Re: is a labiodental stop possible?

Joe Hill wrote:


>I'm thinking of putting one in my next conlang.  I think I can produce one,
>but it's borderline between stop and fricative.

That would be, I suspect, because it's almost impossible to achieve a full
"stop" closure with the teeth; they're usually of unequal size, but more
importantly, there are those little gaps between them that permit some air
leakage, hence the "fricative" affect.    To produce this "labiodental"
"stop" seems to involve a lot of muscular tension, a lot more contact than
for [f],  almost as if you're biting your lower lip (an overbite helps!
getting the lower lip well up in back of the front teeth seems to close most
of the gaps); the fricative affect seems to result, at release, from the air
blowing across the lower lip.

(Yikes. Upon re-reading... does "well up in back of" make sense to anyone
else????)

>Not to mention the fact that there is no IPA symbol for it.
>
>(I'll use /f_p/)
That looks adequate, though square brackets, please,  for _phonetic_ [f_p].
You might romanize it as "fp" or even "pf" (with explanation) if that
doesn't occur otherwise.