From: Mark Odegard
Message: 803
Date: 2000-01-09
This is a question about phonetics. I'd thank someone who could clear it to me, as I have this doubt for more or less 4 years.
I'm a native portuguese speaker and I'm sort of learning polish over this last 4 years. My ear finds different 4 similar sounds, and I'd like to know how do they differentiate if so. And they are:
1 - The portuguese final l (in Portugal) - ex. Mal (badly)
2 - The brazillian final l
3 - The glide [w] - ex. Mau (Bad)
4 - The polish dashed l
In portuguese, there is an audible differentiate between "Mal" and "Mau", but I bellieve that for untrained ears it may be difficult to distinguish. I find the brazillian final l more close to the glide [w], but somehow I hear it in another way. The same counts for the polish dashed l, as I sometimes hear it closer to our final l, others closer to the glide [w]. But again, I never hear the same exact sound as in my language. By the way, where can we put the final english l? (ex. ill)
Another question. I find the L (not final, articulated)
pronunciation
rather different among different languages. As an example I give the
Portuguese
one (which I find similar to the english one, ex. "lago" and "lake") and
the polish one (brightly articulated).
We here in the English-speaking world had to be taught how you pronounce Lech Walesa's name. Once a name appears in print in English, any diacritics that go with it tend to disappear completely. As anyone from other non-English-speaking countries know, listening to our renditions of your names is often painful to hear. The way you folks manage our names can be just as painful our ears too, so we all bear it with good cheer.
Anyway. Mr. Walesa's first name would naturally rhyme with 'vetch' or 'catch', with the final ch rendered like that in 'church'. We've learned it's a [k]. His last name drives us to despair. Where does that N come from? Well, I found out for myself, I think. In Daniels and Bright's The Worlds Writing Systems (Oxford University Press, 1996), when you turn to the discussion on the Polish alphabet (p. 666 no less), you see what looks like an e-cedilla. This is rendered in IPA as e-tilde: nasal E. I assume that nasal E is not quite the same as plain old 'eñ'.
Then there is the Pope's name: Karol Wojtyla. This one is not too hard except for the absent L in the last name. Daniels and Bright present what I call 'slanted-belted-L' which is given the IPA value of [w] with a none-too-clear note that this is realized in regional dialects by the IPA character I describe as 'L belted midway with a tilde'. So that explains that.
The distinction between dark L and light or bright L is not phonemic in English, and we have a very hard time hearing the distinction. I've been given the example 'light' for light-L and 'bell' for dark-L. I can feel the difference in the position of my tongue between the two, though I really cannot hear it.
So. The question for Piotr is for him to give us more information on the Polish Ls than we really want. 8-)
Mark.