Re: NATLANG: Gaidhlig volunteer needed

On 3/21/06, Elliott Lash <erelion12@...> wrote:
> http://www.akerbeltz.org/fuaimean/fuaimean.htm
Thanks!

> > Are lenited |bh| and |mh| really [v]?   Not [B]?
> I really do think they're [v] in Scottish Gaelic.
Ok.  Were they historically [B], maybe?  The use of bilabial symbols
for a labiodental sound just seems a little odd.

> In any event, <mh> sometimes nasalizes the surrounded vowels.
Interesting!  So the underlying nasality carries over even though the
sound itself isn't nasal by the time it's pronounced.

> > Is there a convention concerning which superscript goes first?
>
> I think that the superscript <h> would precede the
> <j>, but I might be biased due to my Indo-European
> knowledge.
Hm?  Why would IE knowledge bias you one way or the other?

I could see it going either way, logically.  The aspiration occurs
before any audible sound that could be said to be palatalized, but the
tongue is probably in the palatal position even before the aspiration
. . .

> > What the heck is a "velarized dental"  (e.g. broad single initial unlenited |l| and |n|)?
> > How do you do that with your tongue??
> Aren't they dark-l and dark-n? Like the <l> (in my
> dialect) in <look>. They're written with a tilde
> through the L and N.
Oh!  Is that all they are?  The description I read explicity said that
the sounds DIDN'T exist in English, so I assumed there was something
stranger than [5] going on.  Grr.

I definitely distinguish the two /l/'s in my 'lect, but I don't quite
feel how the dark one is "velarized".  My tongue isn't in anything
like the position it's in for velars.  But whatever, that helps
muchly.

(BTW, in CXS, the IPA "tilde-through" diacritic is spelled _e, so
those sounds are [l_e] and [n_e].  However, [l_e] is more commonly
written with its own symbol, [5]).

Thanks again!


--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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