Re: permissible syllable codas in major world languages)?

On 13 Dec 2006 11:01:45 -0800, "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:1166036505.695456.216050@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in sci.lang:

Colin Fine wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Paul J Kriha wrote:

P.S. I remember watching an interview with Navrátilová
in the early years of her career. She corrected the interviewer:
"I am not Russian, my name is Navrátilová, not Navratilóva"
The sports reporter didn't understand what she was talking
about, he probably couldn't hear any difference between
those two names, let alone understand why would one
be Russian and the other Czech.

"And my name is Martina, not Martýna!" :-)))

[...]

If it was an interview in English, the interviewer would indeed have
understood the difference between English nav-ra-ti-LO-va and Czech
na-VRA-ti-lo-va, because stress is phonemic in English as in Russian,
but would have had difficulty pronouncing the native form because of
its unfamiliarity. (E.g pav-LO-va is a familiar name).

Err ... no.

The difference is between nav-ra-ti-LO-va and NAV-rah-ti-lo-vah.

That's not what Paul wrote.

Paul didn't indicate stress at all: the Czech name, so far
as I can discover, is <Navrátilová> ['navra:tilova:].
(Actually, I believe that it's ['navra:,tilo,va:], but I'm
not sure how strong the secondary stresses are.).

And I gather that <Martina> is actually ['mart^ina], which
she was presumably contrasting with [mar'ti:n@].

Brian
.

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