has no [x], so Ger. /x/ is rendered as /k/ in English.
>>
>> Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
>> music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,
>
> And then there are Liverpudlians.

I haven't got any handy at the moment to check, but ISTR they have [x]
as an allophone of /k/ in some positions (definitely in "back" at the
end of a sentence, but not in "backed") --- IIRC, but I could be
wrong.

So I think they'd get "Bach" right, but I'm not sure about
"Packelbel".


--
I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, [my daughter] will come to me
and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press
away from the Internet?' [Mike Godwin]
http://www.eff.org/

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jan 28, 9:53 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> On 2012-01-27, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > On Jan 27, 7:23 am, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>
> > wrote:
>
> >> Wiki gives
>
> >> Johann Pachelbel ( /ˈjoʊhɑːn ˈpækəlbɛl/ or /ˈpɑːkəlbɛl/;[1] German:
> >> [ˈjoːhan ˈpaxɛlbəl][2][3] or [ˈpaxəlbɛl], or [paˈxɛlbəl];[citation
> >> needed]
>
> > English has no [x], so Ger. /x/ is rendered as /k/ in English.
>
> Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
> music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,
> and I think most English speakers who also know German would probably
> keep the /x/ in German personal names even in English contexts.

That's hardly relevant to the only datum analys... was looking at, the
English wikipedia pronuciation key, to which is appended a
pronunciation key for German. Why did you snip the most relevant
portion of his or her stupidity?

[anal...@hotmail.com]

> portion of his or her stupidity?- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

Maybe because he is too kind to point out

Wiki on Scottish English:

"The phoneme /x/ is common in names and in SSE's many Gaelic and Scots
borrowings, so much so that it is often taught to incomers,
particularly for "ch" in loch. Some Scottish speakers use it in words
of Greek origin as well, such as technical, patriarch, etc. The
pronunciation of these words in the original Greek would support this.
(Wells 1982, 408)."

And the assumption that the mispronunciation of non-English names by
(some) English speakers would be given as the unmarked pronunciation
by Wiki is absurd.

[Adam Funk]

I guess because it was (to me) less interesting than the idea that
some English speakers use /x/ in foreign names.


--
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to
chance. [Robert R. Coveyou]

[anal...@hotmail.com]

On Jan 28, 4:21 am, Hans Aberg <haberg-n...@telia.com> wrote:
> On 2012/01/27 23:43, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
>
>
>
>
>

> > Trond Engen<trond...@engen.priv.no>  wrote:

Thanks for the reference.

"The International Phonetic Association describes [ɧ] as "simultaneous
[ʃ] and [x]", but this claim is disputed among phoneticians, including
at least one former president of the IPA.[1] Other descriptive labels
include voiceless palatal-velar fricative, voiceless dorso-palatal
velar fricative, voiceless postalveolar and velar fricative, or
voiceless coarticulated velar and palatoalveolar fricative. The
closest English phoneme is /ʃ/ ⟨sh⟩."

Very very very interesting.

>
>
> > Danish looks more straightforward.  It only has [S;], which natively
> > arose from [sj] But also serves to replace [S] in loanwords like

> > <chance>.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -

[Hans Aberg]

> Thanks for the reference.

You are welcome.

> "The International Phonetic Association describes [ɧ] as "simultaneous
> [ʃ] and [x]", but this claim is disputed among phoneticians, including
> at least one former president of the IPA.[1] Other descriptive labels
> include voiceless palatal-velar fricative, voiceless dorso-palatal
> velar fricative, voiceless postalveolar and velar fricative, or
> voiceless coarticulated velar and palatoalveolar fricative. The
> closest English phoneme is /ʃ/ ⟨sh⟩."

My own take is that the position of [ɧ] varies, but it is always only at
one position at each time. If the following vowel is frontal, it becomes
more frontal, and the opposite if the vowel is towards the back.

> Very very very interesting.

Indeed.

Hans

[Trond Engen]

Hans Aberg:

> On 2012/01/28 23:13, anal...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
>> "The International Phonetic Association describes [ɧ] as
>> "simultaneous [ʃ] and [x]", but this claim is disputed among
>> phoneticians, including at least one former president of the IPA.[1]
>> Other descriptive labels include voiceless palatal-velar fricative,
>> voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative, voiceless postalveolar and
>> velar fricative, or voiceless coarticulated velar and palatoalveolar

>> fricative. The closest English phoneme is /ʃ/ (sh)."

>
> My own take is that the position of [ɧ] varies, but it is always only
> at one position at each time. If the following vowel is frontal, it
> becomes more frontal, and the opposite if the vowel is towards the
> back.

I'd probably be better off trusting the natives, but I'm not sure. I
agree that it moves around with the environment, but I think the point
is that it has _all_ positions each time, only weighted differently. The
mouth is formed to a cavity with light but continuous friction on as
many surfaces as possible -- from the soft palate across the hard palate
and the tongue to both lips. There may be a dialect difference in
whether the the tip of the tongue is used too, or if it's pulled back to
achieve retroflex and lateral friction.

--
Trond Engen

[Trond Engen]

Brian M. Scott:

> On Sat, 28 Jan 2012 02:24:47 +0100, Trond Engen
> <tron...@engen.priv.no> wrote in
> <news:jfvimn$7k4$1...@dont-email.me> in sci.lang:
>
>> Christian Weisgerber:
>
> [...]
>
>>> At least Swedish appears to have a ridiculously large,
>>> overlapping range of realizations for<sj> and<kj>,
>>> involving [S;], [S], [S~], [x] and more.
>
>> Yes, up to and including the weird [H] (double-curl h).
>
> 'hooktop heng'

Ah, of course, and thanks! Too lazy to insert it, to sleepy to remember
its name and too tired to care.

> I love that name.

"'ooked-up" is my middle name.

--
Trond Engen

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jan 28, 4:20 pm, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> On 2012-01-28, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Jan 28, 9:53 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> >> On 2012-01-27, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> >> > On Jan 27, 7:23 am, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>
> >> > wrote:
>
> >> >> Wiki gives
>
> >> >> Johann Pachelbel ( /ˈjoʊhɑːn ˈpækəlbɛl/ or /ˈpɑːkəlbɛl/;[1] German:
> >> >> [ˈjoːhan ˈpaxɛlbəl][2][3] or [ˈpaxəlbɛl], or [paˈxɛlbəl];[citation
> >> >> needed]
>
> >> > English has no [x], so Ger. /x/ is rendered as /k/ in English.
>
> >> Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
> >> music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,
> >> and I think most English speakers who also know German would probably
> >> keep the /x/ in German personal names even in English contexts.

Such code-switching is socially inappropriate. It marks the speaker as
snobbish. Do you not recall Woody Allen on "van Gogh"?

> > That's hardly relevant to the only datum analys... was looking at, the
> > English wikipedia pronuciation key, to which is appended a
> > pronunciation key for German. Why did you snip the most relevant
> > portion of his or her stupidity?
>
> I guess because it was (to me) less interesting than the idea that
> some English speakers use /x/ in foreign names.

But look at what analys... replied just before you.

analys... seems to feel that because the Scots language has /x/, the
English language should not use /k/ to render [x] in foreign terms.

[Christian Weisgerber]

Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:

> > English has no [x], so Ger. /x/ is rendered as /k/ in English.
>
> Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
> music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,

I just saw an episode of _Frozen Planet_ where David Attenborough
pronounced Brünnich's Guillemot (a seabird) as /'brUnIx/.

[anal...@hotmail.com]

> English language should not use /k/ to render [x] in foreign terms.- Hide quoted text -

>
> - Show quoted text -

'x' was cited for Scottish English. Actually it can be cited for
American English also - all one has to do is check Merriam Webster or
the OAAD for "loch" although it is noted as Scottish (MW) or 'in
Scotland" (OAAD).

Here is a counterexample to the assumption that English nativization
or mispronumciation of non-English names is the norm for Wiki

"Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Gujarati: મોહનદાસ કરમચંદ ગાંધી; Hindi:
मोहनदास करमचंद गांधी, pronounced: [moːˈɦənd̪aːs kəˈrəmtʃənd̪
ˈɡaːnd̪ʱi] ( listen)."

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jan 28, 8:45 pm, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

"Scottish English" is a name used by assimilationists for what is
widely recognized as the Scots language.

> American English also - all one has to do is check Merriam Webster or
> the OAAD for "loch" although it is noted as Scottish (MW)  or 'in
> Scotland" (OAAD).
>
> Here is a counterexample to the assumption that English nativization
> or mispronumciation of non-English names is the norm for Wiki
>
> "Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Gujarati: મોહનદાસ કરમચંદ ગાંધી; Hindi:
> मोहनदास करमचंद गांधी, pronounced: [moːˈɦənd̪aːs kəˈrəmtʃənd̪

> ˈɡaːnd̪ʱi] ( listen)."-

Do you think that differs (other than the shwa and the length in the
first name) from the usual American pronunciation?

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jan 28, 6:43 pm, na...@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) wrote:
> Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> > > English has no [x], so Ger. /x/ is rendered as /k/ in English.
>
> > Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
> > music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,
>
> I just saw an episode of _Frozen Planet_ where David Attenborough
> pronounced Brünnich's Guillemot (a seabird) as /'brUnIx/.

Yiddish!

[Hans Aberg]

On 2012/01/29 01:32, Trond Engen wrote:
> Hans Aberg:
>
>> On 2012/01/28 23:13, anal...@hotmail.com wrote:
>>
>>> "The International Phonetic Association describes [ɧ] as
>>> "simultaneous [ʃ] and [x]", but this claim is disputed among
>>> phoneticians, including at least one former president of the IPA.[1]
>>> Other descriptive labels include voiceless palatal-velar fricative,
>>> voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative, voiceless postalveolar and
>>> velar fricative, or voiceless coarticulated velar and palatoalveolar
>>> fricative. The closest English phoneme is /ʃ/ (sh)."
>>
>> My own take is that the position of [ɧ] varies, but it is always only
>> at one position at each time. If the following vowel is frontal, it
>> becomes more frontal, and the opposite if the vowel is towards the
>> back.
>
> I'd probably be better off trusting the natives, but I'm not sure. I
> agree that it moves around with the environment, but I think the point
> is that it has _all_ positions each time, only weighted differently. The
> mouth is formed to a cavity with light but continuous friction on as
> many surfaces as possible -- from the soft palate across the hard palate
> and the tongue to both lips.

If I try "skiva" [ɧiːva], then [ɧ] must slide forwards to [iː], in
"skena" [ɧeːna] the place is about the same, and in "stjärna"
[ɧɛː(r)na], I must start at a place slightly towards the back relative
the other two [ɧ]. The last case seem to have little overlap with the
former two, at least in one way to pronounce it.

In all cases, just a single place, however focused you may think it
might be.

> There may be a dialect difference in
> whether the the tip of the tongue is used too, or if it's pulled back to
> achieve retroflex and lateral friction.

Either you use [ɧ] or [ʃ], but not both. If you use [ɧ], then
international words (like names) with [ʃ] will use [ɧ] if given a
Swedish pronunciation, even if you know how to pronounce [ʃ]. So they
are wholly distinct.

Try to pronounce two of [ɧ], [ʃ], and [x] simultaneously, and you will
see it is not really possible.

Hans

[anal...@hotmail.com]

> first name) from the usual American pronunciation?- Hide quoted text -

>
> - Show quoted text -

If Americans have a nasalized 'father' vowel in "Gandhi" and the
voiced aspirate 'dh' - I have never run into them.

But getting back to the misinformation about 'x' in English

from

http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Voiceless_velar_fricative/id/1975415


"Standard English does not have [x], except for a few loan words such
as Scottish loch /lɒx/ and Hebrew Chanukah /xanukaː/. Where it occurs,
it is nearly always represented by a "ch." Many speakers, especially
in the United States, do not (often cannot) make this sound, and are
sometimes not even aware of its existence; these speakers replace it
with [h] in words such as "chutzpah" or "challah," or [k] in words
such as "loch" or "leprechaun." These alternative pronunciations are
considered acceptable by most authorities.

Some dialects in England, particularly London and Liverpool, may have
[x] where other dialects have [k], as in cat. In London it is a
younger, lower-class pronunciation."

And at amy rate it was a phoneme in English at some point in time and
If English speakers tend to replace [x] by [h] or {k] now, although it
doesn't mean these sound changes happened internally in English,
something other than magic has to account for why [x] more or less
disappeared from English.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jan 29, 9:59 am, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>

wrote:
> On Jan 29, 12:40 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > On Jan 28, 8:45 pm, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>
> > wrote:

> > > "Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Gujarati: મોહનદાસ કરમચંદ ગાંધી; Hindi:
> > > मोहनदास करमचंद गांधी, pronounced: [moːˈɦənd̪aːs kəˈrəmtʃənd̪
> > > ˈɡaːnd̪ʱi] ( listen)."-
>
> > Do you think that differs (other than the shwa and the length in the
> > first name) from the usual American pronunciation?-

> If Americans have a nasalized 'father' vowel in "Gandhi" and the
> voiced aspirate 'dh' - I have never run into them.

Sorry your ears are so poorly equipped.

There is nothing, however, in the phonetic transcriptions given above
to indicate that the _a_ in "Gandhi" is nasalized.

> But getting back to the misinformation about 'x' in English
>
> from
>
> http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Voiceless_velar_fricative/id/1975415
>
> "Standard English does not have [x], except for a few loan words such
> as Scottish loch /lɒx/ and Hebrew Chanukah /xanukaː/. Where it occurs,
> it is nearly always represented by a "ch." Many speakers, especially
> in the United States, do not (often cannot) make this sound, and are
> sometimes not even aware of its existence; these speakers replace it
> with [h] in words such as "chutzpah" or "challah," or [k] in words
> such as "loch" or "leprechaun." These alternative pronunciations are
> considered acceptable by most authorities.
>
> Some dialects in England, particularly London and Liverpool, may have
> [x] where other dialects have [k], as in cat. In London it is a
> younger, lower-class pronunciation."
>
> And at amy rate it was a phoneme in English at some point in time and
> If English speakers tend to replace [x] by [h] or {k] now, although it
> doesn't mean these sound changes happened internally in English,
> something other than magic has to account for why [x] more or less

> disappeared from English.-

Why do you claim that _x_ "was a phoneme in English at some point in
time"?

[anal...@hotmail.com]

On Jan 29, 12:31 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Jan 29, 9:59 am, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On Jan 29, 12:40 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > > On Jan 28, 8:45 pm, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>
> > > wrote:
> > > > "Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Gujarati: મોહનદાસ કરમચંદ ગાંધી; Hindi:
> > > > मोहनदास करमचंद गांधी, pronounced: [moːˈɦənd̪aːs kəˈrəmtʃənd̪
> > > > ˈɡaːnd̪ʱi] ( listen)."-
>
> > > Do you think that differs (other than the shwa and the length in the
> > > first name) from the usual American pronunciation?-
> > If Americans have a nasalized 'father' vowel in "Gandhi" and the
> > voiced aspirate 'dh' - I have never run into them.
>
> Sorry your ears are so poorly equipped.
>
> There is nothing, however, in the phonetic transcriptions given above
> to indicate that the _a_ in "Gandhi" is nasalized.
>

It is, actually, and the English transcription missed it. (The
correct chandrabindu gets replaced by anuswara if there is no room
above the top line due to a vowel diacritic- but even in a case like
गांधी anuswara seems to be making inroads these days).

How do most Americans pronounce 'Gandhi' and how close or far is it
from the English transcription above (lets spot them the nasal vowel)?

>
>
>
>
> > But getting back to the misinformation about 'x' in English
>
> > from
>
> >http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Voiceless_velar_fricative/id/1975415
>
> > "Standard English does not have [x], except for a few loan words such
> > as Scottish loch /lɒx/ and Hebrew Chanukah /xanukaː/. Where it occurs,
> > it is nearly always represented by a "ch." Many speakers, especially
> > in the United States, do not (often cannot) make this sound, and are
> > sometimes not even aware of its existence; these speakers replace it
> > with [h] in words such as "chutzpah" or "challah," or [k] in words
> > such as "loch" or "leprechaun." These alternative pronunciations are
> > considered acceptable by most authorities.
>
> > Some dialects in England, particularly London and Liverpool, may have
> > [x] where other dialects have [k], as in cat. In London it is a
> > younger, lower-class pronunciation."
>
> > And at amy rate it was a phoneme in English at some point in time and
> > If English speakers tend to replace [x] by [h] or {k] now, although it
> > doesn't mean these sound changes happened internally in English,
> > something other than magic has to account for why [x] more or less
> > disappeared from English.-
>
> Why do you claim that _x_ "was a phoneme in English at some point in

> time"?- Hide quoted text -
>

It came to me in a dream. Was it or was it not?

[ranjit_...@yahoo.com]

On Jan 29, 9:59 am, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>

wrote:
> On Jan 29, 12:40 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > On Jan 28, 8:45 pm, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> > > "Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Gujarati: મોહનદાસ કરમચંદ ગાંધી; Hindi:
> > > मोहनदास करमचंद गांधी, pronounced: [moːˈɦənd̪aːs kəˈrəmtʃənd̪
> > > ˈɡaːnd̪ʱi] ( listen)."-

> > Do you think that differs (other than the shwa and the length in the
> > first name) from the usual American pronunciation?

> If Americans have a nasalized 'father' vowel in "Gandhi" and the

> voiced aspirate 'dh' - I have never run into them.

[a:] or [A] is the 2nd vowel in Indian abugidas - ஆ in Tamil script.

[wugi]

Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> Going off on a tangent here...
>
> What's a "sh sound" in the first place?
>
> I'm getting the impression that people aren't too fussy about the
> sounds they subsume under /S/ as long as there's no contrast. Is
> English /S/ even [S]? It seems substantially labialized to me.
> Descriptions of Russian waver between [S] and retroflex s.

>
> Is [S;] (curly c) a "sh sound"?
>

> I recently noticed that when a French speaker pronounces a German
> word with /S/, it actually sounds like /C/ to me.
>
> It doesn't help that I'm natively confused about /S/ and /C/, because
> I'm from a region of Germany where they are merged. The result is
> perceived as /S/, but I don't know what it is phonetically.
> I remember somebody using the realization of /S/ by a well-known
> politician from my hometown as an example of how to pronounce Polish
> /S;/.

What about Swedish? My "S. in 3 month" suggests "sh" for a number of cases
in Swedish, as do most other courses I saw. So, a couple of years ago when
on holiday in Sweden, I tried to order some bread with ham saying "shinka",
but could not make myself thus understood. When I asked how they call the
thing I pointed at, I heard something like "HHwinka". And when watching
Wallander and his likes, I seem to hear them saying "situaHHo:n", rather
than "situasho:n", etc. Where can one find better descriptions for this?
(As with other langs Swedish, by reading, would appear quite understandable,
but when listening to spoken Swedish I'm lost immediately, picking up only
the odd, almost Flemish sounding word, in between an undistinct
unarticulated syllabic plasma)

guido google:wugi

[Hans Aberg]

On 2012/01/29 22:27, wugi wrote:
> Christian Weisgerber wrote:
>> Going off on a tangent here...
>>
>> What's a "sh sound" in the first place?
>>
>> I'm getting the impression that people aren't too fussy about the
>> sounds they subsume under /S/ as long as there's no contrast. Is
>> English /S/ even [S]? It seems substantially labialized to me.
>> Descriptions of Russian waver between [S] and retroflex s.
>>
>> Is [S;] (curly c) a "sh sound"?
>>
>> I recently noticed that when a French speaker pronounces a German
>> word with /S/, it actually sounds like /C/ to me.
>>
>> It doesn't help that I'm natively confused about /S/ and /C/, because
>> I'm from a region of Germany where they are merged. The result is
>> perceived as /S/, but I don't know what it is phonetically.
>> I remember somebody using the realization of /S/ by a well-known
>> politician from my hometown as an example of how to pronounce Polish
>> /S;/.
>
> What about Swedish? My "S. in 3 month" suggests "sh" for a number of cases
> in Swedish, as do most other courses I saw. So, a couple of years ago when
> on holiday in Sweden, I tried to order some bread with ham saying "shinka",
> but could not make myself thus understood. When I asked how they call the
> thing I pointed at, I heard something like "HHwinka". And when watching
> Wallander and his likes, I seem to hear them saying "situaHHo:n", rather
> than "situasho:n", etc. Where can one find better descriptions for this?

These links, already discussed in some other posts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sj-sound
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology

> (As with other langs Swedish, by reading, would appear quite understandable,
> but when listening to spoken Swedish I'm lost immediately, picking up only
> the odd, almost Flemish sounding word, in between an undistinct
> unarticulated syllabic plasma)

It is written [ɧ], used in the main dialect (like in Stockholm), though
some may use [ʃ].

Hans

[anal...@hotmail.com]

On Jan 29, 2:56 pm, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>

> > - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -

>
> - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -
>

> - Show quoted text -

Here is what I would consider normative pronunciation by a Hindi-
speaker and I would suspect the Gujarati one would be pretty similar.

http://www.forvo.com/word/mohandas_karamchand_gandhi/#hi

[Christian Weisgerber]

Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:

([x] in English)

> > And then there are Liverpudlians.
>
> I haven't got any handy at the moment to check, but ISTR they have [x]
> as an allophone of /k/ in some positions (definitely in "back" at the
> end of a sentence, but not in "backed") --- IIRC, but I could be
> wrong.

A good source for basilectal speech in the media is interviews with
athletes or enlisted ranks in the military. Let's see... I have
some interview snippets with Terry Etim, a UFC fighter from Liverpool.
He has [x] in all but initial position: "back", "looking", "impact".

[Yusuf B Gursey]

the length is important, otherwise it gets confused with muhandis
"engineer" (from Arabic), which was my initial reaction. the spelling
in Urdu parses it as mohan da:s

[Peter T. Daniels]

> in Urdu parses it as mohan da:s-

We're talking about English pronunciation, which will match the color
of the vowel, which will be interpreted as length by those who have
phonemic length (just as in Arabic).

[Yusuf B Gursey]

mo:han da:s

>
> We're talking about English pronunciation, which will match the color

I realize that, it's just that I was thrown off all those years by the
Emglish pronounciation

[António Marques]

Christian Weisgerber wrote (27-01-2012 22:43):

> Trond Engen<tron...@engen.priv.no> wrote:
>
>> Which also means that the Scandinavian
>> S< sk before front vowels or j
>> is a separate development from the English.
>> There's also
>> S< sj
>> separate from the other because they were pronounced differently
>> ([sC]/[S]) in some dialects until recently. As we speak, Norwegian is
>> developing a third /S/:
>> C< k before front vowels or j
>> +< tj
>> now becoming /S/.
>
> Ugh. I just started to look at the Scandinavian situation starting
> out with the Danish/Swedish/Norwegian phonology articles in Wikipedia.
> This segues into my question just what a "sh sound" is.
>
> Norwegian and Swedish have three sounds in that area:
> * [s.] (retroflex s), which is an allophone for /rs/

Mmmmmm. How curious that polish and czech have had /rz/ > /Z/ or something.

> * The<sj> sound, which can be realized as [S] amongst others
> * The<kj> sound, which can be realized as [C] or [S;] amongst others

In fact, scandinavian at times sounds similar to slavic to someone who
doesn't know either.

[António Marques]

Adam Funk wrote (28-01-2012 14:40):
> On 2012-01-27, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

>
>> António Marques<anton...@sapo.pt> wrote:
>>
>>>> Is [S;] (curly c) a "sh sound"?
>>>

>>> (It seems 'curly c' is a term for 'vulva'
>>
>> I did a quick Google search over two large repositories of porn
>> prose (literotica.com, asstr.org)

That's not conclusive.

But the general absence of evidence is, a bit at least.

> I'll file those corpora for future research, thanks. ;-)
>
>> and neither "curly c" nor "curly cee"
>> turned up anything, so I think the Urban Dictionary entry is garbage.
>
> That's hardly surprising. I think a substantial number of the entries
> are made up by bluffers.

Indeed.

[António Marques]

Peter T. Daniels wrote (29-01-2012 05:40):
> On Jan 28, 8:45 pm, "analys...@hotmail.com"<analys...@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>> On Jan 28, 7:52 pm, "Peter T. Daniels"<gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>>> analys... seems to feel that because the Scots language has /x/, the
>>> English language should not use /k/ to render [x] in foreign terms.-
>>> Hide quoted text -
>>
>>> - Show quoted text -
>>
>> 'x' was cited for Scottish English. Actually it can be cited for
>
> "Scottish English" is a name used by assimilationists for what is widely
> recognized as the Scots language.

It is not. It is the name given to the variant of 'standard' english spoken
in Scotland, distinct from Scots though of course influenced by it. I don't
know that it has /x/, though.

[Peter T. Daniels]

If it doesn't, then it's not what analys... was talking about. (Scots,
however, does.)

[António Marques]

Scots /x/ is, of course, historical; Scottish English, being the outcome of
generations of Scots speakers trying to speak English, should in principle
only have un-English sounds as substitutes of those English sounds that are
missing in Scots. I don't see the sound in question entering Scottish
English by that route. Maybe it is used for toponyms or typically scottish
words or ones which have no english cognate? In either case, completely
irrelevant.

[Trond Engen]

António Marques:

> Christian Weisgerber wrote (27-01-2012 22:43):
>
>> Trond Engen <tron...@engen.priv.no> wrote:
>>
>>> Which also means that the Scandinavian
>>> S< sk before front vowels or j
>>> is a separate development from the English.
>>> There's also
>>> S< sj
>>> separate from the other because they were pronounced differently
>>> ([sC]/[S]) in some dialects until recently. As we speak, Norwegian
>>> is developing a third /S/:
>>> C < k before front vowels or j
>>> + < tj
>>> now becoming /S/.
>>
>> Ugh. I just started to look at the Scandinavian situation starting
>> out with the Danish/Swedish/Norwegian phonology articles in
>> Wikipedia. This segues into my question just what a "sh sound" is.
>>
>> Norwegian and Swedish have three sounds in that area:
>> * [s.] (retroflex s), which is an allophone for /rs/
>
> Mmmmmm. How curious that polish and czech have had /rz/ > /Z/ or
> something.

Even more curious is Northern Norwegian /r/ > /S/ | -/k/ which (at least
to my ear) can be [Z].

[Notational note: | = "with conditioning factor(s)" (~"when"). I've been
planning to introduce that since I read Joseph B. Voyles last year.]

>> * The <sj> sound, which can be realized as [S] amongst others
>> * The <kj> sound, which can be realized as [C] or [S;] amongst
>> others
>
> In fact, scandinavian at times sounds similar to slavic to someone
> who doesn't know either.

Those vague areal features that makes one able to guess part of the
world even without a clue of the phylogeny. Finnic, Baltic and
Scandinavian can sound similar for an outsider too, I think.

--
Trond Engen

[pauljk]

"António Marques" <anton...@sapo.pt> wrote in message
news:jg6145$5jv$1...@dont-email.me...

> Christian Weisgerber wrote (27-01-2012 22:43):
>> Trond Engen<tron...@engen.priv.no> wrote:
>>
>>> Which also means that the Scandinavian
>>> S< sk before front vowels or j
>>> is a separate development from the English.
>>> There's also
>>> S< sj
>>> separate from the other because they were pronounced differently
>>> ([sC]/[S]) in some dialects until recently. As we speak, Norwegian is
>>> developing a third /S/:
>>> C< k before front vowels or j
>>> +< tj
>>> now becoming /S/.
>>
>> Ugh. I just started to look at the Scandinavian situation starting
>> out with the Danish/Swedish/Norwegian phonology articles in Wikipedia.
>> This segues into my question just what a "sh sound" is.
>>
>> Norwegian and Swedish have three sounds in that area:
>> * [s.] (retroflex s), which is an allophone for /rs/
>
> Mmmmmm. How curious that polish and czech have had /rz/ > /Z/ or something.

What are you trying to say? That sentence makes hardly any sense.
1. Are you confusing Polish digraph <rz> (pronounced /Z/) with some kind
of historical evolution of /rz/ > /Z/?

Polish digraph <rz> usually represents a historical palatalized <r>, realized
today as /Z/. There was never any /rz/!

2. Including Czech makes even less sense. There is Czech <ř>, pronounced
as palatalized trilled r, which is quite different from pronunciation of Polish
<rz> or <ż>.

In common Slavic words where Polish have <rz> and <ż>, Czech has
<ř> and <ž> respectively. Polish <rz> and <ż> are pronounced the same
way as /Z/. However, only the Czech <ž> is pronounced as /Z/.
The Czech <ř> is a completely different consonant.

>> * The<sj> sound, which can be realized as [S] amongst others
>> * The<kj> sound, which can be realized as [C] or [S;] amongst others
>
> In fact, scandinavian at times sounds similar to slavic to someone who doesn't know
> either.

Once or twice I thought a Greek song played at a distance was Czech.
Coming closer, it kept sounding like Czech but there wasn't a single
word I'd recognize; then it suddenly hit me it was a completely
different language.

pjk

[Adam Funk]

On 2012-01-29, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>> > On Jan 28, 9:53 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
>> >> On 2012-01-27, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>> >> > English has no [x], so Ger. /x/ is rendered as /k/ in English.
>>
>> >> Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
>> >> music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,
>> >> and I think most English speakers who also know German would probably
>> >> keep the /x/ in German personal names even in English contexts.
>
> Such code-switching is socially inappropriate. It marks the speaker as
> snobbish.

Sometimes that's the motivation, but certainly not always. Haven't
you previously said that it's respectful to pronounce other people's
names as closely as possible to the way they pronounce them?

> Do you not recall Woody Allen on "van Gogh"?

You're confusing fiction with research. :-)

Seriously, one problem that English speakers often miss while trying
to pronounce the "gh" in some German/Dutch fashion is that the "G"
isn't a /g/. (Wikipedia says [vɑn ˈɣɔχ].)


--
XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve the problem,
use more.

[António Marques]

pauljk wrote (30-01-2012 14:35):
> "António Marques" <anton...@sapo.pt> wrote in message
> news:jg6145$5jv$1...@dont-email.me...
>> Christian Weisgerber wrote (27-01-2012 22:43):
>>> Trond Engen<tron...@engen.priv.no> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Which also means that the Scandinavian
>>>> S< sk before front vowels or j
>>>> is a separate development from the English.
>>>> There's also
>>>> S< sj
>>>> separate from the other because they were pronounced differently
>>>> ([sC]/[S]) in some dialects until recently. As we speak, Norwegian is
>>>> developing a third /S/:
>>>> C< k before front vowels or j
>>>> +< tj
>>>> now becoming /S/.
>>>
>>> Ugh. I just started to look at the Scandinavian situation starting
>>> out with the Danish/Swedish/Norwegian phonology articles in Wikipedia.
>>> This segues into my question just what a "sh sound" is.
>>>
>>> Norwegian and Swedish have three sounds in that area:
>>> * [s.] (retroflex s), which is an allophone for /rs/
>>
>> Mmmmmm. How curious that polish and czech have had /rz/ > /Z/ or something.
>
> What are you trying to say? That sentence makes hardly any sense.

It makes complete sense. It may be *wrong*, but that's another matter
altogether.

> 1. Are you confusing Polish digraph <rz> (pronounced /Z/) with some kind
> of historical evolution of /rz/ > /Z/?
>
> Polish digraph <rz> usually represents a historical palatalized <r>, realized
> today as /Z/. There was never any /rz/!

That's my ignorance of slavic historical phonetics.

> 2. Including Czech makes even less sense. There is Czech <ř>, pronounced
> as palatalized trilled r, which is quite different from pronunciation of Polish
> <rz> or <ż>.

That's my ignorance of czech.

> In common Slavic words where Polish have <rz> and <ż>, Czech has
> <ř> and <ž> respectively. Polish <rz> and <ż> are pronounced the same
> way as /Z/. However, only the Czech <ž> is pronounced as /Z/.
> The Czech <ř> is a completely different consonant.
>
>>> * The<sj> sound, which can be realized as [S] amongst others
>>> * The<kj> sound, which can be realized as [C] or [S;] amongst others
>>
>> In fact, scandinavian at times sounds similar to slavic to someone who
>> doesn't know either.
>
> Once or twice I thought a Greek song played at a distance was Czech.
> Coming closer, it kept sounding like Czech but there wasn't a single
> word I'd recognize; then it suddenly hit me it was a completely
> different language.

Modern greek sounds distinctively like spanish, does that mean spanish
sounds like czech?
But then I've taken hungarian for scottish gaelic, so...

[Adam Funk]

Aha, Youtube can be a research tool. :-)

So he has [kɪx] and [kɪxt] for "kick" and "kicked"?

I guess he pronounces "Pachelbel" and "Bach" correctly, then.


--
No right of private conversation was enumerated in the Constitution.
I don't suppose it occurred to anyone at the time that it could be
prevented. [Whitfield Diffie]

[ranjit_...@yahoo.com]

On Jan 30, 7:16 am, António Marques <antonio...@sapo.pt> wrote:

> Peter T. Daniels wrote (29-01-2012 05:40):
> > On Jan 28, 8:45 pm, "analys...@hotmail.com"<analys...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Jan 28, 7:52 pm, "Peter T. Daniels"<gramma...@verizon.net>  wrote:
> >>> analys... seems to feel that because the Scots language has /x/, the
> >>> English language should not use /k/ to render [x] in foreign terms.-
>

> >> 'x' was cited for Scottish English.  Actually it can be cited for
>
> > "Scottish English" is a name used by assimilationists for what is widely
> > recognized as the Scots language.
>
> It is not. It is the name given to the variant of 'standard' english spoken
> in Scotland, distinct from Scots though of course influenced by it. I don't
> know that it has /x/, though.

I could hardly understand my taxi driver in Edinburgh when he gave a
long answer to a question I asked about the place. I couldn't tell
whether it was English or Scots or somewhere between. That it was
distinct from English is the best I can describe it.

[pauljk]

"António Marques" <anton...@sapo.pt> wrote in message

news:jg6anj$pji$1...@dont-email.me...

> pauljk wrote (30-01-2012 14:35):
>> "António Marques" <anton...@sapo.pt> wrote in message
>> news:jg6145$5jv$1...@dont-email.me...
>>> Christian Weisgerber wrote (27-01-2012 22:43):
>>>> Trond Engen<tron...@engen.priv.no> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Which also means that the Scandinavian
>>>>> S< sk before front vowels or j
>>>>> is a separate development from the English.
>>>>> There's also
>>>>> S< sj
>>>>> separate from the other because they were pronounced differently
>>>>> ([sC]/[S]) in some dialects until recently. As we speak, Norwegian is
>>>>> developing a third /S/:
>>>>> C< k before front vowels or j
>>>>> +< tj
>>>>> now becoming /S/.
>>>>
>>>> Ugh. I just started to look at the Scandinavian situation starting
>>>> out with the Danish/Swedish/Norwegian phonology articles in Wikipedia.
>>>> This segues into my question just what a "sh sound" is.
>>>>
>>>> Norwegian and Swedish have three sounds in that area:
>>>> * [s.] (retroflex s), which is an allophone for /rs/
>>>
>>> Mmmmmm. How curious that polish and czech have had /rz/ > /Z/ or something.
>>
>> What are you trying to say? That sentence makes hardly any sense.
>
> It makes complete sense. It may be *wrong*, but that's another matter altogether.

Fair enough. :-)

>> 1. Are you confusing Polish digraph <rz> (pronounced /Z/) with some kind
>> of historical evolution of /rz/ > /Z/?
>>
>> Polish digraph <rz> usually represents a historical palatalized <r>, realized
>> today as /Z/. There was never any /rz/!
>
> That's my ignorance of slavic historical phonetics.
>
>> 2. Including Czech makes even less sense. There is Czech <ř>, pronounced
>> as palatalized trilled r, which is quite different from pronunciation of Polish
>> <rz> or <ż>.
>
> That's my ignorance of czech.
>
>> In common Slavic words where Polish have <rz> and <ż>, Czech has
>> <ř> and <ž> respectively. Polish <rz> and <ż> are pronounced the same
>> way as /Z/. However, only the Czech <ž> is pronounced as /Z/.
>> The Czech <ř> is a completely different consonant.
>>
>>>> * The<sj> sound, which can be realized as [S] amongst others
>>>> * The<kj> sound, which can be realized as [C] or [S;] amongst others
>>>
>>> In fact, scandinavian at times sounds similar to slavic to someone who
>>> doesn't know either.
>>
>> Once or twice I thought a Greek song played at a distance was Czech.
>> Coming closer, it kept sounding like Czech but there wasn't a single
>> word I'd recognize; then it suddenly hit me it was a completely
>> different language.
>
> Modern greek sounds distinctively like spanish, does that mean spanish sounds like
> czech?

From a great distance it might, but the rhythm which you can hear from
some distance, is different. There are of course European languages, like
French or English which would always sound distinctly different.
They would probably never get mistaken for Czech even from the greatest
distance.

Greek songs heard from distance seem to have similar phonological
features, similar collections of long and short syllables, and hard and
soft consonants.

> But then I've taken hungarian for scottish gaelic, so...

pjk

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jan 30, 9:43 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> On 2012-01-29, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> >> > On Jan 28, 9:53 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> >> >> On 2012-01-27, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> >> >> > English has no [x], so Ger. /x/ is rendered as /k/ in English.
>
> >> >> Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
> >> >> music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,
> >> >> and I think most English speakers who also know German would probably
> >> >> keep the /x/ in German personal names even in English contexts.
>
> > Such code-switching is socially inappropriate. It marks the speaker as
> > snobbish.
>
> Sometimes that's the motivation, but certainly not always.  Haven't
> you previously said that it's respectful to pronounce other people's
> names as closely as possible to the way they pronounce them?

Likewise "concerti" instead of "concertos."

> > Do you not recall Woody Allen on "van Gogh"?
>
> You're confusing fiction with research. :-)

You're not suggesting that Woody Allen doesn't portray himself
(whatever name he gives himself) accurately in his movies, are you?

> Seriously, one problem that English speakers often miss while trying
> to pronounce the "gh" in some German/Dutch fashion is that the "G"
> isn't a /g/.  (Wikipedia says [vɑn ˈɣɔχ].)

That's what makes the movie version even funnier -- it catches the
obvious code-switch but not the one where you'd actually have to know
Dutch in order to do it.

(Labov called the sociolinguistic characteristics that people _aren't_
aware of "markers.")

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jan 30, 8:01 am, Trond Engen <trond...@engen.priv.no> wrote:
> António Marques:
> > Christian Weisgerber wrote (27-01-2012 22:43):

> >> Trond Engen <trond...@engen.priv.no> wrote:
>
> >>> Which also means that the Scandinavian
> >>> S< sk before front vowels or j
> >>> is a separate development from the English.
> >>> There's also
> >>> S< sj
> >>> separate from the other because they were pronounced differently
> >>> ([sC]/[S]) in some dialects until recently. As we speak, Norwegian
> >>> is developing a third /S/:
> >>> C < k before front vowels or j
> >>> + < tj
> >>> now becoming /S/.
>
> >> Ugh. I just started to look at the Scandinavian situation starting
> >> out with the Danish/Swedish/Norwegian phonology articles in
> >> Wikipedia. This segues into my question just what a "sh sound" is.
>
> >> Norwegian and Swedish have three sounds in that area:
> >> * [s.] (retroflex s), which is an allophone for /rs/
>
> > Mmmmmm. How curious that polish and czech have had /rz/ > /Z/ or
> > something.
>
> Even more curious is Northern Norwegian /r/ > /S/ | -/k/ which (at least
> to my ear) can be [Z].
>
> [Notational note: | = "with conditioning factor(s)" (~"when"). I've been
> planning to introduce that since I read Joseph B. Voyles last year.]

It's typed as -/ __ and pronounced "in the environment of" -- the
underscore marks the position of the segment you're talking about, and
you put the conditioning factors before and/or after and/or above it
as appropriate. So if you're saying that r > S before k, you'd type
r > S -/__k

> >> * The <sj> sound, which can be realized as [S] amongst others
> >> * The <kj> sound, which can be realized as [C] or [S;] amongst
> >> others
>
> > In fact, scandinavian at times sounds similar to slavic to someone
> > who doesn't know either.
>
> Those vague areal features that makes one able to guess part of the
> world even without a clue of the phylogeny. Finnic, Baltic and
> Scandinavian can sound similar for an outsider too, I think.

Scandinavian is slower and more tonally varied than Russian. I don't
think I've ever heard Latvian or Lithuanian spoken. My Syriac
professor, Arthur Vööbus, had a heavy Estonian accent, but it could
just as well have been Russian.

[wugi]

Hans Aberg wrote:
> On 2012/01/29 22:27, wugi wrote:
>> Christian Weisgerber wrote:
>>> Going off on a tangent here...
>>>
>>> What's a "sh sound" in the first place?

>>

>> What about Swedish? My "S. in 3 month" suggests "sh" for a number of
>> cases in Swedish, as do most other courses I saw. So, a couple of
>> years ago when on holiday in Sweden, I tried to order some bread
>> with ham saying "shinka", but could not make myself thus understood.
>> When I asked how they call the thing I pointed at, I heard something
>> like "HHwinka". And when watching Wallander and his likes, I seem to
>> hear them saying "situaHHo:n", rather than "situasho:n", etc. Where
>> can one find better descriptions for this?
>
> These links, already discussed in some other posts:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sj-sound
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology

Thank you.
There's also Spanish, for which you're taught "sh" only exists in the
combination "tsh" (written ch). So that when they have to use it in foreign
words, I hear things like 'El presidente Bus toma un bus en Wasington'.
Often even ch- would sound more like "ts-" than like "tsh-":
chocolate~"tsokolate", China~"Tsina".
Whereas "sh" is prominently present in eg Argentinan Porteño: 'yo llegué
cuando llovía'~"sho shegué cuando shovía".

Guido google:wugi

[Christian Weisgerber]

António Marques <anton...@sapo.pt> wrote:

> > Norwegian and Swedish have three sounds in that area:
> > * [s.] (retroflex s), which is an allophone for /rs/
>
> Mmmmmm. How curious that polish and czech have had /rz/ > /Z/ or something.

I don't think that's right. Both Czech and an old stage of Polish
developed a "raised alveolar non-sonorant trill". This is spelled
r with caron in Czech and rz in Polish, which is really the same
spelling because the caron originated as a superscript z. Czech
has retained this sound, but in modern Polish it has turned into
/Z/ (and /S/ when devoiced). I don't know how this sound developed,
but I doubt that it had anything to do with an actual /z/; cf. the
digraphs cz for /tS/ and sz for /S/. Where Czech has r caron,
Slovak has plain r in cognate words.

> > * The<sj> sound, which can be realized as [S] amongst others
> > * The<kj> sound, which can be realized as [C] or [S;] amongst others
>
> In fact, scandinavian at times sounds similar to slavic to someone who
> doesn't know either.

From watching _Forbrydelsen_ I conclude that Danish sounds like
German with a Danish accent. :->

I think "sounds like" is too subjective to be meaningful. Portuguese
doesn't sound like a Romance language to me and in fact I have
mistaken it for Slavic.

I already mentioned British athlete Terry Etim as an example of a
strong Scouse accent. The first time I heard him speaking in an
interview snippet, I hadn't really paid attention, so there was
this head on screen talking in an unfamiliar sounding language and
I kept waiting for the subtitles to come on. When they failed to
appear I finally realized that he had to be speaking some peripheral
variant of English and once I forced myself to parse his speech as
English, it was even comprehensible. It just doesn't sound like
English.

[António Marques]

Christian Weisgerber wrote (30-01-2012 17:15):
> I think "sounds like" is too subjective to be meaningful. Portuguese
> doesn't sound like a Romance language to me and in fact I have
> mistaken it for Slavic.

It's not subjective. Many share your impression of (Portugal's) portuguese.

[Hans Aberg]

In Swedish, it is the opposite, there is no [tʃ], so English "ch" will
be pronounced as [ʃ] "sh" apparently, even though most of the younger
generation should know English, because a telecom operator has an ad
campaign about how "cheap" they are, illustrated by a black sheep. But
"sheep" in proper main dialect Swedish should be pronounced with [ɧ],
not [ʃ].

Hans

[Adam Funk]

On 2012-01-30, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> On Jan 30, 9:43 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
>> On 2012-01-29, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>>
>> >> > On Jan 28, 9:53 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
>> >> >> On 2012-01-27, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>> >> >> > English has no [x], so Ger. /x/ is rendered as /k/ in English.
>>
>> >> >> Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
>> >> >> music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,
>> >> >> and I think most English speakers who also know German would probably
>> >> >> keep the /x/ in German personal names even in English contexts.
>>
>> > Such code-switching is socially inappropriate. It marks the speaker as
>> > snobbish.
>>
>> Sometimes that's the motivation, but certainly not always.  Haven't
>> you previously said that it's respectful to pronounce other people's
>> names as closely as possible to the way they pronounce them?
>
> Likewise "concerti" instead of "concertos."

I don't think there's anything *wrong* with "concerti", any more than
"corpora" rather than "corpuses". But it's certainly more defensible
to pronounce personal names correctly.

>> > Do you not recall Woody Allen on "van Gogh"?
>>
>> You're confusing fiction with research. :-)
>
> You're not suggesting that Woody Allen doesn't portray himself
> (whatever name he gives himself) accurately in his movies, are you?

Fair enough: you're confusing entertainment with research, and a
comedian with a sociolinguist. (kidding)

>> Seriously, one problem that English speakers often miss while trying
>> to pronounce the "gh" in some German/Dutch fashion is that the "G"
>> isn't a /g/.  (Wikipedia says [vɑn ˈɣɔχ].)
>
> That's what makes the movie version even funnier -- it catches the
> obvious code-switch but not the one where you'd actually have to know
> Dutch in order to do it.

True, but I doubt that many fans of _Manhattan_ (I think that's the
right film, anyway) know that. (It's funny nonetheless, and I wasn't
aware of the pronunciation issue when I first saw it.)


--
English has perfect phonetic spelling. It just doesn't have phonetic
pronunciation. [Peter Moylan]

[Christian Weisgerber]

[Oddly, pauljk's postings never arrive here, so I'm left with what
other people quote.]

> pauljk wrote (30-01-2012 14:35):

> > Polish digraph <rz> usually represents a historical palatalized <r>, realized
> > today as /Z/. There was never any /rz/!

Oh, rz/ř originated simply as palatalized r?

Picking up my Czech dictionary and checking the entries with r- and
ř-, I think it's that straightforward indeed. The r- section is
strongly skewed towards back vowels (ro-, ru-, ry-), the ř- section
towards front vowels (ře-, ři-). There are a lot of re-, ri- words,
but they are loans.

[anal...@hotmail.com]

On Jan 29, 2:56 pm, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

> On Jan 29, 12:31 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>

> > On Jan 29, 9:59 am, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>
> > wrote:

>
> > > On Jan 29, 12:40 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > > > On Jan 28, 8:45 pm, "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com>
> > > > wrote:

> > > > > "Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Gujarati: મોહનદાસ કરમચંદ ગાંધી; Hindi:
> > > > > मोहनदास करमचंद गांधी, pronounced: [moːˈɦənd̪aːs kəˈrəmtʃənd̪
> > > > > ˈɡaːnd̪ʱi] ( listen)."-
>
> > > > Do you think that differs (other than the shwa and the length in the

> > - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -

>
> - Show quoted text -

Interesting info about 'x' in Old English

http://books.google.com/books?id=Ci9qOY9BDWsC&pg=PA254&lpg=PA254#v=onepage&q&f=false

"Unlike Old English /x/ which contrasts with /k/, odl Elnglish [ɣ] is
not contrasntive with [g]"

Wiki on the other hand says

"[ç, x] are allophones of /h/ occurring in coda position after front
and back vowels respectively. The evidence for the allophone [ç] after
front vowels is indirect, as it is not indicated in the orthography.
Nevertheless, the fact that there was historically a fronting of *k
to /tʃ/ and of *ɣ to /j/ after front vowels makes it very likely.
Moreover, in late Middle English, /x/ sometimes became /f/ (e.g.
tough, cough), but only after back vowels, never after front vowels.
This is explained if we assume that the allophone [x] sometimes became
[f] but the allophone [ç] never did."

http://www.uni-due.de/~lan300/03_Velar_Segments_in_OE_and_OI_(Hickey).pdf

says

"
Now to consider actual velar segments let me begin with Old English.
The
inventory of obstruents was as follows.
(1) /k/, /g/, /x/

"

[Peter T. Daniels]

It's from Annie Hall. _Everything_ is from Annie Hall.

Manhattan is the B&W Gershwin one, and Mariel Hemingway is in it
somewhere.

[pauljk]

"Christian Weisgerber" <na...@mips.inka.de> wrote in message
news:jg6j7d$2ine$1...@lorvorc.mips.inka.de...

> António Marques <anton...@sapo.pt> wrote:
>> > Norwegian and Swedish have three sounds in that area:
>> > * [s.] (retroflex s), which is an allophone for /rs/
>>
>> Mmmmmm. How curious that polish and czech have had /rz/ > /Z/ or something.
>
> I don't think that's right. Both Czech and an old stage of Polish
> developed a "raised alveolar non-sonorant trill". This is spelled
> r with caron in Czech and rz in Polish, which is really the same
> spelling because the caron originated as a superscript z.

The rz cz sz digraphs were used in Old Czech. As far as I know
they remained in use in lands of today's Poland since the time when
Old Czech was their literary language. In early 1400s Jan Huss
proposed extensive and consistent use of diacritics in Czech.
However, it took several generations before they came into
widespread use.

One can see the old Czech digraph in the English five letter word
<Czech> borrowed well before 1400. In the current Czech it's
spelled as a three letter word <Čech>. (BTW, "ch" is not a digraph
it is a single letter pronounced [x]).

> Czech has retained this sound, but in modern Polish it has turned into
> /Z/ (and /S/ when devoiced). I don't know how this sound developed,
> but I doubt that it had anything to do with an actual /z/; cf. the
> digraphs cz for /tS/ and sz for /S/. Where Czech has r caron,
> Slovak has plain r in cognate words.
>
>> > * The<sj> sound, which can be realized as [S] amongst others
>> > * The<kj> sound, which can be realized as [C] or [S;] amongst others
>>
>> In fact, scandinavian at times sounds similar to slavic to someone who
>> doesn't know either.
>
> From watching _Forbrydelsen_ I conclude that Danish sounds like
> German with a Danish accent. :->
>
> I think "sounds like" is too subjective to be meaningful. Portuguese
> doesn't sound like a Romance language to me and in fact I have
> mistaken it for Slavic.
>
> I already mentioned British athlete Terry Etim as an example of a
> strong Scouse accent. The first time I heard him speaking in an
> interview snippet, I hadn't really paid attention, so there was
> this head on screen talking in an unfamiliar sounding language and
> I kept waiting for the subtitles to come on. When they failed to
> appear I finally realized that he had to be speaking some peripheral
> variant of English and once I forced myself to parse his speech as
> English, it was even comprehensible. It just doesn't sound like
> English.

Some decades ago I joined a British computer company in New Zealand.
Later, I spent a couple of years on secondment in England, mostly in
London and the northwest near Manchester. I remember that first
several weeks in the north I couldn't understand a word spoken by
ordinary strangers. Every time I stopped my car to ask for direction
the words like "right", "around", "roundabout", etc (as in "... go
right around the roundabout...") sounded all the same to me.
All I could understand were snippets like: "...follow your nose..."
and "...You can't miss it." at the end. However, after a period of
a month or two I was okay.

I invited my mother to stay with us for a while. She flew to London,
and we spent some time down there. She had no English at all.
When she accidentally bumped into people while we were shopping,
I heard her apologising in German which she still remembered from
her younger years. I told her not to use German, so she then talked
to people in atrocious French. :-)

Later I drove her North where she spent several weeks with my family
in my rented house. One day we were walking around the village
and here and there she heard people standing in their front lawns
talking over the fences with their neighbours. After a while she said:
"I didn't know there we so many Gypsies living here."
She knew no Romany but she would have heard it spoken by wine
cellar musicians or such like. She refused to believe they spoke
the same language as did people in London. To her it didn't
sound Indo-European.

I could understand what they were saying and kept arguing with
her. It reminded me that it can be quite difficult to imagine what
somebody's speech would sound to you before you learned
the language.

pjk

[António Marques]

pauljk wrote (31-01-2012 06:39):
> Some decades ago I joined a British computer company in New Zealand.
> Later, I spent a couple of years on secondment in England, mostly in
> London and the northwest near Manchester. I remember that first
> several weeks in the north I couldn't understand a word spoken by
> ordinary strangers. Every time I stopped my car to ask for direction
> the words like "right", "around", "roundabout", etc (as in "... go
> right around the roundabout...") sounded all the same to me.
> All I could understand were snippets like: "...follow your nose..."
> and "...You can't miss it." at the end. However, after a period of
> a month or two I was okay.

I still can't understand people giving me directions *in portuguese* *today*.

[pauljk]

"António Marques" <anton...@sapo.pt> wrote in message

news:jg8l1v$qfi$1...@dont-email.me...

:-)

I guess you mean a different kind of not understanding. It does happen
to me today too. I understand the words, but for the hell of me I can't
figure out what the person is really trying to say. Last time I was in
Florence, I stopped at pedestrian crossing to ask a lady where could
I find a place to park a car. She launched herself into a lengthy
monologue half way through which she started arguing with herself
whether at that stage I should take a left or right turn. I thanked
her and took off. I heard her calling after me something to the effect
of "you'll find it okay, just make sure you take a correct turn".

pjk

[Adam Funk]

On 2012-01-31, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> On Jan 30, 4:28 pm, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
>> On 2012-01-30, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>> > On Jan 30, 9:43 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
>> >> On 2012-01-29, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>> >> > Do you not recall Woody Allen on "van Gogh"?

...

>> >> Seriously, one problem that English speakers often miss while trying
>> >> to pronounce the "gh" in some German/Dutch fashion is that the "G"
>> >> isn't a /g/.  (Wikipedia says [vɑn ˈɣɔχ].)
>>
>> > That's what makes the movie version even funnier -- it catches the
>> > obvious code-switch but not the one where you'd actually have to know
>> > Dutch in order to do it.
>>
>> True, but I doubt that many fans of _Manhattan_ (I think that's the
>> right film, anyway) know that.  (It's funny nonetheless, and I wasn't
>> aware of the pronunciation issue when I first saw it.)
>
> It's from Annie Hall. _Everything_ is from Annie Hall.

Well, the Marshall McLuhan thing is:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/quotes?qt0373304

(Unlike some people, I actually like his more slapstick work, like
_Sleeper_ & _Bananas_, as well as the supposedly better stuff.)

> Manhattan is the B&W Gershwin one, and Mariel Hemingway is in it
> somewhere.

I think you're mistaken, and the "like an Arab" line is in fact from
_Manhattan_:

http://livingincinema.com/2011/11/22/manhattan-1979/


ISTR Allen's wrote some parody Vincent/Theo letters too (probably in
_Without Feathers_).


--
Civilization is a race between catastrophe and education.
[H G Wells]

[Peter T. Daniels]

I don't know what "the 'like an Arab' line" is. And *Manhattan* is one
of the very few movies I've paid to see more than once!

The cello-player in the marching band is from one of the early ones.

[anal...@hotmail.com]

> Guido google:wugi- Hide quoted text -

>
> - Show quoted text -

I guess that explains why a hispanic chessplaying acquintance used to
call a bishop "bicho".

[Adam Funk]

On 2012-01-31, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> On Jan 31, 3:51 pm, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:

>> I think you're mistaken, and the "like an Arab" line is in fact from
>> _Manhattan_:
>>
>> http://livingincinema.com/2011/11/22/manhattan-1979/

See this thing ^^^ it's a "link" to a "web page".

> I don't know what "the 'like an Arab' line" is. And *Manhattan* is one
> of the very few movies I've paid to see more than once!

If you look at the link I gave up there:

Manhattan (1979) written and directed by Woody Allen Mariel
Hemingway as Tracy and Woody Allen as Isaac Davis.

...
Isaac: I’m mad because I don’t like that pseudo-intellectual
garbage that she… Pedantic! “Van Goch!” Did you hear that? She said
“Van Goch.” I couldn’t… Like an Arab she spoke. I couldn’t… And if
she had made one more remark about Bergman, I woulda knocked her
other contact lens out.

Is that not the Woody Allen line about how someone pronounces "van
Gogh" that you meant? (Did he do a different version in _Annie Hall_,
maybe?)



--
The internet is quite simply a glorious place. Where else can you find
bootlegged music and films, questionable women, deep seated xenophobia
and amusing cats all together in the same place? [Tom Belshaw]

[The General of the Faceless Anti-Franz Shadow Army]

On Jan 29, 11:27 pm, "wugi" <wugiB...@scarlet.be> wrote:
> Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> > Going off on a tangent here...
>
> > What's a "sh sound" in the first place?
>

> > I'm getting the impression that people aren't too fussy about the
> > sounds they subsume under /S/ as long as there's no contrast.  Is
> > English /S/ even [S]?  It seems substantially labialized to me.
> > Descriptions of Russian waver between [S] and retroflex s.
>
> > Is [S;] (curly c) a "sh sound"?
>
> > I recently noticed that when a French speaker pronounces a German
> > word with /S/, it actually sounds like /C/ to me.
>
> > It doesn't help that I'm natively confused about /S/ and /C/, because
> > I'm from a region of Germany where they are merged.  The result is
> > perceived as /S/, but I don't know what it is phonetically.
> > I remember somebody using the realization of /S/ by a well-known
> > politician from my hometown as an example of how to pronounce Polish
> > /S;/.

>
> What about Swedish? My "S. in 3 month" suggests "sh" for a number of cases
> in Swedish, as do most other courses I saw.

That is perfectly good in Finland. In Sweden, though, it is more like
the German ich sound.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Feb 1, 8:18 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> On 2012-01-31, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > On Jan 31, 3:51 pm, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> >> I think you're mistaken, and the "like an Arab" line is in fact from
> >> _Manhattan_:
>
> >>http://livingincinema.com/2011/11/22/manhattan-1979/
>
> See this thing ^^^ it's a "link" to a "web page".
>
> > I don't know what "the 'like an Arab' line" is. And *Manhattan* is one
> > of the very few movies I've paid to see more than once!
>
> If you look at the link I gave up there:
>
>    Manhattan (1979) written and directed by Woody Allen Mariel
>    Hemingway as Tracy and Woody Allen as Isaac Davis.
>
>    ...
>    Isaac: I’m mad because I don’t like that pseudo-intellectual
>    garbage that she… Pedantic! “Van Goch!” Did you hear that? She said
>    “Van Goch.” I couldn’t… Like an Arab she spoke. I couldn’t… And if
>    she had made one more remark about Bergman, I woulda knocked her
>    other contact lens out.
>
> Is that not the Woody Allen line about how someone pronounces "van
> Gogh" that you meant?  (Did he do a different version in _Annie Hall_,
> maybe?)

I remember it being in color, being Diane Keaton, and walking down a
street.

[yangg]

> street.-
***

At last something you're good at.

A.

[Ruud Harmsen]

António Marques <anton...@sapo.pt> schreef/wrote:

In my first encounters, I thought I heard stretches of German:
prugamma weiter minar.
and old English:
mooy two tard.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Of course it really was:
Muito boa tarde
and
Esse programa vai terminar.

Even then (1973? 1976?) I had deciphered that after a month or two, of
listening ten minutes every Sunday afternoon. There were no other
possibilities to hear the language spoken.
--
Ruud Harmsen,
http://rudhar.com/new

[Ruud Harmsen]

"pauljk" <paul....@xtra.co.nz> schreef/wrote:

>Later I drove her North where she spent several weeks with my family
>in my rented house. One day we were walking around the village
>and here and there she heard people standing in their front lawns
>talking over the fences with their neighbours. After a while she said:
>"I didn't know there we so many Gypsies living here."
>She knew no Romany but she would have heard it spoken by wine
>cellar musicians or such like. She refused to believe they spoke
>the same language as did people in London. To her it didn't
>sound Indo-European.

BTW, as you probably know, Romany IS an Indo-European language too.

[Ruud Harmsen]

>>> > On Jan 28, 9:53 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
>>> >> Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
>>> >> music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,
>>> >> and I think most English speakers who also know German would probably
>>> >> keep the /x/ in German personal names even in English contexts.

>On 2012-01-29, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>> Such code-switching is socially inappropriate. It marks the speaker as
>> snobbish.

It depends on the situation. I probably often mentioned the bilingual
presenters on Rádio Alfa. They speak Portuguese, but they things like
Porte de Clignancourt in accentless French in the middle of a
Portuguese sentence.

But what else could they do? Say it with a heavy Portuguese accent,
sounding as if they are mocking their parents or grandparents? Why?
Just for not sounding snobbish?

OTOH, I say website with a Dutch w, as if the word were wepsaait. That
seems natural to me. With Word however, I try to use some imitation,
which sounds akward.

>Sometimes that's the motivation, but certainly not always. Haven't
>you previously said that it's respectful to pronounce other people's
>names as closely as possible to the way they pronounce them?

http://rudhar.com/fonetics/iberx/arantxnl.htm
http://rudhar.com/fonetics/iberx/arant2nl.htm

[Ruud Harmsen]

"anal...@hotmail.com" <anal...@hotmail.com> schreef/wrote:

>Interesting info about 'x' in Old English
>
>http://books.google.com/books?id=Ci9qOY9BDWsC&pg=PA254&lpg=PA254#v=onepage&q&f=false
>

>"Unlike Old English /x/ which contrasts with /k/, odl Elnglish [?] is
>not contrasntive with [g]"

Still so in modern day Frisian.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Feb 1, 3:32 pm, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.com> wrote:
> >>> > On Jan 28, 9:53 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> >>> >> Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
> >>> >> music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,
> >>> >> and I think most English speakers who also know German would probably
> >>> >> keep the /x/ in German personal names even in English contexts.
> >On 2012-01-29, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> >> Such code-switching is socially inappropriate. It marks the speaker as
> >> snobbish.
>
> It depends on the situation. I probably often mentioned the bilingual
> presenters on Rádio Alfa. They speak Portuguese, but they things like
> Porte de Clignancourt in accentless French in the middle of a
> Portuguese sentence.

Then evidently code-switching has a different social meaning in
Portugal than in the US. Don't you recall the discussion of the video
of the German newscaster dissolving into "English"?

> But what else could they do? Say it with a heavy Portuguese accent,
> sounding as if they are mocking their parents or grandparents? Why?
> Just for not sounding snobbish?

What would a "heavy Portuguese accent" used by a Portuguese-speaker
be?

> OTOH, I say website with a Dutch w, as if the word were wepsaait. That
> seems natural to me. With Word however, I try to use some imitation,
> which sounds akward.
>
> >Sometimes that's the motivation, but certainly not always.  Haven't
> >you previously said that it's respectful to pronounce other people's
> >names as closely as possible to the way they pronounce them?

No, I would have said it was appropriate to use the closest available
native phonemes resembling the foreign phonemes.

[yangg]

On Feb 1, 9:32 pm, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.com> wrote:
> >>> > On Jan 28, 9:53 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> >>> >> Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
> >>> >> music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,
> >>> >> and I think most English speakers who also know German would probably
> >>> >> keep the /x/ in German personal names even in English contexts.
> >On 2012-01-29, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> >> Such code-switching is socially inappropriate. It marks the speaker as
> >> snobbish.

***

The USA is certainly the country where stupidity is the only thing
socially appropriate.

A.
***

>
> It depends on the situation. I probably often mentioned the bilingual
> presenters on Rádio Alfa. They speak Portuguese, but they things like
> Porte de Clignancourt in accentless French in the middle of a
> Portuguese sentence.
>
> But what else could they do? Say it with a heavy Portuguese accent,
> sounding as if they are mocking their parents or grandparents? Why?
> Just for not sounding snobbish?
>

***

I once had a teacher from Portugal who said Franco-Portuguese speak
horrendous Portuguese.

A.

[António Marques]

Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.com> wrote:
>>>>> On Jan 28, 9:53 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
>>>>>> music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,
>>>>>> and I think most English speakers who also know German would probably
>>>>>> keep the /x/ in German personal names even in English contexts.
>
>> On 2012-01-29, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>>> Such code-switching is socially inappropriate. It marks the speaker as
>>> snobbish.
>
> It depends on the situation. I probably often mentioned the bilingual
> presenters on Rádio Alfa. They speak Portuguese, but they things like
> Porte de Clignancourt in accentless French in the middle of a
> Portuguese sentence.
>
> But what else could they do? Say it with a heavy Portuguese accent,
> sounding as if they are mocking their parents or grandparents? Why?
> Just for not sounding snobbish?

I find it strange - the thing, not the claim: it fite in with my
experience. The decent thing to do is to approximate the pronunciation with
the phonemes of the main language*, so 'Porte de Cinhancurre' just as if
those were Portuguese words (Porte and de even exist!), which is not the
same as saying them I. French with an accent. But of course that would be
the decent thing to do in Portugal; it's apparently different when you're
abroad.

For instance, should I happen to have to mention the English name of the
Jerusalem Bible in a Portuguese conversation, I'd say the pseudo portuguese
words djerúzalame báibal.

> OTOH, I say website with a Dutch w, as if the word were wepsaait. That
> seems natural to me. With Word however, I try to use some imitation,
> which sounds akward.
>
>> Sometimes that's the motivation, but certainly not always. Haven't
>> you previously said that it's respectful to pronounce other people's
>> names as closely as possible to the way they pronounce them?
>
> http://rudhar.com/fonetics/iberx/arantxnl.htm
> http://rudhar.com/fonetics/iberx/arant2nl.htm
>



--

Sent from one of my newsreaders

[anal...@hotmail.com]

On Feb 1, 3:37 pm, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.com> wrote:
> "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com> schreef/wrote:

>
> >Interesting info about 'x' in Old English
>

> >http://books.google.com/books?id=Ci9qOY9BDWsC&pg=PA254&lpg=PA254#v=on...

>
> >"Unlike Old English /x/ which contrasts with /k/, odl Elnglish [?] is
> >not contrasntive with [g]"
>
> Still so in modern day Frisian.
>
> --
> Ruud Harmsen,http://rudhar.com/new

how come my original post (and the book) shows <gamma> and your reply
<question mark> ?

So the voiced velar fricative contrasts with [g] in today's Frisian?

[pauljk]

"Ruud Harmsen" <r...@rudhar.com> wrote in message
news:qi7ji71qsgjf3af5p...@4ax.com...

Oh yes, of course I do, but my mother didn't and wouldn't believe me if
tried to tell her it was. :-)

pjk

[pauljk]

<anal...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:81336d18-5617-41c5...@l1g2000vbc.googlegroups.com...

> On Feb 1, 3:37 pm, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.com> wrote:
>> "analys...@hotmail.com" <analys...@hotmail.com> schreef/wrote:
>>
>> >Interesting info about 'x' in Old English
>>
>> >http://books.google.com/books?id=Ci9qOY9BDWsC&pg=PA254&lpg=PA254#v=on...
>>
>> >"Unlike Old English /x/ which contrasts with /k/, odl Elnglish [?] is
>> >not contrasntive with [g]"
>>
>> Still so in modern day Frisian.
>>
>> --
>> Ruud Harmsen,http://rudhar.com/new
>
> how come my original post (and the book) shows <gamma> and your reply
> <question mark> ?

Your original post was in charset=UTF-8.
The gamma got screwed up because Ruud posted his answer in charset=us-ascii.

pjk

[Ruud Harmsen]

>> >>> > On Jan 28, 9:53 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
>> >>> >> Generally, but quite a few English speakers interested in classical
>> >>> >> music learn to make /x/ or an approximation for Pachelbel, Bach, &c.,
>> >>> >> and I think most English speakers who also know German would probably
>> >>> >> keep the /x/ in German personal names even in English contexts.

>On Feb 1, 3:32 pm, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.com> wrote:
>> >On 2012-01-29, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>> >> Such code-switching is socially inappropriate. It marks the speaker as
>> >> snobbish.

>> It depends on the situation. I probably often mentioned the bilingual
>> presenters on Rádio Alfa. They speak Portuguese, but they things like
>> Porte de Clignancourt in accentless French in the middle of a
>> Portuguese sentence.

"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> schreef/wrote:

>Then evidently code-switching has a different social meaning in
>Portugal than in the US.

In France. The station is based in Paris, most programs are in
Portuguese, some in French. Most commercials are in French, even in
the Portuguese spoken programs. There is traffic info and there are
accouncements of concerts and feasts etc., where of course they cannot
avoid using French geographical names.

Most presenters are probably children and grand-children of 1950-1970
immigrants. All fully bilingual, although some seem to uncomfortable
with Portuguese, and stick to French even if their guests don't.

>Don't you recall the discussion of the video
>of the German newscaster dissolving into "English"?

I do.

>> But what else could they do? Say it with a heavy Portuguese accent,
>> sounding as if they are mocking their parents or grandparents? Why?
>> Just for not sounding snobbish?
>
>What would a "heavy Portuguese accent" used by a Portuguese-speaker
>be?

A Portuguese accent when saying French names. Porte de Clignancourt
with apical r's, a shorter [u] at the end and <an> = [3~] instead of
[A~], for example. But they don't, they say it in accentless French.
Because they were probably born in Paris, went to school there and
never heard those names other than in French.

Ref:
http://radioalfa986.net/ (for Google: here starts the new URL):
http://www.point-sys.org/radioalfa/player/player_alfa.html

(The other three channels are music only, no presenters.)

[Ruud Harmsen]

>"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> schreef/wrote:
>>Then evidently code-switching has a different social meaning in
>>Portugal than in the US.

I know of two Dutch radio/tv personalities who speak (almost)
accentless Dutch but spent much of their childhood in the States: Adam
Curry and Eva Jinek. (The latter with Czech parents). They both say
English names and loan words in Dutch in conspicuously accentless
American English.

It doesn't sound snobbish when _they_ do it, because everybody knows
about their background.

(Eva Jinek, by the way, is only 99,5 percent accentless in Dutch: most
of the time I hear nothing special about it, but occasionally she
hesitates with the r. Uvular and native sounding most of the time, but
sometimes apical which then seems to sound English, perhaps even
British. My own Dutch r is apical too, but doesn't sound English at
all.)

[Ruud Harmsen]

>"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> schreef/wrote:
>>Then evidently code-switching has a different social meaning in
>>Portugal than in the US.

What about Netanyahu? His English seems 100% accentless American
English to me, very different from the heavy Hebrew accent of people
like Barak and Peres.

I can't remember having heard it, but perhaps somebody knows: if
Netanyahu mentions an English name in Hebrew, does he fake a heavy
Hebrew accent or does he simply say it in English, HIS English? I
expect the latter.

Is that snobbish or natural?

(Now going to look up the exact spelling of his name, and if he really
has a US background.)

[Ruud Harmsen]

Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.com> schreef/wrote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Netanyahu
==
Between 1956 and 1958, and again in 1963–67,[9] his family lived in
the United States in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, a suburb of
Philadelphia, where he attended and graduated from the Cheltenham High
School and was active in a debate club. To this day, he speaks
American English with a Philadelphia accent.
==
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Netanyahu#cite_note-Gresh-9

(The Dutch Wikipedia says Minnesota. Is Philadelphia in or near
Minnesota? No, sorry, not Minnesota but Minneapolis:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Netanyahu#Jeugd_en_opleiding