On 2006-05-30 23:17, Grzegorz Jagodzinski wrote:
> By the way, Ladefoged thinks that the Polish [t d s z c 3] are
> alveolar
> (http://phonetics.ucla.edu/appendix/languages/polish/polish.html).
Ladefoged died in January. He visited Poland many times (I met him last
May at a linguistic meeting in Poznan) and cooperated with Polish
linguists and informants. He knew quite a lot about Polish phonetics
from first-hand experience.
> I have not met a single Polish author who would share this opinion.
> Instead, everybody say that Polish [t d s z c 3] are dental, contrary
> to English [t d s z] (which are alveolar indeed).
It's an isolated slip. In Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) and elsewhere
it is made clear that they are dental. Cf., for example,
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/ladefoge/PLfeaturesParameters.pdf
> He also sometimes makes the difference in notation between Poliush
> affricates and the sequences stop + fricative, and sometimes not. Yet
> some time ago he stated that Polish alveolars <sz z.|rz cz dz.> are
> retroflex (and hopefully changed his opinion after some discussion
> with me). All these facts cause some reservation towards Ladefoged
> and make me not fully believe in the standard character of his work.
"Retroflex" is a somewhat informal term. True retroflexes are
subapico-postalveolar or subapico-palatal, but sounds very similar to
Polish <sz> (flat apico-postalveolars) in many languages are also
traditionally referred to as retroflex. Quite frequently the difference
is non-contrastive and the same "retroflex" phoneme varies between the
two realisations, which partly justifies the use of a cover term.
Anyway, in precise phonetic descriptions "binomial" terms, specifying
both the active articulator and the point of articulation, are obviously
preferable to traditional shorthand labels.
> Some? And do you know any Polish books which contain the proper
> terminology? I am thinking about handbooks, student books, academic
> books, not about special publications.
OK, you're probably right about Polish _handbooks_ (as opposed e.g. to
articles by Polish linguists in international journals), though I doubt
this state of things is something we Poles should be proud of. It's like
sticking to pounds avoirdupois and cubic inches when everybody else has
gone metric. It isn't just a question of looking parochial: if you
deliberately defy international standards out of deference to local
traditions (whose historical value is not in question anyway and doesn't
depend on the current conventions) you create communication problems. If
you write your Web page in English, you presumably don't want it to be
read (and understood) only by students of departments of Polish at
Polish universities. Remember that NASA lost a 125-million-dollar Mars
orbiter because of a stupid US Customary-to-SI coversion error.
Piotr