Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 October 3

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October 3

What's the difference between an apical palato-alveolar (domed) consonant and a laminal retroflex consonant.

I cannot catch the idea of postalveolar consonants. An apical palato-alveolar (domed) consonant (such as the ones in English), since it has to be weakly palatalized, must have the front part of dorsal/laminal involved; while an laminal retroflex consonant (such as the ones on Polish), since one cannot bend one's tongue into a right angle, also will make one's front part of dorsal involved, thus slightly palatalized. Apical and domed sounds a bit paradoxical to me (the word "domed" sounds a bit like dorsal to me, leaving one's tongue tip curled below one's lower teeth), so is retroflex's absolutely not palatalized property and laminal.

How do one describe Taiwanese Mandarin's semi-postalveolars (zh-series) which lie somewhere between Beijing Mandarin's reportedly laminal retroflex consonants and dentialveolars (z-series), then? It is absolutely not palatalized (not tʃ) but sounds not as retroflex as typical ones. 146.96.29.25 (talk) 20:56, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

I also wonder if it is appropriate to differentiate subapical/apical/laminal difference of the retroflexes for all languages, as except for a few languages (such as Toda) most others rarely have subapical (af)fricates or laminal stops, and it seems languages (except for a few like Toda) generally allows a range of articulations without a most preferred one, such as Chinese and Polish (neither has stops) has been described as either apical or laminal according to different linguists, while languages South Asian subcontinent (generally without affricates) range from apical to subapical.

How is the Toda language's palatalized subapical trill /ɽrʲ/ even possible? Can one draw a tongue shape picture for clarification for that article? Can one really tongue bend one's tongue like an anisakis and then make a trill? 146.96.29.25 (talk) 21:27, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Where did you get the idea that domed palato-alveolars are (or can be) apical? Nardog (talk) 05:14, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Well, apparently from the problematic article palato-alveolar consonant, which claims that palato-alveolars are always "weakly palatalized with a domed (bunched-up) tongue" and can be apical. The article postalveolars also claims "the apical-laminal distinction among palato-alveolar sounds makes little (although presumably non-zero) perceptible difference; both articulations, in fact, occur among English-speakers." It is quite confusing even when claiming domed consonants to be "laminal" because the active articulation place of domed consonants feels somewhere more back than that of alveolopalatals, which are described by some to be "dorsal". 98.0.186.98 (talk) 21:51, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

I speak Polish as a native language. Our [tʂ dʐ ʂ ʐ] are not palatalized. I produce them with the blade of the tongue and/or dorsum behind or at the alveolar ridge. I'm not sure whether they're alveolar or postalveolar (descriptions differ) since we don't have any alveolars besides /r/ in the language (and /r/ is, of course, apical). I think that they're more back than the alveolar portion of [tɕ dʑ ɕ ʑ], which would mean that [tʂ dʐ ʂ ʐ] are laminal postalveolar. When I speak English, Dutch or Spanish, I use the domed [tʃ dʒ ʃ ʒ] which are right in-between my [tʂ dʐ ʂ ʐ] (not palatalized at all) and [tɕ dʑ ɕ ʑ] (full-on palatal consonants, not just palatalized but simultaneously alveolar and palatal). It's the same when I try to pronounce Czech words (unfortunately I don't speak the language, just understand some of it), in which case I also use domed postalveolars. It's one of the more noticeable phonetic differences between our languages.

I blame books like The Sounds of the World's Languages for the confusion. Retroflex means bent back, which means apical by definition. Laminal retroflexes do not exist. It is silly to assume that a small subset of postalveolars ([tʃ dʒ ʃ ʒ]) is somehow palatalized by definition whereas the rest is not. It's an utterly anglocentric viewpoint. Even French does not palatalize [ʃ ʒ] and yet nobody writes those with ⟨ʂ ʐ⟩. [tʃ dʒ ʃ ʒ] is thus a correct broad transcription for both English and Polish postalveolars, whereas an accurate narrow transcription is [tʃʲ dʒʲ ʃʲ ʒʲ] for English, Spanish and Italian, whereas the postalveolars of Polish, Serbian and French are correctly transcribed [tʃ dʒ ʃ ʒ], without diacritics.

[tʃʲ dʒʲ ʃʲ ʒʲ] (palatalized postalveolar) are thus not the same as [tɕ dʑ ɕ ʑ] (simultaneously alveolar and palatal, with double dorsal-coronal articulation). They may appear in free variation in some languages, but they're not the same sounds. Sol505000 (talk) 11:53, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for the answer! There may be a whole spectrum of palatalization. From an Asian point of view, the Slavic alveolopalatal siblants sounds quite similar to the English domed ones, as opposed to the Japanese and Tibetan alveolopalatal siblant fricatives. For a lot of times I cannot tell the difference because the Polish and Russian alveolopalatal sh sounds more like retroflex sh to me, though sometimes they sound a little bit palatalized. 146.96.29.61 (talk) 00:23, 13 October 2023 (UTC)