Re: Re: Digest Number 210

From: mayhem <meurtre_at_earthlink.net_at_hypermail.org>
Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 12:55:55 -0700

I, also, was confused by Joya's note. First of all, I took John's original
explanation for the name at face value--he had told us that it was a foreign
word. Of course, he's not above the occasional prank, so it wasn't
impossible
that there was another meaning, or that he'd made the word up.

I also figured Joya just meant "sound-alike word" when she said "phoneme."

But all I could get in trying to sound the word out was "shee-bahsh" (not
understanding that the "t" was supposed to help me produce a good old
English
"ch"). I considered--and discarded--the notion that this somehow sounded
like
"Syvox," because 1) it just doesn't sound alike at all. Even if there's some
wiggle room in the "i" sound, there's no getting around the "x" vs. "sch"
issue,
and 2) there's just no way John would have identified himself on an Olive
web site
using something related to a job he had mixed feelings about at best.
Linguistics
itself, yes. Syvox, no.

So that left me with either "sheepish," or some other English word I hadn't
heard
of. I was beginning to wonder if my vocabulary just wasn't up to solving
this
supposed puzzle.

--Q.M.


JJT writes:
>
> Excuse me, what do you mean by asking 'what is a phoneme for Tschibasch?'
>
> A phoneme is defined as a single unit of sound, so /p/, /a/, /sh/, and
> /ng/ are single phonemes; the sounds /ch/, /j/ are technically two
> phonemes...
>
> The word tschibasch is Romany and stands for "linguist". It is my
> spelling for it, intentionally to disambiguate any false pronunciations.
>
> The word for language in Romany is "chib". Think "cheeb", or "chib".
> The problem with the "ch" is that when we see it in a foreign word, we
> are inclined to pronounce it like the "ch" in Bach. One way to resolve
> this is by spelling that sound (the uvular fricative) as "kh". In
> Klingon, they simply use a capital "H"...
>
> Okay, so to assure that we get the "ch" sound is by spelling either
> with "tsh" or "tsch". I chose the second one.
>
> The word could be thus spelled "chibash", or "tshibash". It is a
> peculiar coincidence only that this would sound a little like "syvox".
>
> Sorry about the Linguistics lesson. Again, there was no connection
> with SyVox.
>
>
> --- In OliveStarlightOrchestra_at_yahoogroups.com, "Joya Beebe"
> <joyab_at_f...> wrote:
>> Waytaminit ...OK, maybe I'm slow on the uptake, but it took Dean
> using Mr. Turley's web moniker in the body of an email for me to
> realize ...
>>
>> John, the company is dead. You have a better job. You don't have
> to base your identity on them any more.
>>
>> - Joya
>>
>> p.s. - Anyone still going "huh?" ... it's a linguist's sense of
> humor, apparently: what is a phoneme for Tschibasch?
>



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Received on 2003-05-20 12:56:54