Afc0703

IPA - Francesca Schiavone

Hey Andrew, I hope you don't mind that I corrected the Italian pronunciation of Francesca Schiavone. Not all tonic vowels are long (/eː oː/, etc.)! GiovanniS (talk) 10:39, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, according to Italian phonology, vowels in stressed open syllables are long (except when word-final). In the case of Franceseca, the stressed /e/ is in an open, non-final syllable, as is the stressed /o/ of Schiavone, which would indicate that they are both long. --Andrew C ^talk (afc0703) 13:04, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

That statement seems a bit strong to me. Also, wait a minute: correct me if I'm wrong, but those syllables (their vowel sounds) are closed, not open: /e o/ as opposed to /ɛ ɔ/.

I believe there is no phonemic vowel length contrast in Italian (except in very specific cases, i.e. "sali" ~ "salii"), like there is in English or German. Sure, some words could present a shorter or longer stressed vowel (['roma] or ['roːma], both acceptable pronunciations for "Roma"), but that depends on context, prosody, speaker etc. and I think we are talking about phones and fine-grained variation, not phonemes anymore (notice that I used [] phonetic brackets, not // phonemic ones anymore).

Disclaimer: I am not a linguist, although I am a native speaker. I perceive the "e" in Francesca as definitely short, and the "o" in Schiavone as... short or optionally slightly long, hence why I wrote /o(ː)/ in the article. GiovanniS (talk) 14:59, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Ah, now I see. I agree: There is no phonemic difference in vowel length in Italian (not even in cases like salii salì-i). In fact, I would have omitted the vowel length marks entirely, but the pronunciation templates for foreign (i.e., non-English) automatically include square brackets.

The article I cited refers to an "open" syllable (not open vowel quality). An open syllable is a syllable that does not have a consonant in its final (coda) position. The article goes on to show that the difference between fata and fatta can be heard in both the vowel and consonant sounds (the /tt/ in fatta ensures that the stressed /a/ does not get lengthened as it **would** in fata). So, if you break the words up into syllables you would get Fran-cé-sca Schia-vó-ne — both closed vowels in open syllables. Both stressed syllables are "open" because the consonants that follow them are in the following syllables. The article also talks about phonology in the context of Standard Italian, so (as you said) these details depend on the speaker.

All in all, I mostly relied on Italian phonology and WP:IPA for Italian to transcribe the name, so if your transcription sounds more accurate/natural, then that's fine by me. Thanks for the nice chat! --Andrew C ^talk (afc0703) 15:38, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

P.S. I'm not a linguist either; just an enthusiast, really. I was inspired to transcribe her name when I hear some sports commentators calling her [ski.ə.ˈvoʊ.ni], :-) --Andrew C ^talk (afc0703) 15:46, 7 June 2010 (UTC)