"No" pronunciation

[0stsee]

Sveiki!

How do you pronounce Latvian no?

From what I've heard it sounded more like an open O monophtong instead of the usual UO diphthong.

Paldies!


Mark

[Sol Invictus]

Sveiki!

How do you pronounce Latvian no?

From what I've heard it sounded more like an open O monophtong instead of the usual UO diphthong.

Paldies!


Mark

It has diphtong

[0stsee]

Labi.

Paldies!

[ciuppo2000]

Hello to everybody !

I have come upon your very interesting forum by chance , while looking for informations regarding a book on Latvian language.
I am Italian, but i have more or less a good, though unfortunately not perfect, knowlegde of Latvian.
It would be really great to have the possibility to take part in this forum in order to share with you informations and insights.

I have chosen this post since it is an issue I have been thinking about very carefully and for a long time and I think (or rather I hope ) to have found the right answer
(the Latvian contributors to this forum will be surely able to say something conclusive on this matter !!!).

As for the pronunciation of O in NO and in many other Latvian words, Sol Invictus is correct: it is of course a diphthong!!!
The problem is what kind of diphthong or better which sounds make up this diphthong?

It is clear that is not [uo] and it cannot be (!!!), since it is a descending diphthong (in a descending diphthong the first sound is a "real" vowel, which by the way is the real syllabic center, and so in this case a real [u], and the second is a so called semivowel, whose function is more or less that of a consonant).

I think that the second sound is the same, or almost the same, sound that we can listen, for instance, at the end of the German surname MŪLLER (Ū stands of course for U + umlaut, that is the pair of dots that you see on some German vowels).

But in order to better understand the nature of this sound, we should take into account the IPA (International Phonetic Association) table of vowels (vocalic sounds)
which is possible to see for example at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internatio ... bet#Vowels

The sound I am talking about is the NEAR-OPEN / CENTRAL sound, whose symbol is [ɐ]
So the correct pronunciation of Latvian O should be [uɐ].

German speaking Latvians or Latvian speaking Germans could be in the right position to confirm, reject or improving this hypothesis.

The same should be true also for the other Latvian diphthong IE that we find in words like PIENS "milk", VIETA "place", etc.
Also here the correct pronunciation of IE should be [iɐ].

Please, take into consideration the fact that unfortunately I have not had yet the time to read all the posts of the forum, so I apologize if someone has already posted something talking about the same topic!!!

Ciuppo2000

[Sol Invictus]

I don't think it is German u, I'd pronounce it differently and I have had approximately five different teachers to learn from In my opinion that sound is ua or maybe a triphtong (uoa). I don't think there are two different diphtongs o, perhaps it is pronounced a bit wider, because it is in the end of the word. What's the problem with ie, I don't understand I think it is i and e, not some kind of ia or anything, my best guess is that a is added after the diphtong (and is not part of the same sound).

[Levo]

I don't think it is German u, I'd pronounce it differently and I have had approximately five different teachers to learn from In my opinion that sound is ua or maybe a triphtong (uoa). I don't think there are two different diphtongs o, perhaps it is pronounced a bit wider, because it is in the end of the word. What's the problem with ie, I don't understand I think it is i and e, not some kind of ia or anything, my best guess is that a is added after the diphtong (and is not part of the same sound).

Oh yes it is sometimes.
(When I continuosly heard something like ia instead of ie I started to remember that even the Latvian grammar book wrote that ie is iea in reality)

[Sol Invictus]

it is not, thought I agree that ia sounds similar enough, I once found that ia can be used to force English text-to-speach pronounce it My atempts to pronounce ia or even iæ (text-to-speach made me think it could be English a) as single sound, eventualy made i sound like j (or rather the sound we got in some words, such as vai, where it is neither), therefore I think it can't be anything wider than e and in piens you acctualy say something like pieans (and pians or piæns sound ridicilous)

[ciuppo2000]

...well...frankly speaking it is probably not a good idea to enter into a debate with a person whose nickname is "Neuzvaramā Saule", it seems as if it were really impossible to have ... the upper hand !!!

Joking apart it is stimulating to receive feedbacks regarding this little but interesting question and every contribution and/or opinion from Latvian and non Latvian speaking people is really welcome and necessary !!!

However for clarity's sake and in order to avoid confusion and misunderstings it would be better to keep separated as much as possible the GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION of a word or of a sound from its PHONETIC REPRESENTATION. This is very important, since, for example to write simply that something is pronounced ie or io is misleading taking into consideration the fact that the letter e or o stand for different sounds even in the same language.

Usually, as many of you knows, a SOUND is represented by a symbol between square brackets. So for example something like [a] or [b] represents respectively the first sound of the Italian word AMORE (love) or the first sound of the Latvian word BITE (bee). Or somenthing like [pɛska] represents the exact standard pronunciation of the Italian word "pesca" (peach).

Now, going back to our issue I would like to propose different options regarding the best way to [phonetically] represent the exact or best pronunciation of the Latvian words KOKS and IELA and I would highly appreciate if everybody could express her/his opinion.

Please, take into consideration the fact that we are considering standard Latvian and normal/fast speech (it is obvious that if we speak slowly almost doing the spelling of a word the pronunciation dramatically changes).

KOKS 1) [kuoks] 2) [kuɔks] 3) [kuaks] 4) [kuɐks]
IELA 5) [iela] 6) [iɛla] 7) [iala] 8) [iɐla]

To make things easier we do not take into consideration for the moment other ipothesis such as triphthongs...

Of course it is very important to know exactly which sounds the symbols placed between square brackets stand for. For this purpose we can consult, amomg many other, the following websites where it is explained the exact pronunciation of the symbols [o] [e] [ɔ] [ɛ] and [ɐ] and, most important, where there are many examples in different languages, which may help us to better understand the nature of the above-mentioned sounds (of course we focus now only on the vowels...):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-mid_ ... nded_vowel [e] closed e
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_f ... nded_vowel [ɛ] open e
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-mid_ ... nded_vowel [o] closed o
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_b ... nded_vowel [ɔ] open o
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-open_central_vowel [ɐ] open schwa

Needless to say that according to my [very humble] opinion the best (even though probably not exact) way to [phonetically] represent the pronunciation of KOKS and IELA are the number 4) and 8) .

So, please, vote your favourite ones or put forward new options!!!

Ciuppo2000

[Sol Invictus]

I meant vowels represented by a and (narrow) e in Latvian, which makes it 3 and 6. I had random not very serious conversation about sounds today, so I threw in ie issue:
-How do you think is ie pronounced - with e or a ?
-In Latvian ?
-Of course
-With e
- Like ia
- No
-Well, some people think there is a, but it makes i sound somewhat hard
-Yeah, it sounds like ija
I don't understand instructions for pronouncing vowels (I guess I should spend some time on reading wikipedia's article explaining this, but not now, so...). Latvian o is [ɔ] not the closed o (in wikipedia's that recording sounds somewhat more like ū to me, on the other hand recordings for both ɛ and e sound wrong, not sure, if it is because it is different sound or author is pronouncing it weird), so you probably can drop 1

[mak]

I vote for 3 and 7.

I don't think we should overcomplicate this. Since I am not a linguist all these /ɛ/, /ɐ/ and /ɔ/ look scary to me. In my opinion a regular language learner just needs to differentiate between two e sounds and three o sounds.

The latter is easy, there's a short o - /o/, a long o - /ō/ and there's the dipthong - /ua/.

I've seen some language books use /e/ to represent šauro e, /ȩ/ to represent plato e, /ē/ to represent garo šauro e, and /ḝ/ (I couldn't find ȩ with a macron) to represent garo plato e. This way you can tell right away if it's plats or šaurs e and the cedilla doesn't clash with the macron.

orgāns [orgāns]
opera [ōpera]
koks [kuaks]

pele [pele]
ezers [ȩzȩrs]
bēglis [bēglis]
zēns [zḝns]

iela [iala]
nav [nau]

[mak]

Regarding /ia/, I have this book Latviešu valodas praktiskā fonoloģija (I have it in PDF format if anyone's interested) and it says

Latviešu izcelsmes vārdos burtkopu ie izrunā kā divskani /ia/, piem., pliens, ciets, riet; diet, siet, diezin [pliāns, ciāc, riāt, diāt, siat, diazin]. Dažos aizguvumos turpretim šis burtu savienojums apzīmē nevis divskani, bet divus monoftongus, kas katrs paliek savā zilbē: klients [kli-ents], orients [ori-ents]. Biežāk lietojamā vārdā pacients zilbes robeža gandrīz ir zudusi: [paci.ents]. Ir vārdi, kur patskaņu savienojuma otrs elements ir gaŗš un zilbes robeža vieglāk uztveŗama, piem., diēta, diēzs.

[Sol Invictus]

Bet tais vārdos kur ir norādīts iā, tā skaņa ir īpaši īsa Ja tu pameklē google ir raksti, kur norādīts gan, ka tas ir ia, gan, ka ie, bet izrunājot kā ia man nekas prātīgs nesanāk - izrunājot kā atsevišķas skaņas tiešām izklausās pēc ie, bet tikko mēģina pateikt ātrāk, lai būtu kā divskanis sanāk ija. Nez - varbūt, ka tā vispar ir pavisam cita skaņa (vai varbūt āķis vispār slēpjas i ?).
P.S. Es gribu tavu pdf

[mak]

Nez, es, skaļi pie sevis izrunājot iela vairākus desmitus reižu, nonācu pie secinājuma, ka tur tik tiešām saklausu a, un tāpēc atbalstu iela izrunu apzīmēt ar [iala], lai gan sākumā tas šķita galīgi greizi.

[ciuppo2000]

Well ... Mak voted for 3) and 7).

Sol ,did you vote for 3) and 6) or am I wrong ?

Ciuppo2000

[Sol Invictus]

Yes

[ciuppo2000]

It seems that as for the word IELA only three options remain on the table (well, that's something anyway) :

[iɛla] [iɐla] [iala] that is [ɛ] [ɐ] [a]

I put the sound [ɐ] between the other two sounds owing to fact that as you can see, taking a look at the IPA vowel chart, if we start from the sound [a] we have to raise a little bit the center of the tongue to pronounce [ɐ]. And then again raise it further to be able to pronounce [ɛ ].
So we could say that the sound [ ɐ] is by and large halfway between [a] and [ ɛ ].

Now, if one Latvian speaking person thinks that the right answer could be [a], but another [ɛ], could it be that the right answer lies ... in between?
If somenthing is not BLACK and is not WHITE, maybe it is GREY!!!

I know, I know, put in this way my argument seems too weak! I fully agree!

So consider the English word RAIN and BOIL. The phonetic representations are respectively [reɪn] and [bɔɪl].

Here too we find two diphthongs [eɪ] and [ɔɪ], here too like in the case of the Lavian diphthong grafically represented by IE the stress is on the first sound of the diphthong, that is respectively on the [e] and [ɔ] sounds, but surprisingly the second sound it is not an [i], but the slighltly different and more lax (atslābināts) sound [ɪ].

Could it be true also for Latvian IE? Could it be that the second sound of the diphthong is not an [a] or an [ɛ] but a slightly different and more lax (atslābināts) sound like [ɐ ]?

Finally consider the German word OBER (waiter/viesmilis) phonetically represented as [obɐ ]!!! Here too we find a sound that most people would swear to be an [a] but in reality it is something different albeit very alike ... that is again [ɐ].

Ciuppo2000

[mak]

Can you like record yourself saying [iɛla], [iɐla], [iala] and we'll tell you which sounds right?

[Sol Invictus]

I choose ɛ just because everywhere I look it says that it is Latvian narrow e, you yourself said you think it is not (and perhaps you're right, since neither ɛ nor e sounded Latvian to me). I think I know how ɐ sounds, I'm not entirely certain, but, if it is the right sound I have doubts about your theory, plus it is as open as æ - as I said it makes i sound like j. To prove you this - I just remembered one case in which people pronounce ia as ija - in abbreviation SIA (ltd), where there is no reason for people to assume there should be j - I've seen plenty of people jokingly writing sija (beam), I myself tend to pronounce it as sijā (to sieve), of course there are others who go for neutral and meaningless siā, but no one ever pronounces that as ie

After spending some quality time with myself, I came up with new theory regarding ie - I think it could be that in iela and similar words i sound is lenghtened and second sound indeed is a, but this doesn't work for words like riet, does it ?

[ciuppo2000]

Can you like record yourself saying [iɛla], [iɐla], [iala] and we'll tell you which sounds right?

I'll try !!!

A nice week-end to everybody!

[Levo]

Can you like record yourself saying [iɛla], [iɐla], [iala] and we'll tell you which sounds right?

I'll try !!!

A nice week-end to everybody!

Really, does it get dark in Latvia nowadays?