Re: permissible syllable codas in major world languages)?

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Paul J Kriha wrote:
Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1166053118.040197.164750@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Brian M. Scott wrote:
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:].
Then what are the acutes doing on both the Russian and the Czech
versions?
Because Martina is(was then) Czech and doesn't speak Russian. :-)

In the sentence
"I am not Russian, my name is Navrátilová, not Navratilóva",
did you want me to type the last word in cyrillic?

No, I wanted the same symbol (acute accent) to have the same denotation
in both the Czech and the Russian example! And since I know that length
isn't phonemic in Russian but stress is, why wouldn't it be stress that
you were marking in Russian?

Keeping to the same orthography I hoped to make it clear
what she was objecting to. From her point of view it was
the vowel lengths moving around corrupting her name into
a complete gobbledygook.

We have a very nice symbol for that, and you don't even have to depart
from ASCII: <:>.

(Actually, I believe that it's ['navra:,tilo,va:], but I'm
not sure how strong the secondary stresses are.).
Thanks, Brian, that's exactly right. I commented on the
secondary stress in another note. It is more likely to
be present in slow formal speech.

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

If I remember it right she may have been happy with
['martina] with [t] instead of palatalized [t^] as the wrong
syllabic lengths sound noticeably more annoying.

The American interviewer, of course, wouldn't have the slightest
awareness of differing syllabic lengths. Perhaps a British interviewer
would! (If length is in fact the important differandum in BrE vowel
phonology.)

I doubt if they would. We *talk* about long vowels, but what we generally mean is /@U/ as opposed to /A./ or /aI/ as opposed to /i/.

Actual length differences (eg between <bad> and <bat>) are unnoticed by all except linguists. (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which meaning of 'linguist').

Colin

Colin
.

Relevant Pages

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