Spelling/Pronunciation of "Tzhuro"

Posted by Xavier McShane on 14:35 2/3/02

In reply to: (none)

The spelling of "Tzhuro" is somewhat puzzling - "tzh-" strikes me as a somewhat odd initial consonant cluster, with its unvoiced stop and voiced fricative. You mention somewhere on your site that you vary your transliteration schemes to give your languages different appearances - is "tzh-" an exotic spelling of an affricate or palatal? Or is it related somehow to "tshur"?

Mark responds:

The most honest answer is that I devised the word before knowing much about phonetics. But I've kept it because it is phonetically possible, though odd. It's a fricative with delayed voice onset, contrasting both with j (which is voiced throughout) and ch (which is unvoiced throughout). (Note that English tends to delay voicing, so our j sounds rather like Tzhuro tzh. Tzhuro , like French, voices its voiced consonants early; so that its j, as in Jippir, would almost sound like 'njippir' to us.)
