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Re: Lateralization

From:Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...>
Date:Monday, November 27, 2000, 21:01
On Wed, 22 Nov 2000 20:30:28 -0600, Eric Christopherson
<raccoon@...> wrote:

>On Wed, Nov 22, 2000 at 11:18:24PM +0000, Keith Alasdair Mylchreest wrote:
>Once again, Keith wrote: >> I'm not sure I entirely believe this, [t'] >> I can manage, a stop with double articulation, alveolar and glottal, but >> [(t)s'] ? and [T'] ?? let alone [hl'], I can't see how you can be making
a
>> stop in one part of the vocal tract and a sibilant/fricative in another > >I have a real hard time with those too, but I've been assured that they do >exist. I try to approximate them by pronouncing e.g. [s] with [?] >immediately afterwards (sometimes I put the glottal stop before _and_
after
>it, which I intuit might be closer to the real thing, but I'm not sure).
Maybe, the following will help a little bit. The way I see it - a bit simplicist and very subjective in many points, but seems to work for me. 1) Consider the difference between voiced and voiceless stops. It's easy to notice that it's chiefly based on the timing of voice onset (which you can comfortably control if you put your finger onto your Adam apple and feel the vibration). In voiced the voice turns on early (before opening the occlusion), and in voiceless - with a delay. 2) The same voice onset timing is involved in more subtle distinctions. Thus, if it nearly coincides with the opening of the occlusion, you get plain voiceless stop (e. g. [t] in _stop_); if it is delayed a bit more, you get an aspirate (like [t_h] in _top_). If you have your voice on from the very start of articulation, you get 'fully voiced' stops (typical e. g. of most Romance and Slavic langs). If you try to turn voice on noticeably earlier than you open the occlusion, you get a preglottalized voiced stop - kinda inevitably. See where I'm pointing? It's like a continuous gradient in which different langs use different areas as phonemic features. 3) Now consider a system which uses more than two zones in this continuum as phonemic features. More specifically, a system distinguishing two rows in the 'voiceless' span. It's natural that it'll try to emphasize the difference in voice onset timing in some way. One way is to stress the delay in one series, producing a very strong, distinct aspiration (maybe emphasized with some pharyngeal friction or adding some affrication to the stop). Thus you get a lang opposing 'plain voiceless' to 'aspirated voiceless'. An alternative strategy is to stress the sharp voice onset coinciding with the opening of the occlusion. And here it's time to tell you about 4) the way I was tought to pronounce ejectives by a Georgian speaker. His instructions (for glottalized [t']) were roughly as follows: a) make your tongue to form an occlusion, as if preparing to pronounce a [t], so that no air could pass through it; b) prepare to push air out, gradually increasing air pressure in your throat; c) now make the air to break through very abruptly, jumping to the fully voiced vowel articulation. If you manage it properly, you'll feel something *like* a glottal stop coinciding with vowel onset; d) you are nearly there. What you've got is an unnatural, hypercorrect Georgian [t']. Now you only need to relax and repeat it with less tension, without screaming like mad. 5) Some comments I'd like to add. It is very common that glottalized stops are opposed to aspirates. For example, Georgian 'plain' stops are in fact lax aspirates. It is also common that langs having ejectives use them to render foreign plain (unaspirated) stops (e. g. Ancient Greek loans in Georgian, Ethiosemitic, Aramaic, etc.). 'Glottalized' is a feature more common for occlusives than for fricatives. Glottalized affricates are more common than the respective fricatives. In particular, it seems that all Semitic langs that preserve the glottalized quality of their 'emphatics' realize [s'] as [t_s'] (which is often obscured by the traditional transcriptions modeled on Arabic). Glottalized stops are indeed different from clusters with glottal stop. Basilius