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| LEE Sau Dan... |
 Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 8:18 am |
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[quote]"Ruud" == Ruud Harmsen <rh at (no spam) rudhar.eu> writes:
And in much of northern France (at least Picardy and the N & NW
banlieue) /A~/ and /O~/ have collapsed together (i.e, "parlant"
and "parlons" are homophones).
[/quote]
Ruud> And so are the vowels in 'vin' and 'brun'? (Better examples
Ruud> welcomed).
"brin" vs. "brun".
Oh! I've been confused by this latter pair, because I don't hear the
difference but the dictionaries uses different IPA symbols for them.
(On the other hand, dictionaries use the same IPA symbol for the two
"a"s in "organisations", which I hear to be different!)
--
Lee Sau Dan §õ¦u´° ~{ at (no spam) nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee |
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| Ruud Harmsen... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 8:54 am |
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Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:18:17 +0800: LEE Sau Dan
<danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de>: in sci.lang:
[quote](On the other hand, dictionaries use the same IPA symbol for the two
"a"s in "organisations", which I hear to be different!)
[/quote]
I can't believe they are ever the same. I can't imagine there is ANY
dialect of English anywhere in the world where these vowels sound the
same. Here is one:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/organization
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com |
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| Ruud Harmsen... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 8:57 am |
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[quote]Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:18:17 +0800: LEE Sau Dan
danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de>: in sci.lang:
(On the other hand, dictionaries use the same IPA symbol for the two
"a"s in "organisations", which I hear to be different!)
[/quote]
Sorry, we were talking about the French word, weren't you? Then please
ignore my previous comment.
To me, these two a's are the same. But some variants of French still
have two a-like phonemes, rumour has it. Where exactly these occur
isn't easy to say.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com |
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| LEE Sau Dan... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 9:15 am |
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[quote]"Ruud" == Ruud Harmsen <rh at (no spam) rudhar.eu> writes:
(On the other hand, dictionaries use the same IPA symbol for the
two "a"s in "organisations", which I hear to be different!)
[/quote]
Ruud> To me, these two a's are the same. But some variants of French
Ruud> still have two a-like phonemes, rumour has it. Where exactly
Ruud> these occur isn't easy to say.
As I mentioned before, after a velar, the /a/ tends to be realized with
a sound closer to an [&]: "garçon", "gagner", "capital", "capitaine".
--
Lee Sau Dan æŽå®ˆæ•¦ ~{ at (no spam) nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee |
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| Adam Funk... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 9:27 am |
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On 2009-10-27, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
[quote]Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:56:56 +0000: Adam Funk <a24061 at (no spam) ducksburg.com>: in
sci.lang:
I'd always assumed it was a surname of non-French origin. According
to the Wikipedia article [1] the car engineer's father was a Dutch
Jewish diamond-cutter who moved to Paris. There's a bit more in the
article about the history of the name, which seems to have been
"Citroen" in Dutch.
Correct. Pronounced /sitrun/. The dots on the e are originally just a
fancy invention to make it look interesting.
[/quote]
One of those crazy French things. ;-)
I guess the dots also make it pronounceable in French (but
differently). I can't think of a French word with dotless "oen" and I
don't know how I would pronounce it if I ran into it.
[quote]And in much of northern France (at least Picardy and the N & NW
banlieue) /A~/ and /O~/ have collapsed together (i.e, "parlant" and
"parlons" are homophones).
And so are the vowels in 'vin' and 'brun'? (Better examples welcomed).
[/quote]
Those are distinct in the dialect I'm talking about.
--
It is probable that television drama of high caliber and produced by
first-rate artists will materially raise the level of dramatic taste
of the nation. (David Sarnoff, CEO of RCA, 1939; in Stoll 1995) |
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| Ruud Harmsen... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 9:43 am |
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Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:15:53 +0800: LEE Sau Dan
<danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de>: in sci.lang:
[quote]"Ruud" == Ruud Harmsen <rh at (no spam) rudhar.eu> writes:
(On the other hand, dictionaries use the same IPA symbol for the
two "a"s in "organisations", which I hear to be different!)
Ruud> To me, these two a's are the same. But some variants of French
Ruud> still have two a-like phonemes, rumour has it. Where exactly
Ruud> these occur isn't easy to say.
As I mentioned before, after a velar, the /a/ tends to be realized with
a sound closer to an [&]: "garçon", "gagner", "capital", "capitaine".
[/quote]
I agree, I hear that too. But then, of course that's a combinatory
effect, not phonemic. So whether dictionaries should mention it is
doubtful. Native speakers don't need that information and non-native
learners will be understood even if they do it very much different
than the natives.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com |
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| Ruud Harmsen... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 9:46 am |
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Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:27:41 +0000: Adam Funk <a24061 at (no spam) ducksburg.com>: in
sci.lang:
[quote]On 2009-10-27, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:56:56 +0000: Adam Funk <a24061 at (no spam) ducksburg.com>: in
sci.lang:
I'd always assumed it was a surname of non-French origin. According
to the Wikipedia article [1] the car engineer's father was a Dutch
Jewish diamond-cutter who moved to Paris. There's a bit more in the
article about the history of the name, which seems to have been
"Citroen" in Dutch.
Correct. Pronounced /sitrun/. The dots on the e are originally just a
fancy invention to make it look interesting.
One of those crazy French things. 
[/quote]
The trema (diaeresis( is originally Greek and is also used in Dutch,
in cases where something needs to be kept apart that means something
different in combination. But that's not the case in the Dutch word
and name [cC]itroen, because <oe> means /u/.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com |
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| LEE Sau Dan... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 10:37 am |
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[quote]"Ruud" == Ruud Harmsen <rh at (no spam) rudhar.eu> writes:
[/quote]
Ruud> The trema (diaeresis( is originally Greek and is also used in
Ruud> Dutch, in cases where something needs to be kept apart that
Ruud> means something different in combination. But that's not the
Ruud> case in the Dutch word and name [cC]itroen, because <oe> means
Ruud> /u/.
Shouldn't that be /U/, as in English "book" (Dutch "boek")?
--
Lee Sau Dan §õ¦u´° ~{ at (no spam) nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee |
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| António Marques... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 10:47 am |
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Ruud Harmsen wrote:
[quote]Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:27:41 +0000: Adam Funk<a24061 at (no spam) ducksburg.com>: in
sci.lang:
On 2009-10-27, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:56:56 +0000: Adam Funk<a24061 at (no spam) ducksburg.com>: in
sci.lang:
I'd always assumed it was a surname of non-French origin. According
to the Wikipedia article [1] the car engineer's father was a Dutch
Jewish diamond-cutter who moved to Paris. There's a bit more in the
article about the history of the name, which seems to have been
"Citroen" in Dutch.
Correct. Pronounced /sitrun/. The dots on the e are originally just a
fancy invention to make it look interesting.
One of those crazy French things. ;-)
The trema (diaeresis( is originally Greek and is also used in Dutch,
in cases where something needs to be kept apart that means something
different in combination. But that's not the case in the Dutch word
and name [cC]itroen, because<oe> means /u/.
[/quote]
Well, I'd say the diaeresis is there to point out that oe is not the
usual french oe digraph. Of course, [sitroEn] is even farther from the
original.
As long as I have the choice, I won't drive anything other than a Citroen. |
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| Christian Weisgerber... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 11:36 am |
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Adam Funk <a24061 at (no spam) ducksburg.com> wrote:
[quote]And in much of northern France (at least Picardy and the N & NW
banlieue) /A~/ and /O~/ have collapsed together (i.e, "parlant" and
"parlons" are homophones).
[/quote]
It is enlightening to read the pronunciation notes in a dictionary.
I think as a self-styled "teaching dictionary" Le Robert Micro is
somewhat conservative, but even its authors are forced to admit in
the fine print:
* The distinction between [a] and [A] is being lost.
* [ at (no spam) ] trends towards confusion with [W] and [Y], e.g. there is little
distinction between pairs such as these:
je dis [Z at (no spam) di] ~ jeudi [ZYdi]
je ne vaux rien [Z at (no spam) nvor"jE~] ~ jeune vaurien [ZYnvor"jE~]
* Many speakers don't any longer distinguish the close/open vowel
pairs ([e] ~ [E], [Y] ~ [W], [o] ~ [O]), in particular in non-final
syllables. The tendency is to have an open vowel in a closed
syllable, and a close vowel in an open syllable.
* The distinction between [E~] and [W~] (brin ~ brun) is disappearing,
with [E~] winning out.
Grevisse (14th ed.) has already abandonned the distinction between
[a] and [A], admitting that even among those speakers that continue
to make it, there is disagreement where to use which vowel. Other
comments echo those of Robert above, with some additional details
on the geographic distribution of the respective changes.
In short, the French vowel system is in various states of collapse.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy at (no spam) mips.inka.de |
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| Ruud Harmsen... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 12:24 pm |
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Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:37:19 +0800: LEE Sau Dan
<danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de>: in sci.lang:
[quote]"Ruud" == Ruud Harmsen <rh at (no spam) rudhar.eu> writes:
Ruud> The trema (diaeresis( is originally Greek and is also used in
Ruud> Dutch, in cases where something needs to be kept apart that
Ruud> means something different in combination. But that's not the
Ruud> case in the Dutch word and name [cC]itroen, because <oe> means
Ruud> /u/.
Shouldn't that be /U/, as in English "book" (Dutch "boek")?
[/quote]
I don't know, I find the true meaning of [U]-like sounds difficult.
What I do know is that the English and Dutch words do not sound
exactly the same, so if English has [U] here, Dutch apparently hasn't.
I have Dutch samples here
http://rudhar.com/lingtics/intrdutc/dutch.htm , of boek (book), and
also of voet (foot), goed (good), hoed (hat), roet (soot),
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com |
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| John Atkinson... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 4:58 pm |
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Ruud Harmsen wrote:
[quote]Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:37:19 +0800: LEE Sau Dan
danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de>: in sci.lang:
"Ruud" == Ruud Harmsen <rh at (no spam) rudhar.eu> writes:
Ruud> The trema (diaeresis( is originally Greek and is also used in
Ruud> Dutch, in cases where something needs to be kept apart that
Ruud> means something different in combination. But that's not the
Ruud> case in the Dutch word and name [cC]itroen, because <oe> means
Ruud> /u/.
Shouldn't that be /U/, as in English "book" (Dutch "boek")?
I don't know, I find the true meaning of [U]-like sounds difficult.
What I do know is that the English and Dutch words do not sound
exactly the same, so if English has [U] here, Dutch apparently hasn't.
The difference, or one of them, is presumably that Dutch <oe> is tense[/quote]
(or else long, depending on dialect?), like British English /u:/, while
English /U/ is short (or lax). AIUI, Dutch <oe> doesn't have a
corresponding closed back lax vowel, unlike a, e, i, o.
Does that make sense at all?
Also, in most of the English accents Ruud's likely to have heard (RP in
particular), /u:/ is pronounced rather forward, between [u:] and [y:] --
though not as far forward as Dutch <uu> of course!
[...]
John. |
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| Peter T. Daniels... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 5:07 pm |
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On Oct 27, 8:03 pm, John Atkinson <johna... at (no spam) bigpond.com> wrote:
[quote]Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Oct 27, 1:18 am, John Atkinson <johna... at (no spam) bigpond.com> wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
[...]
"Polysynthesis" refers to languages that pack more than one root into
a single word -- a feature of Dravidian languages, Eskimo-Aleut
languages, and various other families.
AIUI, "root" means what's left when a word is stripped of its
inflections. (I note that Wikipedia gives the alternative description:
"The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most
significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into
smaller constituents", which seems less useful.)
One of the unusual things about Eskimo-Aleut languages is that a word
can contain only a single "root" (no compound words at all), and
everything else in the word is suffixes, which have no independent
existence. Of course, this doesn't stop them being everyone's favourite
polysynthetic languages.
Dravidian languages (Tamil at least) certainly have compound words
containing more than one root, just as English and Chinese do. Tamil
nouns and verbs decline/conjugate using agglutinative suffixes in a
similar manner to Finnish and Turkish. Verbs don't agree with objects.
I don't think I've ever heard Tamil called "polysynthetic" as opposed
to simply "agglutinative" -- though I could be wrong.
Two dissertations were written at the University of Chicago
_simultaneously_ on precisely the same topic -- polysynthesis in Tamil
-- by Sanford Steever and Vijayarani Fedson.
Fair enough. That explains why "Dravidian" was the first example that
popped into your head above. (I guess I would have said "Tiwi", since
that's the one I'm most familiar with, and maybe added Classical Nahuatl
and Chukchi.)
Do you happen to remember what sort of morpheme-to-word ratios your
friends were coming up with for Tamil?
[/quote]
You're not suggesting I would have _read_ such things, are you?
You quote the Routledge volumes a lot -- surely Sandy quoted himself
in the introductory chapters. |
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| John Atkinson... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 6:03 pm |
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Peter T. Daniels wrote:
[quote]On Oct 27, 1:18 am, John Atkinson <johna... at (no spam) bigpond.com> wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
[...]
"Polysynthesis" refers to languages that pack more than one root into
a single word -- a feature of Dravidian languages, Eskimo-Aleut
languages, and various other families.
AIUI, "root" means what's left when a word is stripped of its
inflections. (I note that Wikipedia gives the alternative description:
"The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most
significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into
smaller constituents", which seems less useful.)
One of the unusual things about Eskimo-Aleut languages is that a word
can contain only a single "root" (no compound words at all), and
everything else in the word is suffixes, which have no independent
existence. Of course, this doesn't stop them being everyone's favourite
polysynthetic languages.
Dravidian languages (Tamil at least) certainly have compound words
containing more than one root, just as English and Chinese do. Tamil
nouns and verbs decline/conjugate using agglutinative suffixes in a
similar manner to Finnish and Turkish. Verbs don't agree with objects.
I don't think I've ever heard Tamil called "polysynthetic" as opposed
to simply "agglutinative" -- though I could be wrong.
Two dissertations were written at the University of Chicago
_simultaneously_ on precisely the same topic -- polysynthesis in Tamil
-- by Sanford Steever and Vijayarani Fedson.
Fair enough. That explains why "Dravidian" was the first example that[/quote]
popped into your head above. (I guess I would have said "Tiwi", since
that's the one I'm most familiar with, and maybe added Classical Nahuatl
and Chukchi.)
Do you happen to remember what sort of morpheme-to-word ratios your
friends were coming up with for Tamil?
[quote]
[...]
The definition usually given is that a polysynthetic language has an
unusually high morpheme (not "root") to word ratio.
[/quote]
John. |
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| Adam Funk... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 6:59 pm |
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On 2009-10-27, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
[quote]Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:27:41 +0000: Adam Funk <a24061 at (no spam) ducksburg.com>: in
sci.lang:
On 2009-10-27, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:56:56 +0000: Adam Funk <a24061 at (no spam) ducksburg.com>: in
sci.lang:
I'd always assumed it was a surname of non-French origin. According
to the Wikipedia article [1] the car engineer's father was a Dutch
Jewish diamond-cutter who moved to Paris. There's a bit more in the
article about the history of the name, which seems to have been
"Citroen" in Dutch.
Correct. Pronounced /sitrun/. The dots on the e are originally just a
fancy invention to make it look interesting.
One of those crazy French things. ;-)
The trema (diaeresis( is originally Greek and is also used in Dutch,
in cases where something needs to be kept apart that means something
different in combination.
[/quote]
And occasionally in Englsh: coöperation (now very rare). I don't
think it's nearly as common in Dutch as in French --- right?
[quote]But that's not the case in the Dutch word
and name [cC]itroen, because <oe> means /u/.
[/quote]
That's the crazy French thing I meant.
--
Usenet is a cesspool, a dung heap. [Patrick A. Townson] |
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