LL-L "Phonology" 2003.03.23 (02) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: Sandy Fleming [sandy at scotstext.org]
Subject: "Holidays"

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Holidays
> * By the way, in Standard Iranian Farsi the long /a/ (<>, <>, <>) sounds
> pretty much identical to that in many Lowlands Saxon (Low German)
> varieties
> ([:]), like in "extremel posh" English "party".

I remember this sound from when I was learning Persian (is
that exactly the same as Farsi? It was always called Persian
when I was learning it!). This is a sound which also occurs
in Scots, particularly my own Lothian dialect where it tends
to be used copiously. However, Scots never seems to sound
"posh".

This made me wonder why Scots never seems to have any
"poshness" about it. Usually I associate "poshness" in
English with particularly hollow or "plummy" accents,
although to a Scots ear there's always a certain plumminess
or poshness in any English-speaking accent, other than
Scottish English.

This made me think of the sort of qualities a language
can take due to the way native speakers tend to position
their speech organs when speaking. For example, I find
that when I'm out of practice in French, reminding myself
to pout properly for rounded vowels works wornders for my
accent, or in Italian, holding the lower jaw slightly more
firmly than I'm used to helps (these effects are slight
and overdoing them would produce a sort of caricature of
the accent).

So I was wondering if there was something like this about
speech production in Scots that makes it sound more closed
and less hollow or less "posh" than English. It's not so
easy to analyse something that just comes naturally to me,
but I think that in Scots the back of the toungue is held
slightly tense while speaking, so that it's perhaps slightly
rounder in cross-section at the back. This causes the upper
surface of the tongue to be slightly higher at the back,
closing the airway somewhat and reducing the "hollowness"
of the speech. In some speakers the narrowed air passage
can produce a certain nasality in the quality of the speech,
although I don't think anyone would improve their Scots by
trying to sound nasal.

I think this also has some other knock-on effects such as
the slightly fricative quality of the Scots voiceless <wh>
as in 'what' /(x)WQ?/ and perhaps also causing the /l/ to
darken is positions where a dark /l/ wouldn't be used in
English.

Sandy
http://scotstext.org/

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Phonology

Sandy,

> I remember this sound from when I was learning Persian (is
> that exactly the same as Farsi? It was always called Persian
> when I was learning it!).

"Persian" can mean the same as "Farsi."  However, it can also be vague,
denoting what others would consider a language group (Farsi, Tajik,
Kurdish/Kurmanji, Baluchi, Tat, Tal, Pashto, Wakhi, Ossetic, the Yaghnobi
group, other Pamir varieties, such as Sariqoli of China, etc.) rather than a
single language, usually all considered derived from Old Persian but largely
unintelligible mutually.  This group is what I sometimes call "Iranic,"
others "Iranian languages."  To some, using "Persian" only for Farsi would
be like using "Germanic" to refer only to German.

Cheers!
Reinhard/Ron

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