Re: More wierd phonemes

On 23 Feb 00, at 1:37, Muke Tever wrote:

> > > Is there a natlang precedent (and/or existing name?)
> > > for the 'hissing'
> > > consonant (fricative?) produced by keeping the
> > > tongue in a lax / schwa-like
> > > position, and producing either voiced or voiceless
> > > breath with the teeth
> > > together and causing friction?
> > > It sounds to me somewhere between /S/ and /f/ (or
> > > /Z/ and /v/), but is
> > > obviously a totally different sound.
> Gotta quote here, from a book quoting a book quoting a couple of other
> people...
>
>     "Passy (1899) describes a fricative in the Shapsug dialect of Adyghe, a
> Circassian language, which has 'the lips fully open, the teeth clenched and
> the tongue flat, the air passing between the teeth; the sound is
> intermediate between /S/ and /f/.'
>     "This sound was noticed independently by Catford who comments that 'the
> Adyghe (Circassian) bidental fricative is, in fact, a variant of /x/,
> occurring for the /x/ in such words as /x@/ "six" and /dax@/ "pretty" in the
> Black Sea sub-dialect of Shapsug'."
> ...Is it like that?
It's exactly like that!  Thanks for these examples and for confirming Ed's
choice of the word 'bidental', which I was previously 'iffy' on.

I think that all the other phones that I've decided on have fairly safe
precedents, and can be adequately described using conventional terminology.

An enormous grid of consonants and a horrible list of rules for choosing
vowel allophones will surely both be forthcoming.  Watch this space...

---
Pb

Just out of interest, does anyone know why the sound described is an
allophone of /x/ in Adyghe?