Re: Some questions on the delectible corpus
Saul Epstein 
Wed, 22 Oct 1997 16:03:32 -0500

At 01:53 PM 10/22/97 -0500, Rob wrote:

>I feel some confusion still about a couple of terms in the Zvelebil
>corpus which I have been unable to find a definition for: Retroflexed,
>and Vibrant.

Retroflex was coined to describe a place of articulation shared by a group
of consonants in Indic languages. In addtion to voiceless stops p, t, and k,
Indic languages have t., which is properly written as a t with a dot
immediately below. "Retroflex" literally means "curl back," which is what
the tongue does to produce the sound in question.

With /t/, a seal is made by the sides of the tongue being pressed against
the the roof of the mouth just inside the teeth, and then being released
where the tip of the tongue was sealed. With /t./, the seal is made along a
more vertical plane, with the tip of the tongue curled back so that the
underside of it seals against the roof of the mouth. The some is true for an
entire class of Indic consonants, including /t,h/, /d./, /d,h/, and /n./.

In fact, because English-speakers tend to produce their /t/, /d/, and /n/
with the tip of the tongue further back than is typical, they sound to Indic
speakers more like retroflex consonants -- which is what gives Indic
speakers their distinctive accent when speaking English.

>I'll also reiterate the question Aunt Maggie asked: what the
>heck does deictic mean?

"Deictic" is the adjective form of "deixis," a grammatical term referring to
the ways a language divides up time and space relative to the speaker.

>I get a general impression of the meaning from those pre-fixes which
>detail those "locational" indicators, but what range of items does
>the word cover - what other deictic parts of speech exist? 

It varies from language to language. English, for example has specific
particles "here" and "there" for place and "now" and "then" for time. At one
time it had "yonder" and "yore" for further away than there and longer ago
than then, respectively. But this kind of information can be conveyed
through many different kinds of structures, and in greater or lesser detail.

--
from Saul Epstein
liberty <at> uit <dot> net
www <dot> johnco <dot> cc <dot> ks <dot> us <slash> <tilde> sepstein
"Surak ow'pha:per the's'hi the's'cha'; the's'pha:dzhar the's'hi surakecha'."
					-- K'dvarin Ursw~l'at