questions not many people ask

[fox]

"Is that supposed to be a semi-vowel or a voiced palatal affricate?"

When I'm in charge of the world, IPA will be compulsory for all phonetic transcriptions. The fact that in English we don't have the sound German spells with a u-umlaut and French spells with a u -- a high front rounded vowel -- will not give us license to be utter sissies and appropriate the symbol [y] for the sound that begins the word "yowza". The symbol for that is [j], and I'm fed up with seeing that symbol for the sound that begins the word "jitter." It confuses me, and I don't like being confused.

That is all.

Comments

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

'yogh' being more or less a cursive 'z' -- the z-thing with the tail of a g hanging down below the line. Yogh is pronounced the same as z-wedge, and is probably actually more correct, just as it's more correct to use esh (the stretched-out 's' that looks like an f without a cross-bar) instead of s-wedge.

Right?

(Delighted by the solution to the affricate problem, by the way -- phonetics vs. phonology. Of course. The business with the palatal stops was driving me bonkers ... which just goes to show that I deserved that C I got in phonetics sophomore year after all. [g])

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

Right?

Yup.

(Delighted by the solution to the affricate problem, by the way -- phonetics vs. phonology. Of course. The business with the palatal stops was driving me bonkers ... which just goes to show that I deserved that C I got in phonetics sophomore year after all. [g])

Evil, evil phonetics. I've found that the further you go in phonology, the less it matters how things actually sound.

Which is a very good thing, since I can't reliably pronounce any of the sounds I'm planning to do my dissertation on...