Re: Hell hath no Fury (was: war and death are in my hand)

En réponse à Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>:

>
> Does it seem possible that the first two doubly-articulated stops would
> exist?  I remember seeing /kp/ and it's voiced counterpart /gb/ in
> African languages, but i've never heard of /pt/ and /tk/.  I can
> pronounce them easily enough...
>
Labio-velar consonnants are really common. After all, the normal articulation of
/w/ is not only labial but labio-velar, so its place of articulation is the one
of [k_p] rather than [p]. I think they appear because the labial and velar
articulations are far enough from each other to be used at the same time without
much difficulty. With /p_t/, the two simultaneous articulations are nearer to
each other, so they could produce a problem, but since the two articulations are
made with different parts of the mouth (the lips and the tongue), I think it
could be possible without much trouble. After all, maybe some Greek dialects
pronounced the cluster /pt/ as a double articulation :) . As for /t_k/, the
problem is that both articulations have to be made with the tongue, and it seems
to me rather difficult to curve the tongue correctly to make both articulations
at the same time. Maybe with a little training, but I would think that such a
double-articulated consonnant should be much rarer than the other two (in fact,
kp should be the most frequent, pt less frequent and tk the rarest if you really
choose to keep them all). Maybe you should allow clusters as allophones of the
double-articulated consonnants...

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr