Talk:Icelandic phonology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Icelandic phonology article.
Please sign and date your posts by typing four tildes (~~~~). Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic. New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Ask questions, get answers. This is not a forum for general discussion about the article's subject.	Be polite Assume good faith No personal attacks Be welcoming	Article policies No original research Neutral point of view Verifiability

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Iceland, a WikiProject related to the nation of Iceland. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
Stub	This article has been rated as stub-Class on the Project’s quality scale. (If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.)
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.

This article is part of WikiProject Phonetics, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to phonetics and descriptive phonology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

Contents 1 Content change 2 Laterals 3 Voicing contrast 4 Translation 5 J in the phonology 6 diphthongs

[edit] Content change

I’ve moved the phonological content from the main Icelandic language article to here, leaving copies of the tables and a brief summary there. I’ve moved the old content of this page to Icelandic orthography, where it is better suited. Max Naylor 18:16, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Laterals

Is there a phonemic contrast between the "plain" laterals [l, l̥] and the velarized laterals [l̥ˠ, lˠ]? None of my (admittedly very scanty) resources indicates that L is ever velarized in Icelandic, let alone phonemically so. —Angr 15:43, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, I was also surprised to see it but it seems that for some Icelanders "veldi" ((I would) choose) and "velgdi" ((I would) make warmer) are not homophones. I believe the reference comes from the book "Íslensk tunga" [1] but I don't have it. Perhaps someone who has the book close by will come and quote the relevant passage. Stefán 19:14, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Voicing contrast

The current text says:

Icelandic has an aspiration contrast between plosives, rather than a voicing contrast, something relatively rare among European languages

Is it really? I'm pretty sure it's the exact same in Danish. The difference between Danish /p/ and /b/ is not one of voicing, it's one of aspiration. --Pinnerup 23:49, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, it says relatively rare. Danish certainly is another example, Faroese probably another. Those are the only ones I am aware of. If there are more then we should consider rewording the statement. Stefán 03:52, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Scottish Gaelic is another one; it's actually not rare in Northwestern Europe. —Angr 04:52, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Right, I've removed it, and another paragraph which seemed to be confusing the written and the spoken language. We still say that a voicing contrast in nasals is rare among the languages of the world. Is that an accurate statement? Also, we say that length is contrastive for consonants, but not vowels. Am I correct in saying that length is only contrastive for [m], [n], [r] and [s]? I cannot think of any others. Also this may not be terribly accurate, the research of Pind suggests that it is the relative length of the vowel compared to the following consonant rather than the absolute length of either one which is the important factor. There is also eyddra vs eitra in which either the vowel length is contrastive or my statement above about which consonants can be contrastive is wrong. Comments? Stefán 16:30, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Translation

This page has a lot of example words with no translation. It would be a good thing to translate the example words. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 04:58, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] J in the phonology

j is an approximant in the IPA. Why is it put in the fricative bit here? Also, j is included as being one of the fricatives which veer towards being an approximant here but in 'Icelandic language' it is not included. Munci (talk) 18:46, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] diphthongs

Are the unusual diphthongs rising or falling? That is, where should we put the <  ̯> diacritic, and how does that fit the length diacritic? kwami (talk) 20:57, 3 June 2008 (UTC)