Re: linguistics questions

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 3:47 PM, Campbell Nilsen <cactus95@...> wrote:
>  If I put my toungue between my upper lip and upper teeth, I can form nasals and
>  plosives, and without my tongue, fricatives. Not only are there no IPA
>  symbols, this POA doesn't even seem to have a name. As it may be used in a
>  future conlang, this is not good.
From trying it out myself, it seems that the sounds made at this PoA
are (a) highly effortful and (b) perceptually almost identical to
regular old labials. So I'd say the reason there's no IPA for this PoA
is that no one uses it, because you have to exert a decent bit of
effort but you don't get the benefit of another easily distinguishable
sound.
Of course, the above is based on what I've been producing myself,
which may not be exactly the same as how you're doing it. But
nonetheless, the place between your upper lip and upper teeth is kind
of out-of-the-way from the tongue's range of motion in speech, and it
seems like articulating at this PoA would be slow, and these
consonants would merge with labials (or, maybe, dentals) fairly
quickly.