[Lexicog] Re: "orientate" (was Frequency ...)

[billposer at ALUM.MIT.EDU]

Re: Mike's and Ken's stories about Washington transportation,
I discovered the existence of flapping in Japanese in a similar
way. When I first lived in Japan, I often took the Yamanote line
train from Meguro station, near where I lived. As we approached the
next station, the conductor would announce what, at first, I heard
as [mamoraku] followed by the name of the station, let's say Gotanda.
I soon caught on as to what this meant in practice, but I couldn't
find the word in my dictionary, and when I asked someone about it,
they didn't recognize it.

After some time, an exasperatingly long time, I realized that
what I was hearing was phonemically /mamonaku/ = ma=mo=na=ku
interval.even.there-not.being. The conductors were flapping the
/n/ so that I heard it as an /r/, which of course wasn't in the
dictionary. (In fact,because of its phrasal grammatical status, it
probably wasn't in the dictionary as mamonaku either.) And when
I asked about it I of course pronounced it carefully so even if I
was making the correct flapped [r], it wasn't in the context where
a Japanese person would expect a nasal to be flapped, and I probably
didn't nasalize it, and may well have made an English approximant
/r/ at that early stage. Anyhow, what I produced was not recognizable.

Bill
--
Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu


 
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