Talk:Faroese phonology

ɹ or ʐ?

The article can't seem to make up its mind. If there's an allophonic rule, it's not explained (nor do I remember Árnason mentioning a rule for a ʐ allophone).--95.42.201.224 (talk) 01:48, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

AFAIK, /ʐ/ is an archaic phoneme. I don't know anybody (and I'm native Faroese) who uses this sound, not even as a voiced allophone of /ʂ/. So I'm guessing that this is a relic, because I vaguely remember reading that intervocalic /ɹ/ had this as an allophone. But I'd need to look for said article. Mulder1982 (talk) 05:47, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

Number of Vowels

The article says that Faroese has 26 vowels in total, a figure that's repeated on the main Faroese page. It looks like the article arrives at that number by looking at all the allophones of Faroese's underlying vowels, which is a weird way to count vowels in a language and not commonly done in descriptions of languages on Wikipedia. Both pages actually list what looks like the correct number of vowels in the table labeled "Faroese Vowels". I'm proposing replacing "26" with "14" (or whatever the correct number of contrastive vowels is).-- Cxhh (talk) 20:49, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

As a native Faroese, I would concur with the figure 14. However, regarding /a: y:/ these only occur in loan words (like /õ/ in German), so maybe 12 would be a more accurate figure. My caveat at 14, however, is that this only counts monophthongs. I haven't counted them recently but 12 diphthong phonemes sounds about right. (I'm not really a fan of Árnason's book, tbqh). Mulder1982 (talk) 05:47, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

I know less than nothing about Faroese, but the first line of the article: "Faroese has a sound system similar to closely related Icelandic, including such features as an aspiration contrast in stop consonants and a lack of vowel length, features rare among Germanic languages."

conflicts completely with the main statement in the vowel section: "As with other Germanic languages, Faroese has a large number of vowel phonemes; by one analysis, long and short vowels may be considered separate phonemes, with 26 in total. Vowel distribution is similar to other North Germanic languages in that short vowels appear in closed syllables (those ending in consonant clusters or long consonants) and long vowels appearing in open syllables."Badatom (talk) 20:41, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Isogloss map origin?

That map looks incredibly useful but it has no citation next to it. Where’s it from? Is it up-to-date? Siúnrá (talk) 00:21, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

Dunno, and yes, at least from a historical POV. There may have been subtle changes but yes, it's quite accurate. I don't know its source, unfortunately. Mulder1982 (talk) 05:47, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

[ʰ] and ⟨ð⟩

@Mulder1982 and Mr KEBAB: Hi, two quick questions, if possible: Firstly, when does the aspirated [ʰ] appear before consonants (e.g. faiʰtː? And finally, what sounds can ⟨ð⟩ make and when are they supposed to be articulated like that? Any answers will be greatly appreciated. I find all of this phonology system extremely beautiful. — AWESOME meeos ！ * ([ˈjæb.ə ət məɪ])) 12:31, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

@Awesomemeeos: I'm not knowledgeable enough to answer that. Árnason will probably have an answer. Mr KEBAB (talk) 12:41, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Preaspiration occurs before stops and affricates, when these are geminated or parts of clusters (like [tn] in all dialects of Faroese. In some other dialects, it also occurs before ungeminated stops/affricates, however here never after open vowels/diphthongs. Concerning ⟨ð⟩ and intervocalic ⟨g⟩, it's not really these who make the sounds, their usage is mere etymological. Rather these former fricatives were completely lost in Faroese. This created hiatuses, so to compensate a glide (usually [j], [w] but also [v]) is inserted between the two vowels. Which one depends on the quality of the vowels, so closed vowels will have only their corresponding unvocalic counterpart, while mid and closed vowels can take both. I hope I explained this somewhat clearly. Mulder1982 (talk) 17:42, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

@Mulder1982: Takk fyri! You did answer my question satisfyingly. — AWESOME meeos ！ * ([ˈjæb.ə ət məɪ])) 21:10, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Unstressed /ɛ/?

@Mulder1982: In the article, it says that there are only three unstressed vowels, /a, ɪ, ʊ/. However, some examples, like hjálpti and sigldi with unstressed /ɛ/. Why does it contradict? — ^{they call me} AWESOMEmeeos ... [ˈɔɪ̯]! 22:52, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

@Awesomemeeos: Those may be nothing more than exceptions to the rule. Mr KEBAB (talk) 02:42, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

It's true, that these are only three unstressed vowels and those are the three that you mention; however, dialectically those "float" quite considerably between various [ ] forms. Unstressed /ɪ/ is roughly [ɪ ~ ɛ ~ ə]. So you can definitely meet someone who would say hjálpti and sigldi with a final [ɛ]. I think I have this personally. Mulder1982 (talk) 04:06, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

@Mulder1982: Ok, so [ɛ] in that context is just an allophone of /ɪ/. I've corrected (normalized is probably a better word) the transcriptions so that they now contain final [ɪ]. Mr KEBAB (talk) 13:09, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, looks better. But I can see that there are other issues that need to be taken care of (for instance how <yrkti> is transliterated, should be more like (in X-SAMPA) ["Ir\`_0t`I]) but yeah I'll do that eventually. Mulder1982 (talk) 05:01, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

@Mulder1982: Thanks. I've fixed yrkti. Mr KEBAB (talk) 11:59, 4 November 2017 (UTC)