palatals, alveolopalatals, and palatalized alveolars

[anna-hope]

palatals, alveolopalatals, and palatalized alveolars

[anna-hope]

Thanks for this analysis.

Indeed, I agree that an alveolar tap should not be given as +cont, because if it were continuous, it would be a trill.

As you might have noticed, Jason Riggle's original chart does not have any palatalised consonants. Rafael Abramovitz and I had to come up with a way to encode those for a project we were working on. At the time, we could not get any input from JR. We were definitely not sure that the way we encoded them was 100% correct, but it served our needs at the time, and that's what made it into this repository.

"Maybe we should ask Riggle what he thinks."

Ha. If you're at UChicago, you can try catching him in his office or obtain his schedule and stalk JR after class. Otherwise, getting in touch with him is near impossible -- he almost never replies to emails. But you are welcome to try and report back with results!

"(/ʃ/ is also -strident — maybe /ʃʲ/ should be as well?)"

I think it's actually us giving /ʃ/ as -strident that is a mistake, because a sibilant is by definition a strident. So, if you could submit a PR to fix that, I would appreciate it!

"Am I right in thinking /dʲ/–/ɾʲ/, /ç/–/ɕ/ and /ʝ/–/ʑ/ are more a matter of taste/convenience, and just more or less intractable in terms of features?"

It would seem to me that JR's chart simply does not provide enough binary features for us to encode all of these sounds perfectly. I don't know how to solve that, other than if we have input from a phonetician or find a relevant thesis/paper that resolves all of these conflicts.

[chronodm]

I think it's actually us giving /ʃ/ as -strident that is a mistake, because a sibilant is by definition a strident. So, if you could submit a PR to fix that, I would appreciate it!

Good catch, & can do. Shall I rename /ʃʲ/ while I'm at it?

[anna-hope]

Yes, thanks.

[chronodm]

Done. I'll close this. I posted a question on Linguistics StackExchange; if anything useful comes of it I can open another issue.

[anna-hope]

Actually, I would leave this open, because the broader questions remain to be answered.

[chronodm]

So (coming back to this after considerable time away), Wikipedia suggests /ɕ/ is +strident, which would differentiate it from /ç/, and instead have it collide with /ʃʲ/.

I think this might actually be correct, given the examples in the Japanese phonology article—I used to be moderately fluent in Japanese, with a pretty good accent, and there’s definitely a distinction between the palatalized /s/ they give as [ɕ] and the palatalized /h/ they give as [ç].

The Wikipedia article on alveolo-palatal consonants also says:

The letters ⟨ɕ⟩ and ⟨ʑ⟩ are essentially equivalent to ⟨ ʃʲ⟩ and ⟨ʒʲ⟩. They are the sibilant homologues of the pre-palatal fricatives [ç˖] and [ʝ˖].

So I propose making /ɕ/ +strident. If we make its voiced counterpart /ʑ/, that also solves the collision of /ʑ/ and /ʝ/. (Presumably it would then collide with /ʒʲ/, but /ʒʲ/ isn't in the table, so that's in the clear. Although one could also consider adding it—with features identical to the now-strident /ʑ/.)

[anna-hope]

Okay, please send a pull request.