Re: CHAT: Rare Phonetics

From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>

| En réponse à Danny Wier <dawier@...>:

| > French: nasal front mid-low rounded vowel [oe~]
|
| And don't forget the dreaded /H/ (inverted lowercase h, the non-vocalic
| equivalent of /y/) which exists in only a handful of languages all over the
| world.

That is also found in Abkhaz, and it was in Classical Greek (_huios_ "son", for
example).  (The document only surveyed living languages, so recently-extinct
Ubyx which would have quite a few unique sounds was absent.)

| > Somali: [U-] (lax version of barred u), [d.~] (velarized retroflex d.)
|
| Can you *produce* such a thing?!

I can do it.  It might be more "uvularized" than "velarized".

| > Uzbek: [B~] (velarized voiced bilabial fricative)
|
| A fricative correspondant of the labiovelar /w/?

Yes, it's the sound of Castillian Spanish "b" and "v" between vowels.  You place
your lips in position for [w], but you use friction like you're saying [v].

| > The language with the most unique phones is !Xou, with 65.
| >
|
| I wish I could hear some of this language one day. I think at the Cité de la
| Science, in Paris, there is a whole part about language where you can listen
to
| samples of a lot of languages, and this language was part of them (IIRC) as an
| example of a language with clicks. Unfortunately, the loudspeaker that was
| supposed to give those samples seemed to be broken :((( . I wonder how you can
| actually put clicks in words...

Only Khoisan language I've ever heard was from the movie _The Gods Must Be
Crazy_ (I think it was Nama).  !Xou or !Xu -- I really thing they're different
spellings of the same thing -- doesn't just have clicks.  It has aspirated
clicks, affricate clicks, prenasal clicks, sibilantized clicks, glottalized
clicks, voiced clicks, labialized clicks...

~DaW~


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