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Could have done what Serbian (and formerly Serbo-Croat) does: freely added letters to the Latin alphabet to match the required set of phonemes, so that there's
by waqf 9y ago
Could have done what Serbian (and formerly Serbo-Croat) does: freely added letters to the Latin alphabet to match the required set of phonemes, so that there's a one-to-one correspondence between the Latin orthography and the Cyrillic orthography.
(It doesn't solve the problem of missing letters and missing diacritics when trying to write your language using English letters only — but Serbs, Ukrainians etc. can't write their language correctly using only Russian letters either.)
- idlewords 9y agoWe just have more of this crap than other Slavic languages. Specifically: ś—sz ć—cz ź—rz/ż dź—dż Mandarin of all languages has this phonetic distinction, but I don't think any other Slavs kept the full set, on top of the nasals mjd wrote about.
- schoen 9y agoWikipedia says Mandarin has all of /t͡s/ ⟨z⟩, /ʈ͡ʂ/ ⟨zh⟩, /t͡ɕ/ ⟨j⟩, /t͡sʰ/ ⟨c⟩, /ʈ͡ʂʰ/ ⟨ch⟩, /t͡ɕʰ/ ⟨q⟩, /s/ ⟨s⟩, /ʂ/ ⟨sh⟩, and /ɕ/ ⟨x⟩, all contrastive. The fricative and affricate sounds in English that are kinda close to these are only /t͡ʃ/, /ʃ/, /s/, /t͡s/, /ʒ/, and /dʒ/. I think these contrasts represent a very underacknowledged difficulty for English speakers learning Mandarin, because we're used to thinking of tones as the only hard thing. I'm still struggling to properly pronounce a friend's name that I think begins with /ʈ͡ʂʰ/. Maybe Polish speakers can deal with this easily!
- yorwba 9y agoMy pronunciation of these consonants was improved a lot by reading the respective Wikipedia articles and imitating the described tongue position. That got me interested in the rest of the IPA, and for a while I spent idle time making strange sounds with my mouth. Retroflex consonants are still awkward, but at least I can produce them reliably. What's really hard for me are uvulars, they feel a bit like choking every time.
- schoen 9y agoI spent a long time learning to say [k'], and when I succeeded I had shirts made for myself and a friend who was practicing with me. They say: "I pronounced the velar ejective consonant [k'] and all I got was this [t']-shirt."
- magic_beans 9y agoEveryone in this thread was a Linguistics major then?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- schoen 9y agoI was a dropout, but I wish I had been a linguistics major! There was a post on Language Hat or Language Log where a professor recounted meeting a student who had linguistics "as a hobby", which was astonishing to the professor -- and the student explained that this was possible nowadays because of Wikipedia. (To which I could add, for some people because of the conlang community, or because of linguistics blogs!) Anyway, Wikipedia's coverage of linguistics topics is generally really excellent and detailed (maybe strongest in phonology, perhaps because of a few super-obsessed editors).
- waqf 9y agoYes, Polish is the worst. Serbian has ć—č and the voiced equivalent spelled đ—dž, but it doesn't have ś—š and it doesn't have nasals.
- ChemicalWarfare 9y agoI "think" these should be pretty close to Cyrillic ш/щ, ч and ж.
- waqf 9y agoIt's a trap! Roughly speaking, the ones on the right are those. The ones on the left are different and they correspond historically to something like сь, чь, зь (though the pronunciation is rather different from standard Russian pronunciation).
- ChemicalWarfare 9y agowell, sure, it's not uncommon even for ppl who speak the same language and use the same letters to pronounce things differently. the point is I don't think Latin vs Cyrillic in Poland's case was driven by Polish language phonetics per se. I would venture to guess this had more to do with political/religious affiliations etc.
- danielam 9y agoAbsolutely. Mieszko I chose to convert himself and his realm to the Roman faith for both political and religious reasons. Had he chosen to accept Christianity from the East (remember, this was pre-schism), it would have entailed the adoption of Cyrillic.
- idlewords 9y agoHalf of them are, the other half are the 'matching' pairs that don't exist in Russian (for example). Soft ш and ж, hard ч and щ.
- tdeck 9y agoCzech also did a great job of this (unfortunately the word Czech itself seems to come to English through the some other spelling system). A few years ago I tried to learn a bit of the language before travelling to Prague, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to learn to read and write.
- danielam 9y agoPrior to changes introduced by Jan Hus (in this case, the introduction of the háček), Czech shared digraphs that are still used in Polish. "Cz" is was ultimately replaced with "č". It is possible that the archaic form somehow made it into English and survived (though my sources tell me that the spelling has only been present in English since the 17th century, or after Hus' reforms).