Re: Iltârer phonology

On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, Tom Tadfor Little wrote:

> At 03:27 PM 4/26/01 , Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> > > Iltârer phonology is distinctive among the Thekashi languages in that it is
> > > strongly frontal; there are no back vowels and no velar consonants.
>
> > > Consonants are distinguished by place and mode of articulation, but not by
> > > voice:
> >
> >Pardon my ignorance; what is voice?  Is that as in "creaky voice" and
> >things like that?
>
> No, voice as in whether the vocal cords are active or not. [t], [p], [k]
> are voiceless; [d], [b], [g] are their voiced counterparts.
Oh!  <bonking self on head>  Duh.  I knew that.  It's just that when I
see "voice" my brain thinks "writing voice," and then I thought of
"creaky voice" because someone mentioned it recently...I'm out of it this
week.

> >Do you have recordings of this?  I would love to hear what this language
> >sounds like; I'm very intrigued.
>
> Yikes! I'm struggling to pronounce it myself--the phonology is less than a
> week old! But I have been practicing, and maybe a few audio files on the
Could've fooled me.  =^)

> web would be fun. Actually, one of my choices this time around was to work
> with sounds that are not too easy for me, like the dental stop, unaspirated
> /t/, and rounded /a./. I'm having to work to achieve passable
> pronunciation, but I sort of like the result. It makes it sound like a real
> language from a distant place, rather than just another rearrangement of
> generic European phonemes. It reminds me of my (very brief) attempt to
> learn to pronounce Sanskrit.
If you ever do get sound files available, let us know!  :-)

YHL