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

On Wed, 30 Jan 2002 12:02:34 +0000, Stephen Mulraney
<ataltanie@...> wrote:

>On Mon, 28 Jan 2002 14:58:38 -0500
>Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...> wrote:
>> 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?
Sorry, I meant "logop(a)edic". Related to speech therapy, that is.

>> 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 ;)
In principle, yes. Velarization seems to be absent in labials, irrelevant
in velars (here "palatalized" and "velaized" are simply two different
main articulations), rather pronounced in dentals (roughly, like in
American English word-finally, where they have a completely different
reason for being velarized), heavy in [r] [S] [Z], very heavy in [l].
Besides, [S] and [Z] are pronounced with lips protruded but not rounded,
which adds a lot to their "deep" sound (a similar "flat labialization"
is also typical, though, of their "soft" correlates).
>
>> 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 meant, universally. This was specially noted for uvular "stops" in a few
phonetic research papers I read; I could hear such affrication in Georgian;
I don't know of any natlang distinguishing uvular stops from affricates;
Starostin (in Preface to his/Nikolaev's Etymological Dictionary of North
Caucasian Languages) groups all uvular stops with affricates, partly for
historical reasons: whenever affricates develop (in terms of voice,
glottalization &like) differently prom stops proper, uvulars follow the
"affricate" pattern, etc.

>I notice that my uvular stops tend to
>be more affricated than say my dental stops, but a stop/fricative
distinction
>is still possible.
Yes, sure. Moreover, fricatives can have several distinct qualities. For
example, Abkhazian [x] vs. [X] seem to be not "velar" vs. "uvular" (as it
is often stated), but rather two different uvulars: one more "apical", the
other sort of more "flat".

>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)
I'm glad to hear that my comments may be helpful :)


Basilius