Re: Uvulars, was: A sample of my newborn conlang

On Mon, 28 Jan 2002 14:58:38 -0500
Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...> wrote:

> >It does indeed. Is it hard? I generally have lots of trouble with
> >front vowels following extremely back consonants (like finding them
> >impossible), but for some reason this doesn't seem difficult to me.
> It's indeed possible. French has no trouble combining its [R] with front
> vowels (including [i] and [y]) and clustering it with [j].
Glad to hear it, and French [R] is an obvious example which I completely
missed.

> It seems I've heard of some language (Chechen?) having some palatalized
> uvular stops as phonemes.
>
> In fact, uvulars are easier to combine with front vowels, palatals &like
> than velars are, just because the articulations involved are more distant.
Yes - I noticed this when deciding what consonant clusters to keep in my
language - I found myself ruling out combinations that I had thought were
easy, like /tc/ and keeping e.g. /tq/ which I had naively assumed were 'hard'
because they contained a 'difficult' sound. [difficult, as ever, meaning
"not in my mother tongue" ;)]


> At first I always produced heavily velarized sounds while trying to
> pronounce a uvular stop. Then I recalled my native accent (or rather a
> logopeutic problem),
"logopeutic problem" = an exercise designed to to teach unfamiliar phones?

> substituting normal Russian [r] with the uvular trill,
> and realized that no velarization was necessary.
Does the Russian soft/hard distinction describe a palatalised/velarised
difference, or a palatalised/unpalatalised one? I thought the latter was
the case for Irish, but after seeing a few times that it should be the
former, my mouth and ears are beginning to belive it ;)


> What seems to be really difficult is to produce a pure (not affricated)
> uvular stop (without confusing "uvular" with "deep velar").
For you, you mean, or universally? I notice that my uvular stops tend to
be more affricated than say my dental stops, but a stop/fricative distinction
is still possible.


> Basilius
Stephen

PS. Thank you, Basilius, for your lengthy answer to my "phonemes" question, which
was of course naiver that I belived it to be when posting ;). I will respond to
it when I have some time to think about the subject (i.e. not today)