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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2000
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Not only helps but takes me back twenty years to my linguistis course!. A very clear exposition, thank you jheem (apart from a slight confusion between which bit of the mouth is upper and which lower concerning the pronunciation of /f/ - it is lower labial with upper dental, rather than the other way.) I tried it the way you described and it made me feel disctinctly neanderthal! 
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veteran
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veteran
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Thanks for the correction. My head was upside down and my body quite coffeeless when I wrote the description, but yes, upper row of teeth and lower lip. I guess you could have a language that used dento-labial (not a term) fricatives. They do kinda sound similar.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
Usually called a stop these days rather than a plosive, in English anyway.
I allus think stop was reserved for syllable final, but I guess it's just another example of a society being generally as lax as its language (Seufz!).
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veteran
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veteran
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I allus think stop was reserved for syllable finalI ran across a phonological term I'd never heard used in the way it was before: implosive s. In Iberian linguistics this means a syllable final {s}. I wouldn't say that plosive is inaccurate, it just sounds quaintly old-fashioned. Which when being pedantic, I guess might be something to aim for.  There's also the 19th century terms: tenuis/media (lit. 'thin'/'middle') and fortis/lenis (lit. 'strong', 'soft') for voiceless/voiced (unaspirated) stops and voiceless/voiced. They're originally from Classical Greek and Latin linguistic terminology. And then there's the whole Indian/Sanskrit grammarian tradition and terminology.
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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fortis/lenis (lit. 'strong', 'soft') for voiceless/voiced (unaspirated) stops
We had a big go-round about these terms on wordorigins a bit back. Someone kept referring to 'hard' and 'soft' versions of some stop. The proponents of this terminology claimed that it was intuitive and that any child would automatically know which was which, but that 'voiced/unvoiced' would cause confusion. I still have to stop and think when faced with 'hard' and 'soft'.
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veteran
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The proponents of this terminology claimed that it was intuitive and that any child would automatically know which was which
Yes, the terms we learned early on are always the most logical, the easiest to retain and understand, etc. It's how the language we speak from birth just happens to be the best suited for communication, argumentation, etc. There's a French linguist, whose name I've forgotten, who seriously argued that French was the most logical language because word order in sentences was the same as the sequence of one's thoughts. I have the same momentary confusion with open and closed vowels (used mainly in Romance linguistics).
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Joined: Sep 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Hey thanks jheem. I appreciate the information. I haven't followed the thread much since I wasn't sure of what everybody was talking about and hadn't had a chance to look every thing up.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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the terms we learned early on are always the most logical
I believe they were claiming that children previously unexposed to the concept of voiced/unvoiced //hard/soft consonants would understand the latter terminology without explanation.
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veteran
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veteran
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I believe they were claiming that children previously unexposed to the concept of voiced/unvoiced //hard/soft consonants would understand the latter terminology without explanation
Uh-huh, yeah, sure. The way I've heard hard-soft used has to do with whether a grapheme {c} / {g} is pronounced as a stop /k/, /g/ or an (af)fricate /s/, /dZ/. Should be an easy experiment to set up. All we need is some children who haven't been exposed to English grammatical pedagogy.
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journeyman
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journeyman
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