Dec 8, 2011
Dear nasalized vowels,
Why can't you just have predictable spectrograms, like aspiration contrasts?
Sincerely, Exhausted linguistics student squinting at formant bandwidths
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Dear nasalized vowels,
Why can't you just have predictable spectrograms, like aspiration contrasts?
Sincerely, Exhausted linguistics student squinting at formant bandwidths
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Le français, a "word-final stress" language.
Prof: CApitaNO.
Italian student: No, the stress is wrong. CA...pitano.
Prof: CA... pitaNO. How's that?
Italian student: Uh, not really.
Prof: Oh well, never mind. These are the rest: caRAttere, capiTAno, capitaNO.
All students: (nod)
Prof: CApitaNO. I just can't get that one. I practised all afternoon!
All students: (aww)
Prof: Anyway, I can do this one. Si bistiCCIAvano un GIORno il VENto di tramonTAna e il SOle... yes, the North Wind and the Sun are still disputing.
“Today's French word of the day is chaleur. It can be written as [ʃalœʀ]. It means... what is the English word... heat. It means heat. It is so hot today!”
— Prof Vilain, who is French, and whose hilarity makes a Friday 3-4pm lecture slot much more bearable. I wish she wasn't just a visiting prof.
After a hard day's work, I can now do clicks, Xhosa-style.
Currently choking on breathy- and creaky-voiced consonants.
if you are an Experienced Linguist, hear my grateful cry
I need a microphone/voice recorder to get sound samples for my Ling 110 term project. What has reasonable quality (i.e. analyzable with Praat), is somewhat portable, and isn't too expensive? Any suggestions?
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[ɦɪnd̪i]
Today I had my first session with my 'language consultant' for the Ling 110 term project.
The project:
Find a native speaker of a language you don't know (that isn't commonly taught in American high schools, i.e. not French/German/Italian/Spanish), and try to figure out the phonetics, phonology and some suprasegmentals of that language.
Otherwise known as 'intro to fieldwork'.
Thankfully, my 'language consultant' is simply a very good friend who was actually the subject of someone's Ling 110 project last fall, so he has an idea of how many times he'll have to repeat a word while I mangle it repeatedly.
The good thing about Hindi is that its vowel system isn't too different from that of English. The consonants, however, are another thing entirely. I seem to be proficient enough in producing retroflex stops, but the retroflex flap [ɽ] is really causing me problems. Then there's aspirated [b], which I can only get right by accident, never intentionally.
The other difficult consonants are dentals – Hindi is one of the few languages that have true dentals, i.e. the tongue does not touch the alveolar ridge at all. Plus, Hindi distinguishes differences between [t̪] and [d̪] and their aspirated forms. Mandarin has [t̪ʰ], which is somewhat helpful, but only just somewhat.
My admiration of all my professors who document rare languages has just shot up. Immensely. You can know how hard a task is but not feel it until you try doing it.