Re: Sonority of 'h'?

En réponse à Amanda Babcock :


>Does 'h' fit into the usual set of sonority classes?  In English it seems
>like it can only appear as the sole onset of a syllable.  In Mohawk they
>throw it around all over the place indiscriminately - does Mohawk use
>sonority distance?  It seems that 'h' is treated in widely varying ways
>by different languages.  Where does it fit?
[h] is a voiceless glottal fricative, i.e. the fricative equivalent of [?],
just like [x] is the fricative equivalent of [k]. It even has a voiced
counterpart, hooked-h in IPA, [h\] in X-SAMPA. How it is treated depends
thus on two factors: how the language treats fricatives, and how it treats
glottal consonants. In English, glottal consonants can appear only
initially. It's true about [h], but also about [?] (which appears in front
of words which seem to begin with a vowel). German has this even stronger
than English. So in this case the treatment of [h] as a glottal consonant
preceeds its treatment as a fricative. In Mohawk, it seems it's treated
more like any other voiceless fricative (does Mohawk have phonemic /?/?),
and it probably patterns with them.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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