4 ms·

I’m not a linguistic but there seems to be an amazing ambiguity around I, E and Y. The English E covers е, и, (roughly) ы in Russian. The English y covers the

by ljm 7y ago

I’m not a linguistic but there seems to be an amazing ambiguity around I, E and Y. The English E covers е, и, (roughly) ы in Russian. The English y covers the same but also partially у and ё. When you get to dialectic English, then all of those vowels have different vocalisations or they otherwise don’t exist. And in all cases Y is a vowel and the same as J. I love languages and linguistics and this kind of thing. What’s more, take this to Spain and South America and in Castellano your ‘ll’ is more like an English ‘y’, but in Latin American it’s more of a ‘dj’ or an English ‘j’.

jdmichal 7y ago
What you're seeing is the fact that /j/ (English Y as in <you>) is a semivowel, which is paired with /i/ (English long-E as in <feet>). This means that the sounds are almost exactly the same -- the consonant version tends to be a bit more restricted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel EDIT: Also, the Spanish <ll> as /ʒ/ (S in English treasure) is not nearly as extent in South America as you might think. It's still mostly limited to Argentina and Uruguay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo#She%C3%ADsmo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo#She%C3%ADsmo EDIT EDIT: I misread the symbols a bit, and in other areas of South and Central America it's /ʝ/ instead of /ʒ/, which is not a very big difference at all. (Palatal vs postalveolar... Basically neighbors.)
- DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
  > Also, the Spanish <ll> as /ʒ/ (S in English treasure) is not nearly as extent in South America as you might think. It's still mostly limited to Argentina and Uruguay: In Puerto Rican Spanish (at least, my grandmother's family's accent), the <ll> is more of a /dʒj/ sort of thing. "llama" comes out to "djyamma", with the "dj" softened significantly. Not sure how to express that more precisely in IPA, though.
  - jdmichal 7y ago
    Maybe /ʝ/? That's the palatal version of /ʒ/, which explains your desire to add a /j/ in there. The Wikipedia I linked is about the merging of <ll> and <y> to /ʝ/ if you want to read more. Interestingly, I don't hear this a lot in the northern Mexican Spanish I hear, even though all of Central America is marked as merged. I didn't read it correctly the first time, and I was wrong to call it out in the first place. The difference between /ʝ/ and /ʒ/ is not so big for me to have said anything.
  - ljm 7y ago
    That was precisely what I was trying to allude to :) ‘ll’ is a soft ‘dj’ in Columbia also.
heavenlyblue 7y ago
I find it fascinating how Greek ф became th in English and then was again reinvented as F. But English still pronounce all of the Greek ф’s as th.
- DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
  Phi is, I believe, pronounced as a voiceless bilabial fricative, which does not exist in English. Instead, we have the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/. If I remember my phonology correctly, Japanese uses the bilabial sound but in romanized text it's spelled with an f, which causes English speakers to use the labiodental sound. Not sure why phi would be mapped to the voiceless interdental fricative ("th") though. I thought that came from theta. But I have not studied Greek, so I really don't know haha.
  - jdmichal 7y ago
    Modern Greek uses /f/ also. It was only /ɸ/ for a brief transition period. Spanish, however, uses the voiced version /β/ as an alternation for /b/, hence <Cuba> /kuβa/. (This is sometimes described as a mumble, since it's not a very common sound in Indo-European languages and people don't know how to interpret it.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology (Click through the "stop consonant" sections.)
    - mcswell 7y ago
      FWIW, some (most? all? the one's I've heard, at any rate) Spanish dialects pronounce the letter 'f' as a voiceless bilabial fricative (I almost wrote 'phricative'). E.g. fotografia (sorry about the missing accent). The letters 'b' and the 'v' are pronounced in Spanish as voiced bilabial fricatives after a vowel, and as stops after a nasal consonant (which in that position will be pronounced as [m]), and generally in utterance-initial position.
- jdmichal 7y ago
  I'm unsure what you mean by this... English <th> is inherited from Proto-Germanic, not Greek. Also, did you mean Greek θ (theta)? θ started as aspirated /tʰ/, and it's a pretty common sound change for aspiration to become a fricative, in this case /θ/. φ also made a similar journey from /pʰ/ to /ɸ/ to /f/.

by ljm 7y ago

jdmichal 7y ago

What you're seeing is the fact that /j/ (English Y as in <you>) is a semivowel, which is paired with /i/ (English long-E as in <feet>). This means that the sounds are almost exactly the same -- the consonant version tends to be a bit more restricted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel EDIT: Also, the Spanish <ll> as /ʒ/ (S in English treasure) is not nearly as extent in South America as you might think. It's still mostly limited to Argentina and Uruguay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo#She%C3%ADsmo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo#She%C3%ADsmo EDIT EDIT: I misread the symbols a bit, and in other areas of South and Central America it's /ʝ/ instead of /ʒ/, which is not a very big difference at all. (Palatal vs postalveolar... Basically neighbors.)

DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
> Also, the Spanish <ll> as /ʒ/ (S in English treasure) is not nearly as extent in South America as you might think. It's still mostly limited to Argentina and Uruguay: In Puerto Rican Spanish (at least, my grandmother's family's accent), the <ll> is more of a /dʒj/ sort of thing. "llama" comes out to "djyamma", with the "dj" softened significantly. Not sure how to express that more precisely in IPA, though.
- jdmichal 7y ago
  Maybe /ʝ/? That's the palatal version of /ʒ/, which explains your desire to add a /j/ in there. The Wikipedia I linked is about the merging of <ll> and <y> to /ʝ/ if you want to read more. Interestingly, I don't hear this a lot in the northern Mexican Spanish I hear, even though all of Central America is marked as merged. I didn't read it correctly the first time, and I was wrong to call it out in the first place. The difference between /ʝ/ and /ʒ/ is not so big for me to have said anything.
- ljm 7y ago
  That was precisely what I was trying to allude to :) ‘ll’ is a soft ‘dj’ in Columbia also.

heavenlyblue 7y ago

I find it fascinating how Greek ф became th in English and then was again reinvented as F. But English still pronounce all of the Greek ф’s as th.

DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
Phi is, I believe, pronounced as a voiceless bilabial fricative, which does not exist in English. Instead, we have the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/. If I remember my phonology correctly, Japanese uses the bilabial sound but in romanized text it's spelled with an f, which causes English speakers to use the labiodental sound. Not sure why phi would be mapped to the voiceless interdental fricative ("th") though. I thought that came from theta. But I have not studied Greek, so I really don't know haha.
- jdmichal 7y ago
  Modern Greek uses /f/ also. It was only /ɸ/ for a brief transition period. Spanish, however, uses the voiced version /β/ as an alternation for /b/, hence <Cuba> /kuβa/. (This is sometimes described as a mumble, since it's not a very common sound in Indo-European languages and people don't know how to interpret it.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology (Click through the "stop consonant" sections.)
  - mcswell 7y ago
    FWIW, some (most? all? the one's I've heard, at any rate) Spanish dialects pronounce the letter 'f' as a voiceless bilabial fricative (I almost wrote 'phricative'). E.g. fotografia (sorry about the missing accent). The letters 'b' and the 'v' are pronounced in Spanish as voiced bilabial fricatives after a vowel, and as stops after a nasal consonant (which in that position will be pronounced as [m]), and generally in utterance-initial position.
jdmichal 7y ago
I'm unsure what you mean by this... English <th> is inherited from Proto-Germanic, not Greek. Also, did you mean Greek θ (theta)? θ started as aspirated /tʰ/, and it's a pretty common sound change for aspiration to become a fricative, in this case /θ/. φ also made a similar journey from /pʰ/ to /ɸ/ to /f/.