27
votes
Accepted
How did Ancient Greek 'πυρ' become English 'fire?'
As jlawer says, English "fire" doesn't actually come from Greek pŷr. "Pyre" does, but that's a borrowing (via Latin), and it's pretty clear how it happened. Instead, English and Greek share a common ...
- 64.1k
25
votes
How did Ancient Greek 'πυρ' become English 'fire?'
English fire is not derived from Greek πυρ.
Both fire and πυρ come originally from the Proto-Indo-European root *paəwr̥.
Greek simplified the *aəw vowel sequence to /ū/, but kept the consonants.
Proto-...
- 10k
8
votes
Accepted
Anglicisation of the voiceless velar fricative [x]
Neither [h] nor [k] is "accurate" as a replacement for [x]: but there are some linguistic issues related to how [x] in a source language word appears in English, when the word is borrowed. The velar ...
- 82.2k
7
votes
Accepted
Sounds between [x] and [h]?
If you look at an IPA consonant chart, the places of articulation are listed from front to back. /x/ is a velar sound, pronounced with the most relevant constriction at the velum; /h/ is (generally ...
- 64.1k
7
votes
In which Slavic languages are [h] and [x] contrastive?
These are the relevant sounds ("phones") - you may check on the following pages for which languages possess them:
a voiceless glottal fricative /h/
a voiceless velar fricative /x/
a voiced ...
- 7,301
7
votes
Accepted
Looking for examples of natural languages with affricates but no corresponding fricatives/plosives
A likely place to start, I think, would be to find an affricate that’s relatively common, but whose corresponding fricative is not all that common. The most obvious candidate to me is /(d)ʒ/.
The most ...
- 3,972
6
votes
Accepted
Why there are few aspirated fricatives in the world?
Aspiration is usually defined as a distinctive increase in voice onset time between the release of a consonant and the initiation of voicing on the segment after the release of the consonant. This is ...
- 82.2k
6
votes
Accepted
Any Spanish speech variety where F is pronounced as ϕ?
/f/ as [ϕ] in Andean, Palenquero, Caribbean, Puerto Rican Spanish
The Linguistics of Spanish - Andean Spanish - 2. Pronunciation
2.4 Pronunciation of /f/
/f/ is commonly articulated as a ...
- 3,102
5
votes
Accepted
Can the voiceless velar fricative, [x], be represented in Japanese?
I will assume that by "translate" you mean which syllables in words loaned by Japanese correspond to [x] in their source language.
The answer is that words containing [x] which come directly from ...
- 5,065
4
votes
Did Common Brittonic use /ṽ/?
This phoneme /ṽ/ appears to be common to both Common Brittonic and Old Irish, and shows the difficulties that the contemporary scribes for Old Irish had with notating nasalisation. As of January 2021, ...
- 7,301
4
votes
Accepted
Dental and labiodental fricatives with different relative positions of the articulators
Such contrasts are not attested in any known language. In the case of the two kinds of labiodentals, the distinction would be auditorily unlearnable since the acoustic consequences are negligible. ...
- 82.2k
4
votes
Accepted
What does the tongue do to discriminate sibilant vs. non-sibilant?
In /s,z/ the sides of the tongue are slightly raised, creating an u-shaped channel or groove, known as sulcus. You probably already do that unconsciously when you say a Korean /s/ (unless you have a ...
- 4,960
3
votes
Similarity between voiced glottal fricative and schwa sound?
As a native speaker of Ukrainian which has [ɦ], I should say it is really very much like schwa except for the fact that [ə] is a real vowel and [ɦ] is a real consonant, the glottis muscles are ...
- 17.7k
3
votes
Accepted
Voiced fricatives are just breathy approximants?
I would be surprised if your native language has these phonemes, which suggests that they are the result of you attempting to produce sounds based on instructions in a phonetics class. If not, you ...
- 82.2k
3
votes
What is the nature of the voiceless velar fricative, [x], in Polish?
I'm Polish and I can assure you that nowadays "ch" and "h" are pronounced exactly the same. Only elderly people (really few), especially in Eastern Poland, still keep the sound [h]. By the way, this ...
- 131
3
votes
Accepted
What is the nature of the voiceless velar fricative, [x], in Polish?
In Polish, most (if not all) words containing letter ⟨h⟩ are actually loanwords as there was no [h]/[ɦ] sound in Polish (as opposed to Czech, Slovak and Ukrainian, where [ɦ] evolved from Slavic [g]). ...
- 2,363
3
votes
Accepted
When does the voiceless velar fricative, [x], undergo voicing?
⟨ch⟩ is pronounced [x] in Polish and as many other Polish sounds, it can undergo so called "voice assimilation".
Assimilation is a process during which a speech sound gets a feature from an adjacent ...
- 2,363
3
votes
ʃ pronounced with tongue
Your sample is squarely in the range of IPA [ʃ], and not [ʂ], [ɕ] or [ç]. It sounds perfectly normal to me. This is the best place to get standard reference values for IPA letters. If you have samples ...
- 82.2k
3
votes
Looking for examples of natural languages with affricates but no corresponding fricatives/plosives
According to the PHOIBLE search tool PSmith:
0 languages have /pf/, but no /f/
1 language has /pɸ/, but no /ɸ/: Banjun (GM)
44 languages have /ts/, but no /s/: Garo, Lakkia, Chukchi, Chamorro, ...
- 344
2
votes
Is the laryngeal fricative the same as the glottal fricative /h/?
In this case, it is probably random writing practice (perhaps involving multiple authors). The corresponding article on Dutch uses the term "glottal" exclusively, and the Frisian article ...
- 82.2k
2
votes
F/V fronting and audible difference?
People might notice that you sound different, but everybody sounds different from everybody else. Given the phonetic diversity of English, this is unlikely to make people "He talks really differently",...
- 82.2k
2
votes
Anglicisation of the voiceless velar fricative [x]
[I don't have sufficient reputation to comment; however, since this question is subjective, I'll dare to "answer" it instead.]
I prefer to use x (since it looks exactly like the Russian equivalent), ...
- 41
2
votes
What is the nature of the voiceless velar fricative, [x], in Polish?
There is some confusion of phonetic transcription with Polish spelling here. To clear things up:
The digraph "ch" and the letter "h" (when not preceded by "c") are pronounced in exactly the same way ...
- 1,773
2
votes
Anglicisation of the voiceless velar fricative [x]
For one, I would pronounce most instances of /x/ as /k/, unless I'm really thinking about how to pronounce it, in which case I might say /x/. Most people I have heard do this, though some pronounce ...
1
vote
Similarity between voiced glottal fricative and schwa sound?
In your examples, the production labeled "voiced glottal fricative" is 2/3 voiceless glottal fricative with the right 1/3 being voiced, followed by a very long schwa. The percept of schwa can be ...
- 82.2k
1
vote
Voiced H as an approximant for schwa?
As a phonetic term, approximants refer to a class of consonants which covers liquids and glides (which includes laryngeal glides), so a vowel is not an approximant. In the SPE feature tradition, ...
- 82.2k
1
vote
Voiced H as an approximant for schwa?
A small cap H has been used by some structuralist phonemicists to stand for the centralizing glide which is very prominent in some American dialects. Perhaps someone who knows that literature better ...
- 12.4k
1
vote
Voiced H as an approximant for schwa?
[h], customarily referred to as a voiceless glottal fricative, in reality denotes any voiceless articulation with no interruption of the airflow in the oral cavity, with no defined configuration of ...
- 4,922
1
vote
Anglicisation of the voiceless velar fricative [x]
On the theory that speakers ordinarily hear and aim to pronounce phonemes, if they can interpret the [x] as a /k/ phoneme of English which has been lenited to [x], then they will say /k/. Using @...
- 12.4k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible