Re: Introducing myself to the list

>From: Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...>
>On Sat, 17 Jun 2000 01:59:40 CDT, Danny Wier <dawier@...> wrote:
> >Amharic and other Ethiopian Semitic languages, along with some variant
> >pronunciations of Georgian, have uvular ejective fricatives,
>
>Can you provide an example from Amharic? I don't remember uvular
>ejective _fricatives_ in Amharic... on the other hand, uvular stops
>tend to be actually affricates....
Well, I didn't hear it, I read about it.  I was thinking about uvular
consonant on the bus today (and yes, Tech phonology).

Maybe I had the wrong Ethiopian Semitic language, maybe it's Tigrinya, or
maybe Ge'ez itself.

Anyway, there is indeed a tendency for uvular stops to become fricatives or
at least affricates.  According to Nostratic believers, Semitic/Afroasiatic
/q/, /x/ and /gamma/ came from Nost /q'/, /q/ and /G/.  As did Kartvelian
/q'/, /q/ (Georgian /x/) and /gamma/.  Tech has, as unmutated phonemes,
/q'/, /q/, /G/, /X/, /R/ , but phonemic status of /q/~/X/ and /G/~/R/ are
doubtful.

> >and Korean has
> ><ss> which is described as 'tense' (sounds like a glottalized consonant
>to
> >me).
>
>No, the term 'tense' is normally applied to a different feature.
>Moreover, there are languages (in Dagestan) opposing 'tense ejectives'
>to 'lax ejectives'.
See, I get told different things by different people!  Avar and other
Daghestani languages geminate consonants, including ejectives.  This is what
is meant by 'tense' and 'lax'.

Korean, of course, writes 'tense' consonants as doubles, so they're probably
more correctly doubled consonants, but I still read some descriptions of
(pre)glottalization.

> >The implosive nasal is not much different than a prenasalized voiced
>stop,
> >found in Niger-Kordofanian languages.  Voiced stops can be implosive or
> >'normal'; they are often written as <d> and <dh>, which is used for
>Swahili,
> >or was it Zulu or Xhosa?
>
>What do you call 'implosive'? Do you mean 'preglottalized'? If so,
>preglottalized nasals exist in languages of SE Asia (don't remember
>which specifically). They have nothing to do with prenasalized stops,
>but resemble preglottalized voiced stops.
To me, both 'implosive' and 'preglottalized' seem like they should be one
and the same -- but they're not.  The 'preglottalized' consonant of Asian
languages you speak of occurs in Pahawh Hmong, in the form of /?d/ and
/?dh/.  Khmer might have at least one as well (but I read it actually has
implosive /d'/).  And I never heard of a language having aspirated ejective
or implosive consonants.

>BTW, there are *voiced* aspirated nasals (e. g. in Indo-Aryan langs).
>I think they would look typologically more natural than voiceless in
>a lang already having voiced aspirates in its inventory.
Oh yeah, Indo-Aryan.  I forget that 'h' (not _visarga_) is voiced, and 'hn'
and similar pairs are common in Sanskrit.  I consider them two phonemes,
since they're written by two letters.

In Tech, voiced aspirate stops are 'fortis' allophone of voiced stops, and
'lenition' removes the aspirate component.  Voiceless-aspirate nasals, like
those in Welsh, result from 'nasalization' mutation of voiceless
non-ejective stops, which too have 'fortis' aspirated and 'lenis' plain
alternates.

But perhaps some dialects voice these consonants and make them 'murmured'
nasals.  I'm way off from getting to the dialectal level of this language.
I'm stuck on noun declension and verb inflection right now.

Daniel A. Wier  ¶¦¬þ
Lufkin, Texas USA
http://communities.msn.com/DannysDoubleWideontheWeb
________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com