3 ms·
If ^ makes the 's' sound in summit, why is ^| = "she" and not "see"?
by 0xcafecafe 9y ago
If ^ makes the 's' sound in summit, why is ^| = "she" and not "see"?
- jdmichal 9y agoTL;DR: Palatalization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_%28sound_change%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_%28sound_change... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_phonology#Vowel_assimilation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_phonology#Vowel_assimil... That "ee" sound is known in IPA [0] as /i/. That sound is also the vowel counterpart to the semi-vowel /j/ [1, 2]. Within languages, /j/ has a tendency to palatize sounds. In the case of Korean, this has resulted in /s/ being conditioned to /ɕ/ before /i/, where /ɕ/ is the alveolo-palatal version of /s/. (This sound is technically different than "she", which is /ʃi/.) This process of moving where a sound is pronounced is actually known as "assimilation", but this particular case of assimilation is via a palatal sound. That's why there's actually two palatalization terms in linguistics -- the one I linked above and this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_%28phonetics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_%28phonetics%29 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... [1] English "y" sound, as in "you" /ju/. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel