Re: Phonological terminology question

Danny Wier wrote:
> From: "Garth Wallace" <gwalla@...>
>
>>I'm also a little unclear on how epiglottal and pharyngeal consonants
>>are produced...is a pharyngeal fricative a choking sound? Because that's
>>what I get when I try it.
>
>
> Oh God, these took me forever to master. I'm sporadically studying Hebrew
> and Arabic, so I had to figure these out. I had to look around for a
> detailed description of what goes on with a pharyngeal consonant.
>
> What happens is that the throat muscles above the glottis (that's where the
> pharynx, treachea and esophagus meet) contracts at the sides, a type of
> "gurgling" sound that also causes a backing of adjacent vowels, which also
> become "pharyngealized" (Maltese "gha" with a stroke through the "h" is a
> pharyngealized /a/). There is no such thing as a pharyngeal stop (that would
> be painful!), just the two fricatives in Arabic, voiceless and voiced.
Ah, so it's less of a "choking" sound than a "hocking up phlegm" sound.
Got it.

> It's very easy to miss the mark and produce uvular fricatives. If you can
> close off the throat and produce a stop, that's uvular, not pharyngeal.
> Incidentally, modern Hebrew gives the sound of "heth" as a uvular voiceless
> fricative (IPA chi) and "ayin" as glottal stop.
Okay.

> Not only Semitic languages have the pharyngeal consonants, but other
> non-Semitic languages in the Afrasian language/phylum: Egyptian (but not
> Coptic), the Berber languages, and the Cushitic languages, including Somali
> and Oromiffa. And these consonants also appear in other families, usually
> with larger, more "exotic" consonant inventories: Northeast Caucasian (i.e.
> Daghestani), Khoisan and Salishan are just a few examples. And Tech (here we
> go again...).
>
> Now the epiglottal consonants, which are extremely rare (I know of no
> natlang with them), most likely involve a "choking" type of sound. They
> occur as voiceless stops (IPA glottal stop with stroke), voiceless fricative
> (IPA small capital H) and voiced fricative (IPA reversed glottal stop with
> stroke, or voiced pharyngeal mark with stroke). I have NO idea how these are
> actually produced, and they seem uncomfortable just thinking about them; I
> have a pretty sensitive neck-throat region.
Those mystify me. I have no idea how to control my epiglottis.

> However... I've seen a symbol used by Sergei Starostin in his reconstruction
> of Proto-North Caucasian: that would comprise both NW Caucasian which
> includes Abkhaz and Kabardian, and NE Caucasian which includes Chechen and
> Daghstani languages like Avar and Dido, the language not the singer. This is
> the IPA glottal stop (resembles a question mark) with a small horizontal
> stroke or tick, the epiglottal stop. That could be an epiglottal stop or
> some sort of pharyngeal ejective, a scary sound indeed!
It makes my throat sore just thinking about it.

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