From: "J Matthew Pearson" <pearson@...>
> Danny Wier wrote:
>
> > This is an interest of mine, as most of yas know. It's from a PDF
document I
> > found on languages that can be distinguished from others by the
occurence of
> > consonants and/or vowels not found in other languages. 451 languages
are listed
> > in the document.
> >
> > Some examples:
> > [snip]
>
> > Malagasy: [d.r?], [t.r?] (rhotacized and glottalized retroflex stops, I
think)
>
> Ah yes. I've always had trouble characterising Malagasy /tr/ and /dr/.
English
> speakers tend to pronounce them [tS] and [dZ], respectively, but that's
not quite
> right. They're definitely less rounded and less affricated than the
English
> sounds. I've always suspected that they're retroflex, but as far as I
know,
> nobody's ever done any palatography studies to confirm that. When I try
to
> reproduce them, I end up making retroflex stops with a faintly rhotic
release, so
> that's how I generally describe them. They don't sound especially
glottalised to
> me.
Well it calls them [d`r_A?] and [t`r_A?], which apparently means retroflex
/d/ and /t/, followed by /r/ with ATR, and /?/.
I found the few non-IPA diacritics confusing, and the typography didn't
help... apparently the diacritics were just thrown on, and in some places
are misleading... is that a gamma by Sui, or voiceless /v/ ? Nahuatl has
what looks like a normal phi, but it's got a diacritic... [Ack! I just
zoomed in on these really close. The Sui phoneme appears to be a creaky
gamma. whose tilde was completely invisible for some reason. And I thought
the diacritic on the Nahuatl phi was "raised" but apparently it's
"non-syllabic"?]
But here I'm just being picky...