----- Original Message -----
From: Juozas Rimas
To: phoNet@egroups.com
Sent: Saturday, April 15, 2000 11:29 AM
Subject: [phoNet] Re: Phonetic curiosities

The main problem for the martyrs trying to speak Lithuanian is
diphtongs "ie" and "uo". "Ei" (like in "Maine") and "ou" (like
in "row) are frequent in other languages but "ie" and "uo" aren't.
This is one of the reasons I'll have to think about transcribing my
own name into something more international if I'm planning to do
anything abroad.

I've been looking forward to your contribution hoping you would tell us someting about these diphthongs. I'd be interested in two things: from the descriptions I've read and from my own informal observations of spoken Lithuanian I gather that they are in fact long mid-high vowels ([e:] and [o:]) preceded by semivocalic onglides. If so, something like [je:], [wo:] could do as a rough transcription. Do you agree?


The second horror of Lithuanian is stressing. It's irregular (good
for the Poles: no need in any accentology textbooks and a
comprehensive textbook on Lithuanian accentology is just impossible),
although there are certain rules. There are several linguistic
groups of Lithuanian that have certain differences in stressing but
only one group has been chosen to be the standard (it couldn't be
done in another way). So we have ended up not having a single person
that could stress all the words correctly, including philologists. My
father, my mother and I all stress certain words in a different
manner. It'd be amazing if one word of ten spoken in English could be
stressed in several ways but it's precisely what is happening with
the modern Lithuanian. Even the stressing of some grammatical cases
of the noun meaning "Lithuania" varies.

And the third thing that makes it possible to recognize a non-native
speaker of Lithuanian, including the Russians who have lived for a
whole decade in the strictly Lithuanian environment is intonation.
I'm referring to the accentological meaning of "intonation" (okay,
frankly, I don't know what is the exact English term:)
 
The exact English term is 'pitch accent'. It is placed on moras rather than syllables, hence the falling (high tone--low tone) vs. rising (low tone--high tone) contrast in heavy syllables. Strangely, the Lithuanian terminology and accent marks are the reverse of what is used for other languages. Your acute is actually a FALLING contour of prominence (as you say, it's the first part of the diphthong which is stressed); the explanation for that is a reversal of accent values in the history of Lithuanian: the "acute" is actually a HISTORICAL acute, phonetically similar to the circumflex of some other languages. Maybe Simona could tell us something about pitch accents in Slovene.
 

 
. Let me
explain it: you got a diphtong, say, "ay". You can stress the first
part of it and this could be called "rising intonation" ("Ay" -
"Maine"), marked with an accute sign. Alternatively, you can stress
the second part of the diphtong and that would be "falling
intonation" ("aY" - I can't think of an example in English right
now), marked with a circumflex.

Juozas Rimas


Thanks!
 
Piotr