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The Pronunciation of Django

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Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#31

Post by jtauber »

_delirium wrote: post #27
jtauber wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason "Django" is pronounced /​dʒɑ̃ɡo/ or /dʒæŋɡəʊ/ is not because the "D" is silent and the "j" is pronounced /dʒ/ but rather because the "D" is pronounced /d/ and the "j" is pronounced /ʒ/. Explaining how to pronounce it by saying "the D is silent" might be helpful but it's technically incorrect. It may seem like pedantry to many but I thought people with an interest in linguistics might find it helpful.

That's not a precisely correct explanation either, though, because English 'j', pronounced /d͡ʒ/, is a single consonant sound (a voiced palato-alveolar affricate), not a sequence of two consonants. Though it's true that it's what English speakers would produce if you asked them to pronounce /d/ + /ʒ/ in sequence, because they always collapse into the single consonant. Not sure if that's also true in French.

Right, I didn't bother making the distinction between the true affricate /d͡ʒ/ and the sequence /dʒ/ because my main point was that the exists in because alone would be pronounced /ʒ/ and hence the isn't a silent letter but exists explicitly to contrast /d͡ʒ/ with /ʒ/

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#32

Post by jtauber »

fusiongyro wrote: post #23
jdlshore wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not silent in French. In English, it is. It's pronounced the same way as the J in James, which happens to be my name. To paraphrase Ron Jeffries, the D in my name is silent... and invisible.

In French 'j' carries /ʒ/ and the digraph 'dj' carries /d͡ʒ/. In English, 'j' carries /d͡ʒ/ and there's no consistent orthographic convention for just /ʒ/ ('si', 'zh', 'j', and 'z' all do the job in different contexts, and probably others as well). There isn't really a /d/ as such in /d͡ʒ/.

Right, but the best explanation for why "Django" is spelled with a is not that the is silent and the represents /d͡ʒ/ but rather that, as you say, the diagraph represents /d͡ʒ/.

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#33

Post by [deleted] »

jtauber wrote: post #29
_delirium wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More careful IPA emphasizes this by not transcribing it as the sequence of characters /dʒ/, though doing so is still common. For a while the solution was to use a ligature, /ʤ/, to emphasize that it was a single consonant, not a sequence of two consonants, but that was typographically to difficult to distinguish from /dʒ/, so now /d͡ʒ/ is preferred, using the generic IPA kludge for "these two characters should be tre…

Yeah, I didn't bother with /d͡ʒ/ (incidentally, neither does Wikipedia in their pronunciation of Django Reinhardt's name) because my main point was to explain the origin of the in the name "Django".

[deleted]

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#34

Post by jtauber »

tomintokyo wrote: post #18
ksaraghan wrote: post #13

As a linguistics student, I don't like this argument. Orthographic in English represents the affricate /dʒ/, which is unambiguously a phoneme in English. by itself (generally) represents /dʒ/, so the doesn't contribute any additional phonetic content to the word, so you could, in fact, call it a "silent" . French has a phoneme /ʒ/, written , but, lacking the affricate /dʒ/, has to represent that sound as a sequence o…

This is the clearest explanation yet. At the beginning of a word in English, orthographic is virtually always pronounced /dʒ/.

Yes, but that is irrelevant to why Django Reinhardt spelled his name with a D.

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#35

Post by _delirium »

jtauber wrote: post #31
_delirium wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a precisely correct explanation either, though, because English 'j', pronounced /d͡ʒ/, is a single consonant sound (a voiced palato-alveolar affricate), not a sequence of two consonants. Though it's true that it's what English speakers would produce if you asked them to pronounce /d/ + /ʒ/ in sequence, because they always collapse into the single consonant. Not sure if that's also true in French.

Right, I didn't bother making the distinction between the true affricate /d͡ʒ/ and the sequence /dʒ/ because my main point was that the exists in because alone would be pronounced /ʒ/ and hence the isn't a silent letter but exists explicitly to contrast /d͡ʒ/ with /ʒ/

Ah yeah, that makes sense to me. Even if you treat 'd' as a kind of modifier in French (it turns the 'j' from a sibilant into an affricative) it's clearly still having an effect on the pronunciation. I was somewhat objecting to whether the the 'd' itself is being pronounced, but that does get pretty hair-splitting, especially since /d/ is a stop. The transcription /dʒ/ sure makes it look like it's pronounced, but if IPA used a single character to transcribe the affricative, the 'd' would look like it disappeared in French too. But, granted, rather than having no effect (as in English), in French it'd still modulate the pronunciation of the 'j' even in that analysis.

Incidentally, I wonder if there are any languages where /d͡ʒ/ != /dʒ/ or if it's just impossible to produce that sequence.

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#36

Post by jtauber »

_delirium wrote: post #35
jtauber wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I didn't bother making the distinction between the true affricate /d͡ʒ/ and the sequence /dʒ/ because my main point was that the exists in because alone would be pronounced /ʒ/ and hence the isn't a silent letter but exists explicitly to contrast /d͡ʒ/ with /ʒ/

Ah yeah, that makes sense to me. Even if you treat 'd' as a kind of modifier in French (it turns the 'j' from a sibilant into an affricative) it's clearly still having an effect on the pronunciation. I was somewhat objecting to whether the the 'd' itself is being pronounced, but that does get pretty hair-splitting, especially since /d/ is a stop. The transcription /dʒ/ sure makes it look like it's pronounced, but if…

Polish apparently contrasts /t͡ʂ/ and /tʂ/

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affricate_consonant#Affricates_...

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#37

Post by pash »

The letters "j" in English and "dj" in French represent the same sound†, what Wikipedia calls the "voiced palato-velolar affricate" [0]. That's /dʒ/ in IPA.

In English orthography, yes, the "D" in "Django"is silent, at least in the sense that if you remove it from the French spelling you'll get the phonetic English spelling.

† — as well as "dzh" ["дж"] in Russian, etc.

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato-alveolar_affricat...

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#38

Post by jtauber »

_delirium wrote: post #35
jtauber wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I didn't bother making the distinction between the true affricate /d͡ʒ/ and the sequence /dʒ/ because my main point was that the exists in because alone would be pronounced /ʒ/ and hence the isn't a silent letter but exists explicitly to contrast /d͡ʒ/ with /ʒ/

Ah yeah, that makes sense to me. Even if you treat 'd' as a kind of modifier in French (it turns the 'j' from a sibilant into an affricative) it's clearly still having an effect on the pronunciation. I was somewhat objecting to whether the the 'd' itself is being pronounced, but that does get pretty hair-splitting, especially since /d/ is a stop. The transcription /dʒ/ sure makes it look like it's pronounced, but if…

I'm trying to think of other modifier examples. Not a perfect analogy but I don't think you'd say that, in English, the in is silent.

I wonder about Italian, though. Would it be correct to say the is silent in ?

Seems a much tougher call in Italian. I would say /d͡ʒ/ has a much closer relationship to /dʒ/ than /ʎ/ does to /gli/ for example.

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#39

Post by jtauber »

pash wrote: post #37

The letters "j" in English and "dj" in French represent the same sound†, what Wikipedia calls the "voiced palato-velolar affricate" [0]. That's /dʒ/ in IPA. In English orthography, yes, the "D" in "Django"is silent, at least in the sense that if you remove it from the French spelling you'll get the phonetic English spelling. † — as well as "dzh" ["дж"] in Russian, etc. 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato-al…

But if you're trying to explain why Django is spelled the way it is, it's far more insightful to explain /d/ -> and /ʒ/ -> than to posit the comes from nowhere and is just silent.

Re: The Pronunciation of Django

#40

Post by jlgreco »

jtauber wrote: post #39
pash wrote: post #37

The letters "j" in English and "dj" in French represent the same sound†, what Wikipedia calls the "voiced palato-velolar affricate" [0]. That's /dʒ/ in IPA. In English orthography, yes, the "D" in "Django"is silent, at least in the sense that if you remove it from the French spelling you'll get the phonetic English spelling. † — as well as "dzh" ["дж"] in Russian, etc. 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato-al…

But if you're trying to explain why Django is spelled the way it is, it's far more insightful to explain /d/ -> and /ʒ/ -> than to posit the comes from nowhere and is just silent.

It is much easier to explain it the way everybody else in this thread (such as has pash's sibling comment) been explaining it, judging from the confusion and befuddlement people seem to be expressing.
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