Uvulars, was: A sample of my newborn conlang

On Fri, 25 Jan 2002 17:13:06 +0000, Stephen Mulraney
<ataltanie@...> wrote:

>On Fri, 25 Jan 2002 06:10:58 -0000 jogloran exponent@TECHNOLOGIST.COM
>wrote:
[...]
>> Owee... does the word kyn /qyn/ as above really have a /q/ followed by
>> a /y/? That's a bit hard to say...
>
>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].

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.

>Anyone else have trouble with this (maybe I'm just pronouncing it wrong ;)
>but I don't think so...) ??
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), substituting normal Russian [r] with the uvular trill,
and realized that no velarization was necessary.

What seems to be really difficult is to produce a pure (not affricated)
uvular stop (without confusing "uvular" with "deep velar").

>
>Stephen
Basilius

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