Re: Latin pronunciation puzzle


"Franz Gnaedinger" <frgn@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...

> As for the f and ph. Be a child again for two minutes and
> use you lower lip against the upper teeth as an instrument:
> you can certainly produce plenty of different sounds, even
> without giving voice. You can vary the pressure of the lip
> against the teeth, and you can move the lip in many ways.
> The resulting sounds are never covered by just v and f,
> there are many sounds in between. And if you allow
> only v and f - where does the range of v end and the one
> of f begin? There is a ph in between, and a whole range
> of different ph's, between different v's and different f's:
> hhv hv v phhh phh ph f ff fff ... Now you can be an adult
> again. Please pronounce the words farm and pharmacy.
> When I do it, farm begins rather with ff, and pharmacy
> with a softer ph. I have to accentuate the f of farm, in
> order not to be misunderstood: was it arm or farm?

I find it difficult to imagine a sentence occurring in normal conversation
which would make sense if "farm" was replaced by "arm", or vice versa. That
is, the misunderstanding you suggest would probably never happen --
certainly not often enough for speakers to adjust their pronunciation every
time they say "farm" to guard against it.

> Yet even when I pronounce farmer, with a softer f
> than farm alone, it is still more accentuated than
> the begin of pharmacy.

It's not quite clear to me from what you say above whether the two "sounds",
which occur in your idiolect and which you denote by ff and ph, are in a
one-to-one correspondence with the spellings <f> and <ph> -- that is, are
all words spelled with <f> pronounced with ff (or close to it), and all
words spelled with <ph> pronounced with ph (or close to it)?

An experiment for you. Here's the only true minimal pairs I've been able to
find:

faze vs phase
flocks vs phlox
fillip vs Phillip
farm vs pharm

Listen to yourself saying uncontrived English sentences containing each of
these eight words (omit any pair where both words don't exist in your spoken
lexicon). In your speech, does each pair show the split you're talking
about?

Like the following (thanks, Google):

I didn't let her behavior faze me; I knew it was just a phase she was going
through.
The moths come in flocks, playing "follow the leader", zipping from one
clump of phlox to the next.
Mr Philip also said that the Government could provide a fillip to the
creation of such capacities through fiscal concessions.
Requiring farmers to have planters, combines, trucks and other on-farm
equipment dedicated solely to pharm crops would decrease the likelihood of
physical mixing on the farm.

BTW, Franz, what is your native language (and dialect)?

Finally. Do you believe in the concept of "phoneme"?

John.


.

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