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>>What is surprising is that glottal stops are rare in European languages much like the velar u sound of Korean, Japanese and Turkish which turns up again in some dialects of Irish and Scottish Gaelic of all places.<<
Actually, that "velar u sound" which you refer to, which is actually /M/, that is, a unrounded high (tense) back vowel, does also exist in English dialects as well. In particular, it exists in Californian English dialects such as Kirk's dialect.
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I've seen that sound in Korean transcribed as /M/ and /1/ but /1/ is most accurate according to how I hear most native Korean speakers say it and how my professors said it in my Korean classes. It's normally much fronter than /M/, probably because Korean also does have a true /u/, and having a phonemic contrast between /M/ and /u/, while not impossible, is probably disfavored in terms of linguistic typology and universals.
The orthographical representation of /1/ is 으 in 한글 ('Hangeul', the Korean alphabet), or "eu" in official Romanization.
As Travis said, my normal /u/ is actually quite fronted and unrounded, as is typical in many parts of the West and in particular, California. It's somewhere in between /M/ and /1/, but I usually just use /M/ to transcribe it.
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Oh, how tricky trying to choose what symbols to transcribe vowels with is! For example, at least here, what are traditionally marked as [{] and [E] in informal speech often take actual positions such that there is only a slight height contrast between them and where the most important actual contrast is actually a front-back contrast, such that one could *almost* map formal /{/ and /E/ to [E] and [3] for my very informal speech. In reality, the actual phones are slightly lower than cardinal [E] and somewhere between cardinal [E] and cardinal [3], respectively, in most informal speech.
Now what symbols should I use to mark said phones? Most of the time I tend to just use the more traditional [{] and [E], respectively, except in certain words which are unambiguously [E], such as very informal "yeah" and "can" (unreduced), which at times almost seem as they are actually /E/ and not /{/ phonemically due to the degree of shifting. Yet from a more theoretical rather than traditional approach it almost seems as if I might be better off using [E] and [3] instead of [{] and [E].
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Hehe, yes, choosing what symbols to use when transcribing can be tricky, especially with vowels. Like you, Travis, I tend to generally use the more traditional GAE-like transcriptions for vowels even tho in my typical speech they are shifted around some by the California Vowel Shift. Last night when I was ordering a pepperoni pizza I realized right after I said it that I had full-on [{] for the first vowel in "pepperoni" instead of [E] (so, using spelling I said "papperoni"). I was even surprised at how low it was, since for me it's not normally [{] but more like a lowered [E]. But that goes to show the possible range for vowels that are going thru a comprehensive chain shift.
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Re: "I've seen that sound in Korean transcribed as /M/ and /1/ but /1/ is most accurate according to how I hear most native Korean speakers say it and how my professors said it in my Korean classes." --- Kirk
I should have said that the IPA (International Phonetic Script) for the velar u sound is a letter that looks something like a square 'w' or the wide prongs of a pitchfork. Some phoneticists also write it as a 'u' with a curl above it.
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<<I should have said that the IPA (International Phonetic Script) for the velar u sound is a letter that looks something like a square 'w' or the wide prongs of a pitchfork. Some phoneticists also write it as a 'u' with a curl above it.>>
I'm not sure what you mean. I know of no such IPA symbol. The IPA vowel symbols are listed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel
Which one do you mean? And what's an example of a word it's used in (for any language)?
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Wikipedia, in your example, calls it a "back u" but nevertheless it appears frequently in IPA transcriptions of words in the Altaic languages, especially Korean, Japanese and Turkic (Turkish, Azeri, Uzbek, Tuvan, Uigyr, Yakut etc.).
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I don't know about Korean or any Turkic languages here, but the vowel you are speaking about in Japanese is not a far-back vowel of any sort but rather [M], that is, an unrounded high back vowel. But anyways, if one were to notationally mark any kind of rounded high far-back vowel in X-SAMPA, I would probably mark such as [u_-] or [u_e] (the latter corresponds to what you are talking about).
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<<Wikipedia, in your example, calls it a "back u" but nevertheless it appears frequently in IPA transcriptions of words in the Altaic languages, especially Korean, Japanese and Turkic (Turkish, Azeri, Uzbek, Tuvan, Uigyr, Yakut etc.).>>
Do you mean /ɯ/ (which is /M/ in X-SAMPA)? It's a high-back unrounded vowel.
That's the symbol I use to transcribe my vowel in words like "food" or "hoot," tho mine's actually fronter than that.
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<<Last night when I was ordering a pepperoni pizza I realized right after I said it that I had full-on [{] for the first vowel in "pepperoni" instead of [E] (so, using spelling I said "papperoni"). I was even surprised at how low it was, since for me it's not normally [{] but more like a lowered [E]. But that goes to show the possible range for vowels that are going thru a comprehensive chain shift.>>
And compare that with Australia, where the complete opposite process has occurred and [E] has turned into [e]. And they say that English dialects are converging! ;-)
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<<I should have said that the IPA (International Phonetic Script)>>
Not to seem pedantic, but it's the International Phonetic *Alphabet*, not the International Phonetic Script, which you have repeatedly called it. One time you referred to the "International Phonetic Script" and I honestly didn't realize that we were talking about the same thing.
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>>And compare that with Australia, where the complete opposite process has occurred and [E] has turned into [e]. <<
As allophones in AusE, they are interchangeable. The relaxed [E] is more prevalent in my speech though.
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Lazar,
Re: "Not to seem pedantic, but it's the International Phonetic *Alphabet*, not the International Phonetic Script..."
Technically you are right but quibbling over someone else's diction is petty and almost always a waste of time... "Alphabet, alphabetic script, script, orthography, writing system" all mean basically the same thing.
and "...and I honestly didn't realize that we were talking about the same thing." That's a canard. I don't believe it.
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<<Technically you are right but quibbling over someone else's diction is petty and almost always a waste of time... "Alphabet, alphabetic script, script, orthography, writing system" all mean basically the same thing.>>
Well, the official name *is* International Phonetic Alphabet...
Also, no one's quibbling, just pointing out the name.
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