ITT: Chagen rambles about lingustics stuff.

Chagen

To keep it out of the forum.

Okay, let's start with the glorious clusterfuck that was Ubykh.

Ubykh was a language spoken in the Caucaus mountains. It also, in my opinion, was the most crazy western language out there.

Seriously, look at that phonology. It's like God threw in whatever shit he wanted in there. Seriously, 12+ damn affricates WHAT THE FUCK.

Just for the record, English only has four afrricates: /tʃ/ ("chip"), /dʒ/ (jet), /ts/ (cats), and I think /dz/ (muds). Ubykh has 12. Actually, more than 12. What the fucking jesus.

Man, it gets worse. It has a voicing distinction along with pharyngealization and ejectives of voicless consonants (English has merely a voicing distinction--/k/ vs. /g/, /p/ vs. /b/, /t/ vs. /d/, etc.). Damn. Most languages only have one of those, as far as I know. And it has Uvalar consonants. Jesus. No Uvalar Stops though.

And to make things even stranger, Ubykh has two vowels. Yes, TWO. English has 14-16 depending on the dialect.

Ubykh? Ubykh has /ə/ and /a/. That's it. Okay, so they change in sound quite a bit due to surrounding consonants, but Ubykh still has only two vowels.

English is no where near this crazy. Then again, there are six different allophones of English /t/, so I guess we're pretty damn wierd too.

Next, I might do the wierd-ass African language that is !Xoo.

Yes. !Xoo. It's supposed to be spelled that way. I'm not kidding.

inb4 no replies

-Chagen

Kinkajou

Yes. !Xoo. It's supposed to be spelled that way. I'm not kidding.

Have you tried talking with clicks, boy?

Chagen

Hell no, talking with Clicks is hard as hell

TheConductor

I thought English only had five vowels?

nohaynicklibre

I think he meant phonetically.

TheConductor

Ah.

Icalasari

This is confusing

Chagen

Do note that I don't know everything. I may be wrong. So take everything I say with a grain of salt.

Chagen

Conductor: Nick had it somewhat.

There are basically two "groups" one can place the sounds of a language in: Phonemes and Allophones.

Phonemes are sounds that speakers can tell apart. For example, /p/ and /b/ are phonemes in English. We can tell this because "bit" and "pit" are seperate words in English. They can't be divided anymore, so we know that /p/ and /b/ are seperate phonemes. Similarly, we can tell that /k/ and /g/ are seperate phonemes in English because the words "back" and "bag" exist.

Allophones are different sounds that are considered to be the same. For example, in "button" the "tt" is not actually a /t/ sound. It's an entirely different sound, called the Alveolar Tap/Flap. We percieve the Flap as a /t/, though. So it's an allophone of /t/.

Incidentally, The infamous Japanese R is an Alveolar Tap that we percieve as /r/ when it's really closer to /d/ and /t/.

glennmagusharvey

I think the Japanese r is similar in that sense to the Spanish r when in the middle of a word sandwiched between two vowels.

DYRE

Incidentally, The infamous Japanese R is an Alveolar Tap that we percieve as /r/ when it's really closer to /d/ and /t/.

Who's "we"?  (or, rather, I sure don't think it sounds anything like the English "r")

Chagen

Well, whoever standardized the romanization of Japanese wrote it as an "r".

It sounds different, but slightly similar to English /r/ to me.