IF:To convince myself that something indeed hides between the 's' and[cut]
the 'l' of pensəl I would have to record the word, pass it through an
oscilloscope, observe the Fourier wave decomposition of each of its
components and analyze its frequency and amplitude content.
JCR: Or you could just explain to me what difference you hear between the 's' and the 'l' of 'slate' with those of 'pencil'. I suspect that you can hear this difference but that you just believe it to be a 'tiny gap'.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- --------
---------------------------------------------------------------------- --------
James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew Thesis 1 - Aleppo codex machine translation
http://www.lamie.org/lad-sim.doc Thesis 2 - language acquisition simulation
---------------------------------------------------------------------- --------
---------------------------------------------------------------------- --------
On 9/19/07, Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu> wrote:
Jason,
First, it is XAG GAH, '[she] celebrated', not XAGIGAH, 'feast'.
The question, of course, it what constitutes a "vowel". A consonant
has breadth and may include some faint, involuntary, miniscule vocal
aftershocks, depending on its situation in a word. Articulating 'B'
by itself I do hear the sound of air resonating in my mouth even as
it is being ejected between my spread lips. But in the combination BG
the sound of this trailing puff of air is absorbed in the G and it
becomes BGADIM to my ear. It is possible that some people hear
"something", to wit: "the shortest and quickest to pronounce vowel
available to the human vocal system", between the 's' and the 'l' of
pensəl because this is how they articulate it. As said, I cannot hear
this whisper of the grass, this, audible to some, $IRAT HA(ASABIM. We
need to keep also in mind that the distance between hearing something
and dreaming of hearing it is very short [I am ignorant of the
essentials of the science of psychophonetics, but am occasionally
reproached that I hear only what I want to hear].
To convince myself that something indeed hides between the 's' and
the 'l' of pensəl I would have to record the word, pass it through an
oscilloscope, observe the Fourier wave decomposition of each of its
components and analyze its frequency and amplitude content. But I
will not do it since I am not interested in this esoteric science of
phonetics, which, I admit, should be nevertheless of great interest
to scientists working on computer speech recognition.
In any event, this discussion of the microscopic nature of this
metaphysical ə is irrelevant to Hebrew. As you know, a Hebrew speaker
overriding a schwa does it now by a premeditated, full-fledged vowel
and not by an incidental squeak. Thus, the question is if it should
be ,BGADIM, 'clothes', or B[E]GADIM, the same as M[E]GADIM, 'sweets,
gifts of the earth', is now commonly articulated.
I think that the pause in MacCoots is long and deliberate.
Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.