User talk:Dermotmacflann

Nabooru Pronunciation

I'm not very good with writing the pauses in IPA, like the apostrophe, comma, and period, but I do understand the letters and pronunciation. Perhaps you could explain to me the difference. The comma is for a long vowel, tho, right?

Now as for the pronunciation, what I hear now that I look it up on YouTube and listen to it with headphones is the nɑ being reduced into a nə, and the OO being pronounced ɔ instead of o like I had it originally, but like you said, she pronounced it with a standard R (r) (rather than an English R (ɹ) which tends to get a bonus ə right before it). I definitely don't hear the R being with the OO like you do. I hear it with the U. I know it makes more sense for some consonants (like an English R) to attach to the end of an open vowel, but I don't think a standard R would be one of those. Also, isn't the comma for elongating a vowel? She definitely pronounces the OO as a long vowel, and the U at the end is pretty short. So I'm quite certain the IPA for that actor's pronunciation would be nə'bɔ:ru, assuming I have the spacing markers correct. Schwarzorn (talk) 23:06, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

All right, let's see... /ˈ/ is directly before a syllable with primary stress, /ˌ/ is directly before a syllable with secondary stress, and /./ is a syllable break. /ˈ/ and /ˌ/ are also implicitly syllable breaks, so that /.ˈ/ and /.ˌ/ are redundant. /ː/ immediately after a vowel indicates that it is phonetically long. Now, still reading your comment...

As for exact pronunciations of words, trying to reach an exact complete phonetic pronunciation accounting for speaker and accent is not necessarily a good idea. The English language comes in all sorts of different accents, each with their own pronunciation quirks. While "Nabooru" is presumed to be a word in some stage of the Gerudo language, the dialogue of the English version of Breath of the Wild is (not surprisingly) in English, so a "broad transcription" of sounds in English is used for the pronunciation. That means /r/ is transcribed even where it would be silent for British or Australian speakers, and /ɔːr/ (as in NORTH) and /ɔər/ (as in FORCE) are distinguished, and so forth. When speaking of broad transcriptions of English vowels, there are various opinions on the wisest way to go about it, but the prevailing wisdom is to treat vowels as part of a "lexical set," which makes it relatively easy to discuss different vowels and what makes them different. Now, what are the vowels in "Nabooru"? On inspection, it sounds like the COMMA vowel, then either the NORTH or FORCE vowel, then the GOOSE vowel. The most likely alternative to the COMMA vowel for the first syllable is probably the PALM vowel, but I would say it's not this vowel because Urbosa pronounces it too lax such that it becomes a "weak vowel." And most (but not all) accents today pronounce the NORTH and FORCE vowels the same way (/ɔɹ/ in North America, /ɔː(ɹ)/ in England), but usually, the rule in determining which is which is by context—is the "o" understood to be "long" or "short" (even if the pronunciation difference has been lost)? With such a test, the "o" in "for" is a "short" "o", while the "o" in "fore" or "four" is a "long" "o", and some accents still distinguish this (like /fɒr/ vs. /foːr/ in Ireland) even if many of us no longer do. I'm going with the general assumption that the "oor" in "Nabooru" is a FORCE vowel (with "long" "o"). For historic reasons, largely concerned with reflecting meta-differences between North America and Britain, the NORTH vowel is broadly transcribed /ɔːr/ while the FORCE vowel is broadly transcribed /ɔər/. Using a more exacting pronunciation for Gerudo language words would be a fool's errand as long as the phonology of the fictional Gerudo language itself is not well defined and documented such that we can cite it as a reference—we can only really rely on how the words filter into broad English phonotactics. - Dermotmacflann (talk) 23:39, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

As for whether the "u" in Nabooru is a strong vowel or a week vowel, broad English transcriptions generally don't distinguish this in final vowels. /i/ (HAPPY) vs. /iː/ (FLEECE) are traditionally distinguished because they actually differ in some accents (Scotland in particular), but final /u/ vs. /uː/ aren't distinguished at the ends of words because practically no natively-spoken accent of English treats these as separate phonemes which can be assigned separate lexical set terms. So there's a GOOSE vowel, but no separate HINDU vowel, if that makes sense. A lax /u/ can theoretically exist word internally, and I like to non-standardly call this the MINUET vowel (/ˌmɪnjuˈɛt/), which can have a lax realization, [ˌmɪnjʊˈɛt]. But if you speak the vowel at the end of a word, in pause, it does not really differ from the tense version of the vowel. Some people to say HAPPY (/ˈhæpi/) more narrowly as [ˈhæpɪ], but how many people pronounce "Hindu" /ˈhɪnduː/ more narrowly as [ˈhɪndʊ]? I'm going to guess hardly any native accent of English has this as a feature. The meta-vowel /i/ exists because some accents tense it to [iː] while other accents lax it to [ɪ] or even [e] (again, Scotland), separately from /iː/, even at the ends of words. The same can't really be said of /u/ vs. /uː/ at the ends of words. - Dermotmacflann (talk) 00:03, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Source Info on Image Uploads

Hey, make sure you provide information for your source in the source field when you upload an image. If you obtained the image yourself, go ahead and use {{Original Source|Dermotmacflann}}. If you obtained it another way, please state or link where. Thanks. -- Hylian pi (talk) 06:17, 18 April 2017 (UTC)