Re: Arabic Questions

Roger Mills jazdy:


> Is there any friction or is it smooth?
As for [?\], it is fricative.

> It occurs to me that in a language
> with contrastive initial /?/::/0/, it might be the onset of /0/-initial
> words??  Since IIRC you're familiar with both Arabic and Hawaiian, am I
more
> or less right?
In Arabic (as most other Semitic lgs, e.g. Biblical Hebrew) V-initial
syllables are impossible, so there is no /?/::/0/ contrast.
In Hawaiian (as well as in her sister lgs), there is such opposition, tho i
don't recall minimal pairs from head now. I find this feature especially
difficult, because smth makes me to pronounce all words in a certain lg
either with the glottal stop, or without it - just compare English and
German.

ObConlang: none of my projects contain [?\], because I find this sound to be
one of the most difficult to reproduce, and I want to be able to utter
anything I compose :) Some projects indeed have the glottal stop [?], but
I'm not sure if it is contrasted to zero in any of them. Anyway, I'm still
not satisfied with the stuff I made, and hope to better ideas in future.

Yitzik

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