English words beginning with <j> pronounced [Z]?

Benjamin Zimmer bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
Tue Jan 22 19:01:11 UTC 2008


On Jan 22, 2008 1:39 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> At 10:20 AM -0800 1/22/08, Brenda Lester wrote:
> >shouldn't it be J pronouced like ZH??
> >
>
> That's what we've been using [Z] to indicate in this thread and
> others, a voiced alveo-palatal fricative as in "rouge" or "pleasure".
> [J] is the affricate, as in "judge".  Somewhere there's a list of
> these notations within ascii-netic transcription.

The five most common transcription systems are given here:

http://www.blahedo.org/ascii-ipa.html

All five use [Z] for "ezh".


--Ben Zimmer

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list