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I juggled the main consonant table a bit to merge all allophonic sounds into single cells. To do so required clumping the affricates and the fricativs under the rarely-seen umbrella term "fricate", but the [kxh] / [x] and [dZ] / [Z] variations would seem to suggest that there indeed is no affricate / fricativ distinction in Sesotho, independant of phonation contrasts at least. Someone will need to edit the phoneme descriptions, too, to reflect this. More information on the conditions of the allophony of /Z/ and /h/ would also be needed.
& on another note, is the <r> a trill (as listed in the approximant subsection) or a fricativ (as listed in the main table)? -- Tropylium 20:55, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for your edit, but it looks bad on so many points...
Could you revert yourself or at least discuss your changes here? Tebello TheWHAT!!?? 09:39, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
Sorry for taking so long to respond.
I've properly looked at the table now and it looks good. I don't think it's necessary though to remove the other table.
The "b" SOUNDS like "B" because to an English speaker, whose "b" is delayed voiced (it sounds like it's pre-nasalised but with an unvoiced nasal) the full voicing sounds like there might have been no contact between the lips -- but removing it was an excellent idea.
D & M describes the "r" as a "rolled" "Parisian" "trill". Due to the uvular nature it, just like the famous French cosonant, is rather unstable and pops up all over the place (just listen to my recordings) but it certainly (subjectively) sounds different from the "r" used by most other South African language groups.
The affricate variations are not dialectical -- it's just that different people speak differently. For example, some people use LBD (see Sesotho tonology) and some others don't -- even within single families -- we can't exactly say that members of the same family speak different dialects, now can we? There seems to be an incomplete chain shift from x - kxh (as in Setswana and Northern Sotho) to h - x. So the variation with the last consonant happens because different communities have adopted the x in place of kxh at different rates.
Thanks a lot for your help guys, and I'm sorry that I took so long to respond (blowing my mother's mid-year bonus is a full-time job...). Tebello TheWHAT!!?? 10:46, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
One of the clicks was described as "radical", which I changed to "tenuis" based on the transcription. However, a note said the accompaniment should be ejective. It's not clear what that is supposed to mean: Is the click simply glottalized? A lingual-glottal airstream contour? A consonant cluster? Please correct if need be. kwami ( talk) 15:59, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
Oops. I posted that on my phone, like I am now, and to type "ejective" I need to press 35328483, which are the same keys one presses when writing "elective". I meant ejective (glotal), not elective. Tebello TheWHAT!!?? 15:16, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
It would seem that stress marks have been substituted for tone marks. Is primary stress supposed to be high tone, and secondary stress low tone? What does it mean when both precede a syllable, as in [buˌˈikʼɑʀɑbɛlɔ]? We should convert to normal IPA. kwami ( talk) 08:36, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
I have removed the mouseover feature wherein an example word is given and the IPA representation is available when readers hover their cursor over the word. This is problematic largely in that readers unable to use the mouseover feature will not be able to see the IPA. Moreover, in an article about phonology, the use of IPA should take primacy over orthographic representations so that readers who have familiarized themselves with IPA won't have to learn a new system. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 16:02, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
Are the "ejective" stops in Sotho actually ejective or are they "stiff voiced" or something; are they sometimes pronounced ejective and sometimes just unasperated?
The reason I'm asking is that they many don't really sound like ejective consonants in a lot of the words in the audio samples. It may just be that I have a misunderstanding of how ejective consonants usually sound, expecting them to be more forceful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.20.39.228 ( talk) 01:08, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I juggled the main consonant table a bit to merge all allophonic sounds into single cells. To do so required clumping the affricates and the fricativs under the rarely-seen umbrella term "fricate", but the [kxh] / [x] and [dZ] / [Z] variations would seem to suggest that there indeed is no affricate / fricativ distinction in Sesotho, independant of phonation contrasts at least. Someone will need to edit the phoneme descriptions, too, to reflect this. More information on the conditions of the allophony of /Z/ and /h/ would also be needed.
& on another note, is the <r> a trill (as listed in the approximant subsection) or a fricativ (as listed in the main table)? -- Tropylium 20:55, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for your edit, but it looks bad on so many points...
Could you revert yourself or at least discuss your changes here? Tebello TheWHAT!!?? 09:39, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
Sorry for taking so long to respond.
I've properly looked at the table now and it looks good. I don't think it's necessary though to remove the other table.
The "b" SOUNDS like "B" because to an English speaker, whose "b" is delayed voiced (it sounds like it's pre-nasalised but with an unvoiced nasal) the full voicing sounds like there might have been no contact between the lips -- but removing it was an excellent idea.
D & M describes the "r" as a "rolled" "Parisian" "trill". Due to the uvular nature it, just like the famous French cosonant, is rather unstable and pops up all over the place (just listen to my recordings) but it certainly (subjectively) sounds different from the "r" used by most other South African language groups.
The affricate variations are not dialectical -- it's just that different people speak differently. For example, some people use LBD (see Sesotho tonology) and some others don't -- even within single families -- we can't exactly say that members of the same family speak different dialects, now can we? There seems to be an incomplete chain shift from x - kxh (as in Setswana and Northern Sotho) to h - x. So the variation with the last consonant happens because different communities have adopted the x in place of kxh at different rates.
Thanks a lot for your help guys, and I'm sorry that I took so long to respond (blowing my mother's mid-year bonus is a full-time job...). Tebello TheWHAT!!?? 10:46, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
One of the clicks was described as "radical", which I changed to "tenuis" based on the transcription. However, a note said the accompaniment should be ejective. It's not clear what that is supposed to mean: Is the click simply glottalized? A lingual-glottal airstream contour? A consonant cluster? Please correct if need be. kwami ( talk) 15:59, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
Oops. I posted that on my phone, like I am now, and to type "ejective" I need to press 35328483, which are the same keys one presses when writing "elective". I meant ejective (glotal), not elective. Tebello TheWHAT!!?? 15:16, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
It would seem that stress marks have been substituted for tone marks. Is primary stress supposed to be high tone, and secondary stress low tone? What does it mean when both precede a syllable, as in [buˌˈikʼɑʀɑbɛlɔ]? We should convert to normal IPA. kwami ( talk) 08:36, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
I have removed the mouseover feature wherein an example word is given and the IPA representation is available when readers hover their cursor over the word. This is problematic largely in that readers unable to use the mouseover feature will not be able to see the IPA. Moreover, in an article about phonology, the use of IPA should take primacy over orthographic representations so that readers who have familiarized themselves with IPA won't have to learn a new system. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 16:02, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
Are the "ejective" stops in Sotho actually ejective or are they "stiff voiced" or something; are they sometimes pronounced ejective and sometimes just unasperated?
The reason I'm asking is that they many don't really sound like ejective consonants in a lot of the words in the audio samples. It may just be that I have a misunderstanding of how ejective consonants usually sound, expecting them to be more forceful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.20.39.228 ( talk) 01:08, 28 December 2018 (UTC)